John Lasseter is an American animator, film director, producer and former chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He is a legend in animation industry. In this lesson, we learned that Toy Story (1995) directed by John Lasseter was the first entirely computer-animated feature film.
Lasseter began his career as animator in Disney, but he was fired because he wanted to promote computer animation in the past. He joined Lucasfilm an he worked on CGI animation there. Lucasfilm became Pixar after it was sold by Steve Jobs in1986. Therefore, he been through all of Pixar’s films and projects. He became the executive producer of Pixar after he directed many of the well known CGI animation including Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998) and Cars (2006). He was the executive producers for Walt Disney Animation Studio after Pixar was sold to Disney. He is one of the most successful filmmakers of all time because produced famous films that have grossed more than $19 billion USD, such as Toy Story 3 (2010), Frozen (2013), Zootopia (2016), Finding Dory (2016) and Incredibles 2 (2018).
We love all of the films that he produced, he is truly a legend. Sadly, he will leave Disney and Pixar after he is under sexual harassment in workplace. His last Disney film will be Frozen 2 which will be released in next week! Who is ready for it??!!!
The Golden Age of Animation is a period in the history of animation that began on November 18, 1928, with the release of Steamboat Willie, and strengthened by the growth of Warner Brother, Fleischer, and MGM in the following years. It ended in the early 1960s with the rise of television animation. Feature animation also began during this period including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumno, and Bambi. Other popular characters such as Tom and Jerry, Donald Durk, Betty Boop, and Mr.Magoo were created during this period. Snow White was an instant success when it was released in theaters in 1937, and became the most financially successful movie of its time. Therefore, almost every studio started to copy Disney’s work. Harman and Ising, former Disney’s employee, Walter Lantz, Van Beuren Studio and even the Ub Iwerks studio led by Disney’s best friend were trying to imitate Disney. All of their attempts failed since they did not import any of Disney’s storytelling skills.
The situation changed after the failure of Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940. In the same year, Tom and Jerry and Bug Bunny got popular along with the releasing of Woody Woodpecker by Walter Lantz, Herman, and Katnip by Famous Studios, Fox and Crow by Columbia Cartoons, and many others. Even though the budget, resources and manpower constraints due to the war effort, many animation companies considered the 1940s to be the peak of animation in history.
Tom and Jerry is the first cartoon that I watched when I was a kid. I can still remember how the conflicts between them made me laugh so hard. The music and sound were well used throughout the whole series. Here is a video clip of Tom and Jerry. I hope you guys will enjoy watching it!!^^
After the production of Steamboat Willie in 1928, more space was needed for the increase of workers so Walt Disney decided to expand the building. The succeed of using sound in Steamboated Willie made Disney’s foremost animation studio in Burbank California. Then they produced the Silly Symphony series including The Skeleton Dance(1929), Flowers and Tree (1932) and Three Little Pigs(1932). Flower and Tree was their first cartoon in color. We can see when Walt Disney entered the field he did not get immediate success. I was quite surprised by how he maintains his business with limited workers and a tight budget after his company was stolen by the producer of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. However, Disney once said, “I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.” I believe Walt Disney’s talent in storytelling and his passion for animation are the keys to his success. The studio went from Steamboat Willie to The elegant and sparkling beauty of Snow White in ten years. I love the character design of the Seven Dwarfs in Snow White because it conveys the personalities of each Dwarf. Dopey and Grumpy are my Favourite. I also love to sing “Heigh-Ho” while I was hiking with my friends!!!
Character Sheet of Dopey.Character Sheet of Grumpy.
When Professor Jake talked about Fantasia from Disney, I misunderstood as the other one that I love watching which is also made by Disney. I found myself often messed this one up with Fantasia. The one music video or a show that I am talking about is Mickey’s PhilharMagic. The animation is created for a show in Disneyland. I love this animation when I was a little girl. Even though it is a computer animation, I do still find some old fashion taste from the old animations showed in class. The whole animation is driven by music. A lot of the content in between is basically scenes and songs from the classic animated Disney animated movie but are remade for dramatic effects and interaction with Donald Duck. The consideration of the characters in it will interact with the audience is what makes me remind of the animations showed in class. Remembering there are scenes when the characters were doing something or talking but they were actually talking to us, the audience. For example, Hell-Bent for Election (1944), directed by Chuck Jones. There is the scene of the short man in suit, he was being frustrated and transformed into Hitler. He then was embarrassed and returned back to himself. This is a symbolic movement of the animation but have you ever think of who is he embarrassed to? Us, the audience because in any animations, we are watching the story goes on in god mode, we know a lot more than the characters in it. If you think about it, from the old animations, the characters sometimes interacted with the audience to create a sense of humor that makes us laugh.
I do not have a proper link to watch it in the best quality because it is a show in Disneyland. No one got the original video, it is best to watch it in person but you have to pay to watch this. This is the one I think it got the best quality to watch it. If I remembered it correctly and they still haven’t remove it, this can be watched in Disneyland Hong Kong too.
Taking a sharp left turn away from fine art, I want to discuss how mainstream animation uses music. While experimental film explored the intrinsic qualities of music in abstract ways, mainstream film and animation would use music to the end of creating objective scenery and narrative. The Disney method/style capitalizes on the intrinsic influence music has on an audience, whether it be a musical score or songs with vocals and lyrics. And as a de facto pioneer of all aspects of animation film, Disney’s use of music has become a model for animated films even today.
Though not the first cartoon to feature music, Steamboat Willie in 1928, was the first Disney cartoon with synchronized sound. Walt Disney then produced the Silly Symphonies series, exploring both visual techniques and exercising the use of animation to music: Skeleton Dance (1929) made use of a musical score, Three Little Pigs (1932) was a musical in which the story was told in song. The Old Mill (1937) was also set to a score, and showed Disney studio’s impressive use of the multiplane camera in immersive scenery coupled with atmospheric music.
But I think the culmination of Walt Disney’s personal conviction of music’s importance to film and animation, was the anthology film Fantasia (1940), a 126 minute behemoth with a concert-like program of 8 musical acts or segments. It was built around a longer Silly Symphony, starring Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and using the symphonic poem 1897 by French composer Paul Dukas, based on the German poem by Goethe.
It was a very daring production, for reasons ranging from its departure of traditional narrative based fairytale features like Snow White, to the production costs that were difficult to make back as Europe had plunged into World War II. For the music in Fantasia, the studio developed the stereo sound system to reproduce the most immersive audio experience, which they aptly named ‘Fantasound’. This makes Fantasia the first commercial film with stereo sound to ever be shown.
The first segment, set to an orchestral arrangement of Fugue in D Minor by Bach, changes from live action footage of a strongly lit musical ensemble into abstract scenes of patterns and shapes moving across the screen, highly reminiscent of the abstract visual music filmmakers usually associated with fine art more so than commercial animation. In fact, Walt Disney was inspired by Len Lye, a New Zealand experimental filmmaker, to create this segment, and hired Oskar Fischinger to work on the special effects with one of Disney’s top FX men, the Chinese-American Cy Young. However, Disney rejected Fischinger’s contributions, finding them too abstract. Although no doubt drawing from abstract animation, the segment is visibly more objective; the bows of string instruments, undulating waves, mountains and cathedral windows can be seen. The overall concept remains intact, and some of the visual vocabulary is similar to the works of ‘true’ visual music animators like Fischinger’s Studies. Watch this section of Disney’s homage to visual music below:
As my parents said to me when they showed me this film as a child, ‘Disney was teaching kids how to listen to music’. I think they were right, and, at least in teaching me, Disney succeeded.
In Class 5 we delved into the strain of animation known as ‘visual music’, which made me begin to think about music’s relationship with animation. To do that, it turns out we must first look at music’s relationship with art in general.
A handful of visual artists and designers were the visual and conceptual forefathers (foreparents?) of the group of animators working in visual music. French painter Leopold Survage was the first to suggest the idea of merging cinema and abstract imagery, and his series Rythmes colorés (1913) was concieved with the intention of being animated. Sadly, he did not have the funding to put this project into action, and so did not become the first pioneer of visual music. That privilege perhaps goes to Swiss Dadaist Viking Eggeling, who sought to create a vocabulary of shapes and symbol to be usd in visual abstraction as with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, which he demonstrates in works like the 1924 film Diagonal-Symphonie. The term ‘visual music’ was in fact used to describe Kandinsky’s paintings. Kandinsky began as a figurative painter but rejected depicting objective visual “reality” and became a staple of the abstract painting tradition. Thus the rejection of figurative forms in animation was the abstract, or ‘absolute’ animation. Another important influence of the visual music aesthetic was the Bauhaus school of design in Germany, which saw modernist design and concepts like color theory consolidated under a systematic method.
Called the ‘Father of Visual Music’, Oskar Fischinger’s filmography explores the ways of creating moving design around music. Though a narrow niche it may seem, he explored many techniques to achieve his artistic goal throughout his prolific career: progressive cross sections of wax/clay building on Ruttman’s wax slicing method as in Wax Experiments (1922), drawn/painted animations like in his commercially successful series The Studies in the late 20’s and 30’s, documenting the gradual progress of a semi-abstract painting in Motion Painting (1947) and even stop motion as in Composition in Blue (1935) and the Muratti Privat commercial in 1935.
Another visual music artist whose works were discussed in another class but are undoubtedly the continuation of the visual music tradition, is the inimitable Scottish-Canandian filmmaker Norman McLaren. His works done with the method of drawing directly on film, such as Boogie Doodie (1940) or Hen Hop (1942) have a charming simplicity and rawness that matches the rhythm of the music very well. McLaren’s styles of work are very highly varied, also including stop motion (La Merle, 1958), progress of chalk drawings like a sort of Motion Painting, and using the ‘pixilation’ method, or animation using the body, such as in the Oscar-winning short Neighbors (1952).
Visual music continues to be an active art form in the 21st Century, though undoubtedly somewhat overshadowed by mainstream ‘visualization’ of music with music videos, let alone animation. I was very much captured by the 2008 short AANAATT, created by Hong Kong based new media artist Max Hattler. He describes it on his page as ‘the ever-shifting shape of Analogue Futurism’, which seems quite apt. While similar to Fischinger’s Composition in Blue, in that it is abstract stop motion animation set to tone-defining music, the resulting visuals are highly different. Where Composition is whimsical and pure, AANAAT seems alien and otherworldly.
The Golden Age of Animation loosely began after the release of Steamboat Willie (1928) by Disney. It was also the beginning of many animators experimenting with easier or more time-efficient ways of creating moving pictures. Other ambitious animators rose, like Harman and Ising, who tried creating their own studio because of Disney’s perseverance. Many great animators gathered together during this time and encouraged each other to continue to build their curiosity and talent towards different animation and cinematography styles.
One of the highlights for me during screening in class, was Red Hot Riding Hood (1943) by Tex Avery, who demonstrated unique choices in voice and performance when directing Red Hot Riding Hood (1943). He was apparently one of the first animator to use smear – dry brush motion for a blurred effect. Reason for use is to portray extremely fast movement, a technique they’d explored to draw more exciting, stylized in-betweens.
Hans Fischerkoesen, who was employed by Hitler was forced to make cartoons to compete against Disney, eventually earning the nickname “Germany’s Walt Disney”. It demonstrates how Hitler was determined to use even the entertainment industry to gain favour among his country. I feel like passive power gain like that are still happening in the form of, what we now call, “Soft Power”. An example of this soft power is seen in J-pop, anime, and in the more recent years K-Pop, where one country’s culture can earn particular favour within other countries.
Class Notes: Ub Iwerks – Pat Power Studios, worked on most of the works for Disney so ppl highly valued him. Thought Disney would fail. BUT didn’t?!?!?! infact, Ub iwerks didn’t really work out/gain audience attention. Jack Frost – Techicolour? Trolley Troubles – Oswald the lucky Rabbit (1927) Style developed by Harman Ising (who tried to open their own studio, but was fired) Chuck Jones: Duck Amuck – often breaking fourth wall and explores interaction with the animator. Bosko: HughHarman – Black Caricature Contract wuth MGM for developing new series for Bosko
In this class, we studied the life of Walt Disney, who was an animator, storyteller, film maker and entrepreneur. Disney’s interest in drawing grew when he was a child. He started as an illustrator for commercials in Kansas City where he met his best friend Ub Iwerks. They both had a passion for making their original animation. After a few times of failures, Disney began producing Alice’s Wonderland, combing live-action with animation in Laugh-O-Gram Studio. From there, we can see that Disney has a passion to work on fairytales and classical stories. Alice’s Wonderland was a big success so Disney invited his friend Iwerks to Los Angels.
Good days didn’t last long for them. After they created another successful character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 1927, it was stolen by their producer Charles Mintz. I felt very sad for Disney and Iwerks as their creativity was stolen. At the same time, I also respect their spirit of not giving up.
To replace Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, they created Micky Mouse together. An employee said that “Ub designed Mickey’s physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul.” Plane Crazy (1928) was the first appearance of Micky Mouse. Even though it was a silent film, I found it so interesting as it had tones of dynamic shots. Steamboat Willie (1928) which we might see it at the beginning of some of Disney’s famous animation, was the first Disney cartoon with sound and music. I love how the characters were moving with the beat perfectly. It soon became the most popular animation of its day.
I’m sharing another old Mickey Mouse cartoon called Giantland (1933). Enjoy!! ^o^
When you think of the creator of Mickey Mouse I bet your brain doesn’t jump to the name, Ub Iwerks.
Ub Iwerks was born in Kansas City Missouri and shorten his full name, Ubbe Eert Iwwerks, for ease. He was known for his fast ability to draw and his quirky sense of humor. He was Walt Disney’s partner and helped create the face of Disney itself, Mickey Mouse. He also was the lead animators in many of Disney’s early films such as the Skeleton Dance and Steam Boat Willie. But early on into the creation of the Disney empire Ub split off to start his own animation company, Iwerks Studios. This studio brought forth its own line of characters, such as, Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper. The studio didn’t last long and eventually tanked.
However, Iwerks legacy didn’t end there for he snatched up two Oscars for his work. As well as got to work on many other classics like the Looney Tunes and The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock.
LeAnn Schmitt
Below I have linked one of my personal favorite cartons produced by his studio
Previously I discussed
the 1940 Disney film Fantasia
It is no shock to say the image of racial
stereotypes can be seen in many of the early cartoons, such as Bosko from
Looney Toons. Yet, today we can still these stereotypes in some of Disney’s
recent films. Pocahontas, released in 1995,is one of the company’s
most controversial films due to its stereotyping of Native Americans. Aladdin,The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, and more of Disney’s “classic”
films have been called out and criticized for their orientalism, stereotypes, and
other cultural insensitive factors.
But, does this mean we
can’t enjoy these movies anymore?
No, no, you can still watch the films if you
want and appreciate the artistry and hard work that went into them. Some of the
professors at SCAD even worked on those films. But you should be aware of each film’s
controversial past and acknowledge that Dinsey at a time thought that these
films were suitable for release.
I will continue to watch Aladdin and annoy all of my neighbors as I burst out with all my heart the current lyrics to “Arabian Nights– But I will also acknowledge the original song’s original lyrics contained the orientalist stereotype line “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face”.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 