SOUR - “Life Is Music” by Space Shower Music
The phenakistoscope animation in this music video was made possible by 189 spinning compact discs!
Zoetrope by Pixar
How animation works, explained by Pixar animators.
More you might like
Walt Disney demonstrates early steps in the history of animation–a thaumatrope, a phenakistoscope, and a zoetrope–in Disneyland, “The Story of Animated Drawing” (1955)
Professor William H. Zimmerman patented the “ludoscope” in 1904, a small phenakistoscope wheel attached to a viewing hood.
From Stephen Herbert
John Edmark’s zoetrope sculptures, created by a 3D printer
Favorite Silent Animation # 8 - The Eyes of the Dragon (Les Yeux du Dragon) (1925)
Władysław Starewicz (Владислав Старевич) is one of the weirdest filmmakers of the silent era, and that’s saying a lot, since there was some very, very odd stuff being made at this time.
I almost chose The Cameraman’s Revenge, one of Starewicz’s early films and definitely his best known. It’s weird and clever, but the animation is still pretty blocky and the sets quite simple. And yes, real animals were definitely harmed in the making of that film. If you are bothered by the idea of killing insects, sticking wires through their bodies, and using them to act out a melodrama about cheating spouses, then this is not the film for you. Starewicz made a lot of these little bug dramas, but after a few years began working on longer, more ambitious films using more traditional puppets.
If you like your stop-motion animation animal-carcass free, then there are plenty of delightfully inventive films from later in his long career, from the silent era and going well into the sound era. Throughout his life, Starewicz continued to hone his animation skills, eventually producing really elegant fairy tales, like The Magic Clock or The Girl Who Wished to Be a Princess (1928). Love in Black and White (1923) is fun for having a puppet Charlie Chaplin and other Hollywood stock-character parodies, but unfortunately features very racist portrayals of African Americans. For my favorite Starewicz film, I choose The Eyes of the Dragon (excerpt here), a fairy tale set in China about a couple in love, an evil villain, and a dragon with magical eyes. The background sets are gorgeous, the puppets are expressive and well animated, the story is sweet and engaging, and the film is almost insect-free.
Favorite Silent Animation #9 - Sky Scrappers (1928)
Walt Disney had several animated series before he hit pay dirt with Mickey Mouse. His first popular series was the Laugh-O-Grams, which focused on fairy tale topics. There are some decent films in this series, like The Four Musicians of Bremen (1922) and Puss in Boots (1922). Most of the Laugh-O-Grams aren’t great, but you can see that the animation is being done by people who really care about motion and expression, and this would become SO important for the Disney Company by the end of the 1920s.
Disney had further moderate success with his Alice Comedies (1923-1927) starring several different adorable little girls: Virginia Davis (who had long blond curls in the Mary Pickford-style popular at the start of the century); Margie Gay (with a short brown bob, a la Louise Brooks); and Lois Hardwick (who had cute brown curls, but whose films are largely lost). Some Alice Comedies are pretty silly, but as they progressed, the animation became more and more impressive, and by the mid-1920s, the careful work of Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney began to show how much they cared about really showing character and movement, and this careful animation would be part of what catapulted Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies to stardom.
Disney’s best pre-Mickey creation was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney created this long-eared variation on Felix the Cat to sell to Universal Studios, and the character was a hit. Thanks to the wonderful animation of Ub Iwerks, Oswald lived in a world where everything could wiggle and come alive–the beloved “rubber hose” style of animation. Many of these cartoons are adorable, like The Mechanical Cow (1927) and All Wet (1927). I don’t know if Sky Scrappers is the first cartoon to make the discovery that the steel frames at a construction site make for great physical gags in a cartoon, but it’s the first I know of, and it certainly is fun!
Favorite Silent Animation #2 - A Wild Roomer (1926)
How is Charley Bowers not more famous? I had never heard of him until I started delving into silent animation for this blog, and it only took a couple of his films for me to be completely hooked. Bowers started out as a traditional animator and slapstick comedy actor, and in the 1920s began creating his own films, which usually were live action stories that used stop motion animation to add fantastical elements. Sometimes Bowers starred in the films himself, usually as a earnest young inventor who creates something astounding that goes awry.
There are so many delightful Bowers films to check out! There It Is (1928) is a ridiculous ghost story featuring a stop motion bug detective (don’t worry - unlike with Starewicz, no insects were harmed in the making of this film). The highlight of Now You Tell One (1926) is when Charley creates a tree that grows cats! One of my favorites is He Done His Best (1926), in which a fantastic machine produces meals for an automated restaurant. But for my top favorite, I’ve chosen A Wild Roomer (excerpt here). The plot overall is not very memorable, but it’s really just an excuse for Bowers to create an amazing machine that can create anything! The stop motion anything here is just top notch. Watching his machine create a doll and bring her to life by inserting a heart just feels like pure magic, and is a joy to watch.
Bowers made some adorable gems in the sound era as well, such as the cute stop-motion household critters in A Sleepless Night (excerpt here) (1940). Netflix has two discs of his works that I highly recommend everyone should watch. it’s full of great films, including A Wild Roomer.
Favorite Silent Animation # 6 - Unusual Cooking (1908)
Segundo de Chomón has so many delightfully bizarre animated shorts, it’s very hard to pick a favorite. De Chomón created films in every medium and genre – live action drama, wacky trick films, stop motion animation, and traditional animation. He is best known for The Haunted House (1908) and The Electric Hotel (1908), which used stop motion animation to make ordinary objects appear haunted. He had a tendency to steal ideas from other filmmakers (sometimes even directly remaking someone else’s hit film), but often he improved upon them, giving them a bit more panache and style.
He has so many dazzling little films, often brightly hand-colored and set in ornate fantasy settings. It is certainly worth checking out some of the earliest claymation in Modern Sculptors (1908), the hilarious A Dreadful Night (1905), or the mesmerizing magic show in Métamorphoses (1912). But my favorite of his films is Unusual Cooking, a silly farce where cooks dance with giant utensils, even bigger utensils dance by themselves, and a cook is chopped up and put back together again. Why is any of this happening? Who knows!! But play “Be Our Guest” in the background, and somehow it just all works.
Favorite Silent Animation #7 - Lichtspiel (1921-1925)
By the late 1910s, some European artists were beginning to incorporate animation into their art. Walter Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel series, produced in four separate opuses, allowed his groundbreaking abstract art to come beautifully to life. I love these images–true living paintings! And I was thrilled to see them show up in the wonderful recent German TV series, Babylon Berlin. Ruttman wasn’t too proud to apply his art to advertisements either, and these are stunning works of art in themselves, such as his advertisement for Excelsior-Reifen (1922), Kantorowicz-Liköre (1922), and the GeSoLei trade fair (1926).
Ruttmann’s work inspired his fellow German artists like Hans Richter, who created Rhythmus 21 (1921), Viking Eggeling, who created Symphonie Diagonale (1921), and Oskar Fischinger, who created An Optical Poem in 1938 and even animated a segment in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940).
Favorite Silent Animation #1 - The Pet (1921)
Winsor McCay is often considered the father of animation. He may not have made the world’s first animated film, but his film Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) was certainly the first major animated hit, and probably the most famous animated film of this era. McCay was already hugely successful for his beautiful and inventive comic strips, such as Little Nemo in Slumberland. McCay turned some of his comic strip ideas into clever animated short films, like How a Mosquito Operates (1912) and The Flying House (1921).
All of McCay’s films are carefully and beautifully drawn, and they set a new standard for quality in the animation genre. But my favorite McCay animated short is The Pet. Based on an idea which first appeared in a 1905 Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip, a woman finds a cute puppy-like creature on her doorstep. At first he’s adorable and inquisitive, crawling into bed and exploring the house. And then he begins to eat. First food, then dishes, then, well, everything in sight. He grows and grows, until he is a monster wreaking destruction on the city. McCay so perfectly captures that surrealism of a nightmare, and yet this odd, calamitous creature remains adorable throughout, and there’s something so pleasing about watching him scoop up everything around him with his huge, shovel-like mouth.
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