The Animation Time Machine has just returned from its latest mission to the year 1923, gathering snippets of animation news from exactly 100 years ago!
While programming the Animation Time Machine for its 100-year odyssey back to December 1923, we suddenly remembered that Walt and Roy Disney founded The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in that very same year. Well, with the Disney centenary celebrations dominating the final months of 2023, how could we forget?
In light of this, we instructed the Machine to make a special search through the news journals of December 1923 for references to this auspicious event … and found nothing!
On reflection, we decided this wasn’t surprising. Here’s why …
In the summer of 1923, following the collapse of his previous venture Laugh-O-Gram Films, Walt Disney moved to Hollywood to make a fresh start. During this time, he and his brother hooked up with New York distributor Margaret J. Winkler, who at the time was bristling over the loss of her lucrative “Out of the Inkwell” contract with Max and Dave Fleischer (the Animation Time Machine has already unearthed some juicy tidbits about Ms. Winkler’s reaction to this — see our previous column, mission date November 1923).
It’s fair to assume that, through the final months of 1923, Walt and Roy had their heads down as they laid the groundwork for their brand new series of animated shorts, which would become known as the “Alice Comedies.” In terms of news coverage, this meant all was quiet on the Disney front.
The first of these new Disney movies, Alice’s Day at Sea, premiered in March 1924, and we can’t wait to focus the Animation Time Machine’s lens on it next year. Thanks to a temporal glitch, however, the Machine did stumble on a charming teaser from the The Film Tribune, dateline February 9, 1924. In what may be the first mention of Disney’s “Alice” series in the press of the time, a photo of child actor Virginia Davis — who played Alice in the first run of films — is accompanied by this caption:
“Virginia is making a series of twelve one-reel cartoon pictures for Walt Disney, local cartoonist and short-subject producer, at his studio at 4651 Kingswell Avenue. She is now at work on the third. One picture will be made each month. In these productions Disney combines flesh-and-blood players with thespians from Cartoonland. Between three and four thousand drawings are required for each film, in addition to the regular negative.”
Now let’s return our attention to our primary mission, and find out what audiences were enjoying in December 1923. Sullivan and Messmer’s Felix the Cat was popular, as were the animated exploits of Colonel Heeza Liar. In The Bray Studios’ amusing one-reeler Forbidden Fruit, the bombastic Colonel explains how he solved the “great banana shortage” of 1923. The movie riffs on true events that inspired the popular novelty song “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” and, like many cartoons of the days, features outdated cultural stereotypes.
Here’s what Exhibitors Trade Review had to say about Forbidden Fruit in an issue from December 29, 1923:
“The mysterious banana shortage of 1923, which has been so celebrated in song, on stage, radio and talking machines, is explained at last by the intrepid little pen and ink advertiser of the Bray Studios, Colonel Heeza Liar … It seems that the trouble is due to the wonderful agility of the wild African banana, its slipperiness when captured and its ability to change its form at will … It wiggles away from (the Colonel) and leads him a wild chase through the jungle. At last he sneaks up on it when it is apparently asleep with one end sticking out of the ground, but alas, this is a grievous error for it turns out to be the tip of the horn of a snoozing rhinoceros … He saves the Jungle Queen but leaves the love-smitten damsel to return to his beloved New York with a goodly supply of bananas.”
Watch Forbidden Fruit on YouTube.
Forbidden Fruit splices its cartoon narrative between a pair of live-action bookends, much like Disney’s soon-to-be released “Alice” movies will do. In this era, audiences were comfortable with the juxtaposition of animation with live-action, as evidenced by the continuing success of the “Out of the Inkwell” films, in which the character of Koko the Clown literally leaps off the animator’s drawing board. On 2 December, 1923, The Film Daily reviewed the “Inkwell” one-reeler Shadows, a film that’s fallen so deep into the temporal vortex that even the Animation Time Machine can’t retrieve it:
“Once again the imp from the inkwell becomes involved, this time with the shadows of his own figure. The result is a completely different set of difficulties, chiefly the result of Fleischer’s making silhouettes of animals with his figures. These animals annoy the imp and trouble him to such an extent that finally after being chased and crushed he becomes so bewildered that he is glad to jump back into the inkwell. Very laughable, very amusing.”
The popularity of “Out of the Inkwell” clearly shows that audiences in 1923 were beguiled by the process of making animated films. In an edition from December 22, 1923, Exhibitors Trade Review tapped into this fascination with a feature article about the working methods of Paul Terry, creator of the “Aesop’s Film Fables” cartoon series. It remarks on the fact that, instead of writing his storylines, Terry chose to draw them instead:
“In preparing a screen subject, Terry works out the germ of his theme mentally. Then, deciding upon his leading characters like Farmer Al Falfa or Henry Cat, he sketches them in the clothes they are to ‘wear’ in their roles. With his ‘stars’ at hand, he then develops a scenario in a continuity of rough free hand sketches. These working sketches show the characters in the key scenes and are made in a progression, which when developed by the addition of many, many more drawings are photographed to produce the two-reeler that certainly makes the most of animated effect on the screen.”
Story development through drawing is a process familiar to animators today. Ample evidence that there’s nothing new under the sun!
In the 1920s, animated films were usually exhibited as one- or two-reel short subjects within a larger program — often referred to as “auxiliary attractions.” According to a 1923 survey commissioned by The Motion Picture News and published in that year’s Film Year Book, around 23% of theaters used animated cartoons in their programs. That’s a long way behind the 59% popularity of the weekly newsreel, but way ahead of short dramas of equivalent length, which came in at just below 14%. Make no mistake — by end of 1923, animation was definitely on the rise.
The Animation Time Machine made one final stop before returning to the present day. Scanning the pages of a 1923 collection of presentations made at the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, it found “The Phonofilm,” a visionary talk by Dr. Lee DeForest imagining how the well-established medium of animation might be combined with the burgeoning technology of sound:
“In the realm of comedy immense possibilities for the Phonofilm unquestionably lie. The humor of many ludicrous situations can be screamingly increased if the right words, the right jest were spoken at the right time, in the proper dialect, or vernacular, or tone of voice. Similarly in animated cartoons, where the little animals or manikins can speak their funny thoughts as well as act in their funny ways, the humor of this new type of comedy can be readily doubled.”
Just one year after this was written, the Fleischers began experimenting with sound (in somewhat rudimentary fashion) with their “Song Car Tunes” series of animated shorts. But it wasn’t until 1928 that a film arrived which combined sound and animation so creatively and effortlessly that audiences were truly blown away. That film was “Steamboat Willie” and its creator was, of course, Walt Disney.
Join us again next month when we dispatch the Animation Time Machine on its next mission, into a brand new year with the month of January 1924!
