The Animation Time Machine has just returned from its latest mission to the year 1924, gathering snippets of animation news from exactly 100 years ago!
Happy New Year! The Animation Time Machine has flown in on a flurry of seasonal snowflakes, carrying with it century-old animation news from January 1924.
In a month when a famous cartoon feline called Felix the Cat starred in two new releases — Felix Out of Luck and Felix Loses Out — an animated short from the Aesop’s Fables series, called Five Orphans of the Storm, topped the bill at a reopening event for the 6,100-seat New York Hippodrome. According to Moving Picture World” this morally upright tearjerker about an orphan puppy “was received with unmistakable evidences of approval and at one point there was an outburst of applause.”
Next, the Animation Time Machine sped across the Atlantic to Europe, where it discovered a fascinating article in the January 1924 edition of Der Kinematograph, Germany’s first film trade journal.
Entitled “The Silhouette Film,” the article introduces Lotte Reiniger who, having learned the German art of “Scherenschnitte” — literally “scissor cuts” — adapted her skills to create a number of films in which she animated cut-out figures frame by frame.
Innovative at every level, Reiniger stacked her silhouettes one atop the other and moved them in varying increments to create immersive parallax effects — over a decade before Walt Disney perfected the technique with his multiplane camera.
The most famous of Reiniger’s silhouette films is The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an adaptation of Arabic folk stories from One Thousand and One Nights, including Aladdin. Released in Germany in 1926, the film is generally regarded as the world’s oldest animated feature. It remains a remarkably sophisticated example of early animation.
The Der Kinematograph article contrasts Reiniger’s 1924-era stop-motion films with magic lantern shows of the late 19th century, in which hinged cut-outs were manipulated in real-time:
“In film, silhouettes have their limitations. The movements are not fluid but rather puppet-like, angular and proceed in jerks.”
After this somewhat dismissive introduction, the article goes on to praise the advances made in the medium since the days of the magic lantern:
“The technology of silhouette films has advanced by leaps and bounds. In the first silhouette films, probably a decade ago, the movements of the silhouettes were choppier than today, because the intermediate frames were missing. In recent years, we have seen films in which each character has its own unique movement.”
Back in Hollywood, the Animation Time Machine concluded its trip to January 1924 with a copy of Exhibitors Trade Review. Here it found a review of Liquid Lava, a film from the Hodge Podge series made by Lyman H. Howe.
Howe’s Hodge Podge films were educational shorts combining documentary footage with amusing animated vignettes. They were described by Exhibitors Herald as having “more ideas, more novelty per inch than any other screen product.” The series included such titles as Jungle Giants (African wildlife in its natural habitat), Across America in Ten Minutes (a whistlestop tour of the U.S.A.), and Traffic (modes of transport from around the world, including Viennese streetcars, Chinese rickshaws and a Hamburg milk cart drawn by a dog).
A consummate showman, Lyman H. Howe released his first film in 1896, having begun his career exhibiting miniatures and giving phonograph concerts. By the time Liquid Lava hit screens in 1924, he was already a year in his grave.
Here’s an extract from the January 1924 review of Liquid Lava:
“This is another Lyman H. Howe presentation combining sense and nonsense, because, as he says, ‘variety is the very spice of life.’ So cartoon fades into an actual scene and then back to cartoon again, throughout the reel. There are some wonderful photographs of the volcanic eruptions in Java (in action and at night) among other interesting scenes.”
Howe’s jaunty travelogs prove that, even back in January 1924, when animation was in its infancy, audiences around the globe had access to all manner of animated entertainment, from side-splitting cartoons to educational animated shorts and exquisite renditions of classic folk tales. As Howe himself asserted, variety is indeed the spice of life!
Join us again next month when we dispatch the Animation Time Machine on another mission, back through the decades to February 1924!
