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!
Two giants of animation were in the news in March 1924 — veteran cartoon producer Paul Terry and a young upstart called Walt Disney. We dispatched the Animation Time Machine to scour the industry journals of the day and report back on the buzz around these two remarkable figures.
The Animation Time Machine began its search with Walt Disney. Why? Because March 1924 marked the release of Alice’s Day at Sea, the first ever film to emerge from The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, founded by Walt and Roy Disney in October 1923. Yes, folks, this is the very same company that, 100 years later, the whole world knows as Walt Disney Animation Studios.
In a neat visual reversal of Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell shorts, in which an animated Koko the Clown romps through live-action environments, Alice’s Day at Sea combines a flesh-and-blood girl with animated characters and backgrounds.
The film begins in the real world. While on a visit to the beach, Alice, played by child actor Virginia Davis, listens to an old sea captain’s tale about being shipwrecked. She takes a nap and dreams about … guess what? Being shipwrecked!
It’s at this point that the live-action Alice is transported into cartoonland. In a primitive precursor to the “Beautiful Briny Sea” segment of Disney’s 1971 musical fantasy Bedknobs and Broomsticks, she listens to a fish orchestra and visits “King Nep’s Zoo,” home to a bizarre menagerie of creatures including a fish-tailed elephant. A plethora of underwater gags follows, during which Alice transforms into a swimming cartoon girl to escape a giant grouper. Menaced by a malevolent octopus, she finally reawakens in the real world to discover she’s got tangled in a fishing net.
Alice’s Day at Sea was the first in a series of one-reel films known as the Alice Comedies, with various child actors playing Alice over the years. The series was distributed — and to some degree mentored — by the powerful New York-based distributor Margaret J. Winkler, already known for her involvement with the long-running Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat cartoons. The Alice Comedies continued all the way up to 1927, at which point Walt Disney ditched Alice in favor of his brand new animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
The Hollywood press afforded Alice’s Day at Sea only modest coverage upon its release. The best the Animation Time Machine could come up with was this brief review in a copy of Motion Picture News from 1924:
“It is a novel single reeler combining both an acting cast and cartoons. The cartoons help wonderfully but Alice is always in evidence in person. This novel idea is very unique and entertaining enough to satisfy any sort of an audience.”
The relative lack of interest betrays a simple truth — back in March 1924, few people knew who Walt Disney was. They were much more likely to recognize the name of Paul Terry, the animator behind the highly successful cartoon series Aesop Film Fables.
Active between 1915-1955, Paul Terry was a prolific cartoon producer and one of the first in his field to become a household name. In 1929, he founded the animation studio Terrytoons. Here he created a number of popular animated characters including, in 1942, the diminutive superhero Mighty Mouse.
Unlike Walt Disney, Paul Terry was getting plenty of ink in March 1924. While Alice’s Day at Sea was splashing its way across the silver screen, Exhibitors Trade Review published a feature titled “Terry Explains Why Aesop Fables Get Laughs.” The article describes Terry as “the pioneer in the film business of animated cartoons, and the man who probably gets more laughs per foot of celluloid than any other comedian in the world.” It outlines his early career as follows:
“Mr. Terry is a soft-spoken person, who conveys his enthusiasm more by the earnestness of his expression than in the force of words. His entry into the film business was a natural transition for one who had served a motley apprenticeship as a newspaper cartoonist and court photographer on some of the biggest dailies in the United States. [He] was born in San Alateo, California … He attended the elementary and high schools of San Francisco, and when hardly out of his teens was already at work on one of the ‘Frisco papers as a cartoonist. The many years in this field of work and subsequent experience as a newspaper photographer gave him an intimate perspective of the petty frailties of human nature, which he now capitalizes so distinctively in his Aesop animal characters. He has his methods of knitting material together down to absolute checking precision.”
The article includes Paul Terry’s own thoughts on his approach to animation:
“There is no question but that all human beings — large, small, rich, poor, educated and ignorant — are fundamentally alike in one certain respect. Some years ago, I decided that this was in being peculiarly childlike. And I discovered also that the sort of humor that appeals to children, appeals practically to everyone. In other words the child is father to the man so far as humor is concerned. That gave me my cue in using animals in my animated cartoons. To see ourselves as others see us, in the form of animal caricature, is a successful form of satire that dates back to the days of Greek Mythology, and it was only a question of applying this time tested form to the modern scheme of life.”
Always keen to know what worked in his films — and what didn’t — Terry regularly documented audience reaction. If a gag played well, he had no qualms about repackaging it for use in his next movie, as he makes clear below:
“I never fail to review my pictures, right in the theater. In my lap I have a regular checking sheet, arranged to show the result (using laughs as a standard of measure) of this gag here, that funny stunt there, and the effect of the whole in general. Thus I carry away practically a tangible standard of what tickles the palates of the audience — something which can be actually used in my next production, needing only a slight change in story form to give the material the variety of newness.”
Commonplace today, test screenings have been used in Hollywood since the 1920s. Searching for an early reference, the Animation Time Machine landed in February 1922, when Motion Picture News reported on a test screening for Come On Over, a comedy about Irish immigrants in New York, that took place in front of a Los Angeles audience “containing many prominent screen personalities.”
It’s unclear whether Paul Terry arranged formal test screenings or simply sat in the movie theater post release alongside a regular paying audience. Given the relatively low status of cartoons at the time, not to mention the incredibly fast pace of production, the latter seems more likely. Either way, he used the intelligence he gathered to craft the most commercial product he could, reinforcing his reputation as a filmmaker who treated his studio somewhat like a production line.
All of which confirms that, in March 1924, Paul Terry had an iron grip on the cartoon market. So what opinion did that rookie Walt Disney have of the old man of animation? Well, the Animation Time Machine’s sources suggest that Paul Terry was something of an inspiration to the young Walt Disney, who stated more than once that his early ambition was to make films “as good as a Fable.”
The respect was mutual. As Walt Disney’s reputation grew, Paul Terry generously acknowledged their different philosophies by calling himself the ‘Woolworths’ of animation … while referring to Disney as ‘Tiffany’s.’
Join us again next month when we dispatch the Animation Time Machine on another mission, back through the decades to April 1924!
