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A FIVE-TIIOUSAND-DOLLAR JOB GOES BEGGING 109
At almost any movie show you can see one or more of such famous folk as
Mutt and Jeff, the Katzenjammer Kids, the Boob Family, Jerry on the Job, Krazy
Kat, and our old friend, Col. Heeza Liar. All there is to any one of them is a lot
of lines, but people get just as excited over them as they do over Douglas
Fairbanks or H. B. Warner.
Now, somebody has to make these black and white people of the film. Bud
Fisher, George McManus, Rube Goldberg, Fred Opper, J. R. Bray, and the rest
of them? Hardly. Not if you knew how much work it takes to follow, say,
Col. Heeza Liar for five hundred feet. The aristocrats just mentioned originate
the ideas and then—then the hundred-dollar-a-week men come in.
For instance, if Rube Goldberg by himself wanted to execute five hundred
feet of the Boob Family he would have to make something like 3,000 drawings.
It would take him a month and the Boob Family comes out once a week. That's
the rub and so in comes the animator. The animator takes the funny idea and
the principal situations and makes the characters move. Before us we have
Jeff taking his hand out of his pocket, which requires four drawings. That
simple little operation of Jeff taking his hand out of his pocket requires four
separate and distinct drawings. You can imagine how much paper and ink
is consumed when trudging down a lonely road Jeff meets a bear!
Animating movie cartoons is a new and growing business, and needs more
men than it can get, but it has one objection. Only about one person in a hundred
can do the work. The more you have studied and the more prizes you have
taken in the Latin Quartet the surer you are to fail. Many an artist with a
national name has picked out his lots on Long Island and gone into animating
A SIMPLE SIGN-LANGUAGE LOVE SCENE BETWEEN TWO DEAF MUTES WOULD
COVER TEN REAMS OF THE FINEST TISSUE
cartoons and then suddenly moved to the Bronx. Then on the other hand,
a number of men and young women have left their cutting board at the shirt
waist factory and made good. It all depends on whether or not you can see
continuous action and see it comically.