Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Cartoons both amuse and engage; they are able to point
out the foibles and complexities of humankind in direct,
illuminating, and original ways. From humble beginnings,
the cartoon has progressed to address social, cultural,
and religious taboos in provocative and amusing
ways. It is the most subversive of mainstream arts.
Though often intrinsically bound up with the Disney
tradition, the cartoon has a variety of histories worldwide,
and diverse practices reflecting the cultures of the nations
in which it has been produced.
The animated cartoon emerged out of the early
experiments in the creation of the cinematic moving
image. As early as 1798, Etienne Robertson constructed
the Phantasmagoria, a sophisticated magic lantern to
project images. It was followed by Joseph Ferdinand
Plateau’s Phenakistascope in 1833, William Horner’s
Zoetrope in 1834, Franz Von Uchatius’s Kinetoscope
in 1853, Henry Heyl’s Phasmatrope in 1870, and Émil
Reynaud’s Praxinoscope in 1877, devices that in some
way projected drawn or painted moving images. With
the development of the cinematic apparatus came the
first intimations of animation, at first accidents or trick
effects in the work of figures like Georges Méliès (1861–
1938), and the emergence of lightning cartooning—the
accelerated movement of drawings by manipulating camera
speeds—particularly in the British context, where
Harry Furniss, Max Martin, Tom Merry, and Lancelot
Speed defined an indigenous model of expression related
to British pictorial traditions in caricature and portraiture.
It was also the Britons J. Stuart Blackton and Albert
E. Smith, working in the United States, who saw the
potential of a specific kind of animation filmmaking in
The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humourous Phases of
CARTOONS
Funny Faces (1906), though these were essentially little
more than developments in lightning cartooning.
While stop motion 3-D animation progressed in a
number of countries, it was only with the creation of
Émile Cohl’s (1857–1938) Fantasmagorie (1908), a linedrawn
animation influenced by French surrealism, that
the 2-D animated film was seen as a distinctive form.
Cohl was later to work in the United States, animating
George McManus’s comic strip The Newlyweds (1913),
one of a number of popular comic strips that characterized
early American cartoon animation, others being
Krazy Kat, The Katzenjammer Kids, and Mutt and Jeff.
Winsor McCay (1871–1934), an illustrator and graphic
artist, made Little Nemo in Slumberland (1911), based on
his own New York Herald comic strip, and one of the first
self-reflexive cartoons, the aptly titled Winsor McCay
Makes His Cartoons Move (1911). McCay’s influence on
the history of animation cannot be overstated. He created
one of the first instances of the horror genre in The Story
of the Mosquito (1912); ‘‘personality’’ animation in the
figure of Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), which was featured
in an interactive routine with McCay in his Vaudeville
show; and ‘‘documentary’’ in an imitative newsreel-style
depiction of The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).
As early as 1913, Raoul Barré and John R. Bray were
developing systematic, ‘‘industrial’’ methods for the production
of animated cartoons using variations of what
was to become the ‘‘cel’’ animation process, where individual
drawings (later, cels) were made, each with a slight
change in a character’s position, and then aligned with
backgrounds that remained the same, using a peg-bar
system. By replacing each drawing in a sequence of
movement and photographing it frame by frame, the
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