Starting the Discussion

Felix: A Star is Born

Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business, Chapters 1 and 2 (x)

In All the President's Men, reporter Bob Woodward has met one of his 'unidentified sources,' whom he calls Deep Throat, in a Washington parking garage. To repeated questions about who was responsible for the Watergate break in, Deep Throat finally says, "Follow the money."

In this course, I want you to "follow the money" as well. Theatrical animated films are made as commodities to be sold within the framework of the capitalist marketplace. Therefore, the money determines which animators and types of animation will be supported and which will be left to languish by the wayside. In reading about the early years of animation history in Serious Business, you should be focusing not only on the developing technology of animation, but on who had the power to access that technology and why that was so.

1. Who were the primary individuals/production companies during the early part of the twentieth century?
2. Did that change in the 1920s?
3. How did Winsor McCay rise to prominence in early animation? Why didn't he stay at the top?
4. How does animation made after 1920 contrast with that made during the teens? Can you see any patterns in the kind of animated films popular in the US before 1920 as opposed to those made after that date?
5. What impact did World War I have on American culture? How was that impact mirrored in the work of such animators as Winsor McCay and Otto Messmer?
6. McCay greeted the audience at the opening of his The Sinking of the Lusitania with his belief that all art would eventually move, that museums would be full of moving pictures, not still ones. By 1933, a year or so before his death, he acknowledged that he had been wrong about that, when he told an assembly of animators assembled to honor him, "Animation should be an art. That is how I conceived it. But as I see what you fellows have done with it, making it into a trade . . . . not an art, but a trade, bad luck!" Given the economic system in which animation was developed, should McCay have been surprised by the progression of animated films away from the museums and into popular culture?
7. "Why animate something you can see in real life," Otto Messmer asked himself early in his career. At least until Disney moved into his '30s productions, audiences apparently agreed with Messmer. How much did he personally benefit from the combination of this insight and his talent and imagination?
8. How did the partnership of Messmer and Pat Sullivan prefigure the kind of relationship many animators would have with their studio and studio head?
9. How did Max and Dave Fleischer get interested in animation? What made them different from most of the other animation studios with which they were to compete in the 1920s? What new technology did they pioneer? What impact did this new technology have on the nature of their animation?
10. Walt Disney is introduced at the end of this reading; how does Kanfer characterize his political agenda? Can you see any evidence of this position in the Disney cartoons you're familiar with from the '30s through the '50s?

You've now seen and read about some of the films made during this period.

1. How does the ending of Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces point the way toward an enduring problem in the use of racial and ethnic stereotypes in cartoons made through the middle of the 20th century? How did the mainstream, white, European-derived US culture justify this kind of stereotyping? (You might check the Princeton University study Kanfer cites on p. 40 for help on this one.)
2. What does the account of McCay's cartoon strips tell you about the sense of humor of the viewing public around the turn of the century? What made his Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend unusual?
3. By the time he was animating the tale of the sinking of the Lusitania, McCay was taking the animated cartoon into completely new territory, that of high drama. In his time, virtually no one else followed his lead. Since then, however, can you think of any other examples of dramatic or political use of animation?
4. Kanfer quotes a sentence from Sigmund Freud (who was still working and writing during this period): "The dream is a compromise between and the defense against the unconscious emotions; in it the unconscious wish is represented as being fulfilled." Is this a good description of animated film as well?
5. What do Gertie and Felix have in common?
6. Felix's creator also seems to have had a dark side; how is it apparent in Felix's first appearance in Feline Follies (1919)? What's different about Felix's personality by the time he appears in Comicalamities, nine years later, at the height of his career?
7. Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables series, also popular in the 1920s, are often seen as prototypes for many Disney films of the 1930s. Can you trace the connection?
8. Even before Felix, the Fleischer brothers pioneered the Out of the Inkwell series, starring Koko the Clown. He would go on to be the co-star of the Fleischer's successful Betty Boop, but what were his strengths as a single act? Why do you think he attracted an audience in an era when animal protagonists were becoming the norm in animated cartoons?

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