History: The Animator Newsletter 1946

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.


Today's post is for animation history buffs. Fans of the amazing artwork that usually fills this page will have to sit tight until the next post...

Here's a fascinating document- an animation union newsletter from 1946. There are a lot of interesting things in these pages... Page two has plans for an animation award, an idea which finally came to pass when June Foray created the Annie Awards in 1972. On the same page is an item about Ronald Reagan warning cartoonist veterans about the imminent threat of an atomic World War III! Pages four and five feature chatty updates on all of the doings at the local cartoon factories. Page six has a review of Nat Falk's How To Make Animated Cartoons, which we have posted in its entirety here on the site in the past. (Part One: The History of Animation, Two: The Cartoon Studios, Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Five: How To Animate)








You may not realize how remarkable it is to be able to see documents like this. When I first started studying the history of animation back in the late 1970s, I never imagined that information like this existed. Back then, the only way for a cartoon fan to learn about the subject was from books and newsletters written by other fans. These usually consisted of detailed descriptions of cartoons interspersed with the author's personal opinions about which ones were good and which ones weren't. We read it all carefully, because many of the cartoons being discussed weren't available to us, and second hand descriptions were the only way to learn about them. Trivia dealing with the subject matter of the gags and evolution of the characters were discussed endlessly, but there wasn't a lot of solid information about how the films were made or stylistic analysis of individual artists, because most of the writers weren't animators or cartoonists themselves.


Photo of the Lantz Studio staff recently posted
to Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi's Cartoon Brew
Until I was in college, I had never seen an MGM Tex Avery cartoon, nor had I seen Snow White or Pinocchio. That may sound surprising to you, but things were quite different back then. Features were only screened theatrically in a 7 to 10 year rotation. Each television market had its own syndication package of cartoons that aired in morning and afternoon time slots. One city might have Tom & Jerry and Mighty Mouse, but no Woody Woodpecker or Tex Avery cartoons. Another city might have an entirely different lineup. The cartoons shown on TV were film chained live from beat up 16mm prints, and were almost always edited to fit four cartoons into a half hour slot instead of three. The same couple of dozen titles were aired over and over again. If you were interested in the filmography of a particular studio, you were limited to viewing just the titles in circulation at your local TV station. The only way to view other cartoons was to purchase, rent or borrow 16mm prints. This was beyond the means of all but the most serious collectors.


Drawing lesson based on "Heckling Hare"
by John Kricfalusi from All Kinds Of Stuff
There were a few excellent sources of information that stood out and offered a real glimpse of what it was like working in the golden age of animation... Funnyworld presented interviews with animators telling about their careers in their own words. Leonard Maltin's landmark book Of Mice And Magic was like a bible to me, as was Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. A little later, John Canemaker's Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat opened my eyes to the fact that things behind the scenes weren't always the way they appeared on the surface. Bendazzi's Cartoons blew my mind with information on animation from around the world. (I'm still searching for copies of films to view that I've only read about in that book!) All of these sources were invaluable, and still are. But first hand information like this union newsletter was as scarce as hen's teeth back in the early 80s.

Today, technology has changed everything. Thousands of cartoons are readily available on home video, cable TV and the internet. Primary source research turns up all the time on blogs like Cartoon Brew, Mayerson on Animation, A Film LA, and right here on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive blog. Animation professionals like John Kricfalusi, Will Finn, Michael Sporn, Mark Kausler and Peter Emsley generously share their vast collective experience in their blogs, raising the level of discourse dramatically.

If you're anything like me, you're excited about what you see happening around you. We don't have to take another cartoon fan's word about the relative merits of a particular cartoon or depend on a written synopsis any more... we can view the cartoons and consider the analysis of professional animators before making up our own mind. The true context and history of the films becomes more and more apparent with every piece of first hand evidence that is digitized and entered into the search engines. We're living in a golden age of animation scholarship; and hopefully, this access to knowledge that wasn't available before will lead to a flowering of the art of animation.

This is a great time to be interested in the history of animation!

If you found this interesting, you'll want to check out... Dispatch From Disney's Part One and Part Two, The Building Of The Disney Studios, Clair Weeks Goodbye Book, the 1938 Disney Artists Tryout Book, Clair Weeks: Pioneer of Indian Animation and Clair Week's Animal Studies.

Also, see... Chuck Jones on Modern Animation, Walt Disney Goes To War, John Canemaker on Bill Tytla and Musical Timing Rediscovered.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!