Illustration: Dulac's Tanglewood Tales

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 6 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about golden age illustration.


Today, a friend of mine asked me a question that a couple of his acquaintances had asked him about the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive... "Why aren't there more posts of material from animation?"

It's a valid question. There are two reasons... First of all, animation is primarily about movement. In order to convey that, it requires movie files. Unfortunately, at this point, the Archive Project can't afford the bandwidth to provide a lot of streaming video. At some point, when the project has grown a bit, we hope to be able to do that.

The second reason cuts to the heart of what the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive is intended to accomplish. We aren't trying to create a trade school program in animation to teach people how to animate- That's beyond the scope of what we can do here. The purpose of the Archive is to provide inspiration... To supply material that will help artists see and create in a different way. Inspiration for animation doesn't have to come from animation itself. Real life, illustration, fine art, music and great literature can all inspire animation.

Animation celebrated its 100th Birthday in 2006. But in all that time, the way an animated film looks hasn't been explored nearly as fully as it should have been. From a design standpoint, cartoons have always been very imitative... In the 1930's dozens of characters looked like Mickey Mouse. Today, the main characters of animated features all look about the same. There's no reason why this has to be the case.

The purpose of the reference material I'm providing isn't to give you, the artist, a "cop file" that you can duplicate in your own work- It's to help break down the essence of animation design... caricature, anthropomorphism, stylization, color, pleasing shapes, expression, etc... so you can incorporate those elements into your own work, and create new ways of seeing for those of us in the audience. Referencing illustration and print cartooning is a better source for that sort of thing than referencing other animated films.

With that said, I offer these scans from Edmund Dulac's last great illustrated book, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales....















If you compare these images to the ones in our previous posting of Dulac's illustrations of Edgar Allen Poe's Poetical Works, you will notice a radical shift of style. Just like Gustaf Tenggren reinvented his painting style between Small Fry And The Winged Horse and The Little Trapper, Dulac's style underwent a transformation from the classic illustration style of artists like Arthur Rackham and Howard Pyle to a style influenced by Persian illuminated manuscripts and oriental design.

A truly great artist can't keep working in a single style. They have to evolve and grow. I hope the images I'm posting here in this blog help you along to break new ground in how an animated film can look.

See also... Milo Winter's Aesop For Children, Lorioux's Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Felix Lorioux's Tom Thumb, Puss in Boots, Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Le Buffon des Enfants, Mabel Lucie Attwell's Peter Pan and Wendy, Einar Norelius' Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1929 and 1934, John Bauer's Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1917, More Norelius and Bauer, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Kay Nielsen's East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Hansel & Gretel, Dulac's H.C. Andersen Part One and Part Two, Little Verses Part One and Part Two, and Rojankovsky's Frog Went A-Courtin'.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

6.07.08
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