Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Behind-the-Scenes Doc about 1930s Cartoon Animation

Animator Walter Lantz produced this behind-the-scenes documentary in 1936 about the making of one of his black-and-white cartoons.

6 comments:

Susan Krzywicki said...

Wow. Really cool. I loved the men's shoes at :21, the section around emotion at 2:16 and the whole section starting at 8:13.

Giggled, of course, about the "girls" in the copying department...

Amazingly labor intensive. What interesting jobs!

Rick S. said...

Definitely pre CGI!

Bill Marshall said...

"15,000 drawings!!!

Not on this caliber, but it brought back memories of inking and painting for Imagination Inc. in the early 70's in San Francisco while a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. We got paid $3.00/hr. to push, not brush, paint up to the ink lines on the cells for Sesame Street "classics", "The Letter 'A'", and "Add and Subtract". Helped to pay my tuition for the San Francisco Art Institute.

Bill Marshall

Pierre Fontaine said...

Two observations...

One is that I'm surprised that the dialog was post-looped, similar to how the Fleischer Studios did Betty Boop and Popeye. It makes me wonder how the animators got the timings for the mouth movements if the actual dialog was recorded after the animation. Perhaps they worked to scratch tracks which were then rerecorded in the Foley studio as shown at the end of the film.

Second is the level of skill at every level, from the script to sketch to animation, inking, painting, music and foley work. The talent and craftsmanship was staggering!

doforanimals said...

So fascinating! I love watching behind the scenes footage of film/art making, especially vintage footage like this. So interesting to see the similarities and differences from today. Thanks for posting this and now I want to search YouTube for more!

Ted B. said...

Disney had a massive stills camera with a huge depth-of-field so they could photograph complex moving zoom-shoots with different parts of the matte in different planes allowing the background appeaing to move in three dimensions.