While volumes could and have been written
about the creation and history of animation going back to Magic
Lanternist in the 17th century, on film, the first baby step in the
infancy of animation came in 1896 when George
Melies discovered stop motion.
The next step toward creating animation as
a genre, came about a decade later, when in 1906 J. Stuart Blackton, co-owner
of the Vitagraph
Co. and former cartoonist for the New York Evening World, did a film
entitled Humorous Phases of Funny Faces where Blackton stood in
front of a blackboard and drew faces that moved and came to life. This was
basically a combination of the trick film and the popular speed drawing
from vaudeville. Blackton did about a half dozen films, his most influencial
being The Haunted Hotel in 1907 which was a smash hit in Europe.
Blackton's work influenced such animation legends as Melbourne-Cooper, Walter
R. Booth, Segundo do Chomon, Edwin S. Porter, Billy Blitzer and Emile Cohl.
Soon the popularity of these films died down and Blackton however lost interest.
The next step came from Emile Cohl.
Emile Cohl had been a caricaturist and comic strip artist before
seeing Blackton's work. From 1908-1910, Cohl worked on about 75 films for
the Gaumont Company, creating such tools for the animators of Europe as
illuminated animation stands, vertically mounted eletrically driven cameras,
charts for calculating movement duration and lens depth of field. Cohl experimented
with a wide variety of materials being animated which were extremely popular
in Europe, also working for Pathe and Eclair.
In 1912, Cohl move to Fort Lee, New Jersey where he adapted a 14
film series of comic strip artist George McManus's The Newlyweds and
their Baby. The success of this series caused numerous comic strip
artists to want to transform their strips into film.
Enter Windsor McCay....
Windsor McCay was the most popular comic strip artist of his time..
His comic strip Little Nemo was so popular that it was made into a vaudeville
act and then into a Broadway play. In February 1914, McCay introduced Gertie
the Dinosaur which was a phenominal success.
The film of Gertie had a MAJOR impact on the film industry and
is considered the catalyst that such amimation giants as Paul
Terry, Max Fleischer, Walt Disney, Chuck Jones and Walter Lantz point
to as what started them in animation.
The final step to making a animation into
a genre was creating the procedures to be able to mass produce animation
into the series at the theaters. These legends invented, created, borrowed
and stole their way into becoming the Legends of Animation. Without these
adventuresome group, there would be no animation today
Here are the ones that LAMP Salutes as Legends
of Animation:
