Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler

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СКАЧАТЬ and luck gathered in a perfect storm. But one factor in Felix’s success was crucial: he was the first recurring cartoon character with a distinct personality, a thinking character and not a mindless action figure. He communicated directly with the audience, winking at them from the screen, holding up a finger as if to say, “Watch this” before launching into some caper. These mannerisms echoed Messmer’s as he waltzed through the studio, pantomiming Felix’s movements for his staff: clenching his fists straight down when he was frustrated; pondering a question by pacing back and forth, hands behind his back; and the famous “eureka” gesture, slapping his fist into his palm when he had a revelation.

      During Felix’s early years, Messmer sometimes drew from his war experience for storylines. Just before shipping out to France, he had married Anne Mason, who remained his wife for fifty-nine years. Some of Messmer’s friends, however, had returned home to discover that their girlfriends had left them. In Felix Turns the Tide, Felix likewise returns home from war to discover that his girlfriend has had kittens with another cat. But before Felix can get mad, he sees how she nags this other cat, which is saddled with a litter of needy, whining kittens. Suddenly, Felix is relieved, shrugging it off while laughing to a friend, “Gosh! I had a narrow escape!”

      Nor did Messmer’s war-themed cartoons shy away from showing violent death. Mountains of limp bodies, x’s for eyes, pile up on the battlefield in Felix Turns the Tide, released in 1922, which featured Felix joining the Army after rats declare war on cats. In later years, after the movie industry imposed censorship rules on itself, audiences would no longer see images so graphic. A cartoon character might fall off a cliff, have an anvil crush its skull, or be blown up by dynamite, but viewers would never see it actually die. There was a window of time during Felix’s earliest years, however, when Messmer showed death graphically.

      Felix’s on-screen movements—full of unexpected changes, improvisation, and metamorphic riffs—resonated with the decade’s new jazz sounds. His look, angular and pointy, moved away from art nouveau, the curvilinear and fluid motion of Winsor McCay, toward the fragmented cubism of postwar modernism. Felix’s rising popularity, however, soon demanded adjustments to his appearance. Animators needed a look that allowed them to draw him faster, so they could meet increased demand for more cartoons. Animator Bill Nolan, a former Hearst employee, helped Messmer develop a look that was more round than angular, helping smooth Felix’s on-screen motion and making him easier to draw. Rather than diminish Felix’s popularity, the changes seemed to boost it. One psychologist thought the rounder head, accentuated by a smaller body, triggered the audience’s innate affection for babies. Messmer himself put this analysis in terms of psychology, saying, “Felix represented a child’s mind . . . and that’s why I think it took hold. He’d wonder where the wind came from, or how far away is a star? How deep is the ocean? Things like that . . . then, with some gag, he would solve the problem.”

      Pundits of the Roaring Twenties excitedly declared Felix the icon of their era. “He becomes the impossible,” Marcel Brion of the Académie Française wrote in 1928. “Nothing is more familiar to him than the extraordinary, and when he is not surrounded by the fantastic, he creates it.” The literary world was also enthusiastic. Aldous Huxley wrote in Vanity Fair that European filmmakers should study Felix cartoons—this would help improve their humor, he said, and guide them to be less pretentious. George Bernard Shaw gave particularly high praise, seeing the same potential in cartoons—as a high art—that Winsor McCay saw. “If Michelangelo were now alive,” he said, “I have not the slightest doubt that he would have his letter box filled with proposals from the great film firms to concentrate his powers to the delineation of Felix the Cat instead of the Sistine Chapel.”

      Chapter 7

      “How to Fire a Lewis Machine Gun”

      In the years after World War I, Max Fleischer found working for John Bray frustrating. Max was still one of Bray’s best employees, but Bray’s interests had shifted. He was no longer interested in making the kind of comedies that inspired Max; he was now focused on training and industrial films.

      During the war, Bray saw the contracts going to defense contractors and smelled a lucrative new opportunity. The military would need training films, and animation offered a way to illustrate certain concepts much better than live action could. After meeting with Army officials at West Point, Bray procured a contract to make the films they needed, many of which would rely on Fleischer’s rotoscoping process. When the Army then tried to draft Fleischer, Bray asked, “How can I make films when you draft all my men?”

      Bray had a fair point, so the Army agreed to an arrangement. Fleischer was relieved of regular service and sent to “Fire School” at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he would supervise the production of training films made there. A dusty scrubland surrounded by even dustier scrubland, Fort Sill was a far cry from New York, but Fleischer didn’t seem to mind. Clad in a custom-tailored wardrobe of drab olives and muted browns so he would appear at least somewhat Army-like, he directed films with titles like How to Operate a Stokes Mortar, How to Fire the Lewis Machine Gun, Submarine Mine Laying, and How to Read a Contour Map. After the war ended, Fleischer returned to New York and convinced Bray to hire his brother Dave, who had been stationed in Washington, D.C., making training films for the medical corps. Able once again to focus on comedic cartoons, the brothers revived Dave’s old clown character and began working up a new series, Out of the Inkwell (although the character would go nameless for several years, by 1924 he would regularly be referred to as Koko, or sometimes Ko-Ko). A mix of live action and animation, each installment of the series began with Max sitting at a drawing table, bringing Koko to life and then setting him off on a series of misadventures in the city. The series was released on a bimonthly schedule starting in 1919.

      Max Fleischer filming How to Read a Contour Map, one of many military training films he made during World War I.

      Although not as popular as Felix—a difficult feat to match—Koko quickly became one of his few notable competitors. Like Felix, he possessed a unique personality, much more than just a simple cartoon automaton performing simple gags and stunts. His films possessed a reflexive nature not seen in other cartoons; he was always aware that he was living as a cartoon, made of pen and ink. This concept, reflecting his creators’ sly self-awareness, thrilled audiences. The clown was “a living example of what can be accomplished by hard work and concentration,” according to Moving Picture World. The New York Times was also impressed, proclaiming that “Mr. Fleischer’s work, by its wit of conception and skill of execution, makes the general run of animated cartoons seem dull and crude.” Fleischer was pleased by the attention but was nagged by a question raised by another Times reviewer: “Why doesn’t Mr. Fleischer do more?”

      Model sheet used by animators to standardize the appearance, posture, and gestures of Koko the Clown.

      Max did want, very badly in fact, to do more. He tried to convince Bray that, even though Koko was already a star, he could be so much bigger—some theaters had even started advertising him on their marquees, which almost never happened for the opening shorts; it was meant only for main features. But Bray wasn’t interested. His success with military training films had convinced him that educational material was the future of animation. Such films might not have been as sexy as entertainment films, but they did offer steady and dependable revenue from government and corporate contracts. This was important to Bray because he was by now having financial difficulties. His expansion plans had included a production and distribution contract with the Goldwyn Company, a contract worth roughly $1.5 million, which required that he release more than 150 reels of film a year, a number he had trouble reaching. By 1921, he faced numerous legal threats for contractual breaches related to nonperformance СКАЧАТЬ