Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler
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Название: Wild Minds

Автор: Reid Mitenbuler

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Кинематограф, театр

Серия:

isbn: 9780802147059

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ that ideas and feelings might exist in a realm somewhere between magic and reality. McCay explored similar territory in his comic strip, playing with the familiar tropes of dreamscapes: falling through space, drowning, moving slowly while everything else around you moves quickly. Each week, his characters floated around outer space on milkweed seeds, on beds that acted as flying carpets, or in ivory coaches pulled by cream-colored rabbits. These fantasies were always rudely interrupted by reality—falling off the flying bed and waking up in a real bed, or being jolted awake by a voice telling you it was all just a dream. Adults enjoyed Little Nemo in Slumberland because it helped them reconnect to their childhood minds; for youngsters, it was a bridge to their blossoming adult minds. The strip was so popular it was adapted for the stage in 1908, costing more than any other production of its era—nearly $300,000—and featured the biggest names known in theater. The production was a critical success and popular with audiences, but made little profit because of its extravagant cost.

      Little Nemo in Slumberland was a highly personal cartoon for McCay. He claimed the title character was based on his young son, Robert, even though the name Nemo in Latin technically means “no one.” The character also demonstrated qualities Winsor had as a boy growing up in Spring Lake, Michigan, a logging town where literacy didn’t extend much past McGuffey’s Third Reader, and most people hadn’t understood McCay’s dream of drawing as a career. It was a place where someone like Winsor—small, pale, destined to go bald early—inevitably adopted introverted hobbies like drawing. Just as young Winsor had done, Little Nemo attempted to escape the real world by hiding in his dreams.

      The tools McCay used to animate his cartoon were simple: stacks of rice paper, a bottle of Higgins India ink, a stack of Gillott #290 pens, and some art gum. Puffing his way through endless cigarettes, a machine belching out exhaust, he set to the task of producing 4,000 drawings, all a little different from each other. In one, he would establish a pose; in the next, he would move it ever so slightly. Flipping through the drawings quickly gave the suggestion of movement. Each drawing was assigned a serial number and was given marks to keep it in register with the other drawings. Then the drawings were photographed, with the marks kept in careful position to ensure the final image didn’t vibrate on the screen.

      McCay was known for drawing so efficiently, his colleagues joked, that he could draw a picture in a single line without ever raising his hand from the paper. As he worked, a cigarette always dangled from his lips, the thin plumes of smoke pooling underneath his wide-brimmed hats.

      Winsor McCay re-creating the laborious process he used to produce his Little Nemo cartoon, circa 1911.

      Fifteen years earlier, McCay had seen his first movie while working at the dime museum in Cincinnati. That film had been part of Thomas Edison’s Vitascope project, when cinema was still very much a novelty. The premise was simple—just a train moving toward the camera—but it frightened those who had never seen a moving film before. During the showing one man stood up, screaming his head off, while another man fainted and crumpled to the ground. In subsequent years, people became comfortable with seeing photographs move on-screen, but they still had never seen drawings like McCay’s move in a similar way.

      On April 12, 1911, McCay showed his animated cartoon at New York’s Colonial Theatre, a vaudeville house that seated nearly 1,300 people. The spectators sat mesmerized, asking each other excitedly if it was all some sort of trick using special photography as they watched characters—Impy, Nemo, and Dr. Flip—float in space, no wires visible, as Nemo appeared out of fragments of stray lines that had coalesced to form him. When the cartoon reached its end, just a few minutes after it started, a green dragon named Bosco lumbered into the frame holding a chair in his mouth to carry all the characters away.

      Moving Picture World called the cartoon “an admirable piece of work,” and claimed that it “should be popular everywhere.” What the magazine didn’t know, because animation was still brand-new, was that McCay’s film had set a very high bar. Only people looking back, from many years in the future, could appreciate just how high that bar was. In the 1960s, an animator named Bob Kurtz would call McCay’s work “Seventy or eighty years ahead of its time—as if he had really been born in 2025, acquired a complete knowledge of animation, then took a time capsule back to 1911 and faked it.” In 1985, Chuck Jones, who helped create many of the iconic Warner Bros. cartoon characters, would say, “It is as though the first creature to emerge from the primeval slime was Albert Einstein; and the second was an amoeba, because after McCay’s animation, it took his followers nearly twenty years to figure out how he did it.”

      After finishing his first cartoon, McCay began dreaming of animation’s vast potential and championing it as a new art form. Perhaps it would even replace great styles of art that had come before, he told anyone who would listen. “Take, for instance, that wonderful painting which everyone is familiar with, entitled The Angelus,” he announced to a crowd of fans one day, referring to a popular oil painting by the French master Jean-François Millet, of two peasants standing in a field solemnly praying over a meager harvest of potatoes. “There will be a time when people will gaze at it and ask why the objects remain rigid and stiff. They will demand action. And to meet this demand the artists of that time will look to motion picture people for help and the artists, working hand in hand with science, will evolve a new school of art that will revolutionize the entire field.”

      Chapter 2

      “Fantasmagorie”

      Winsor McCay didn’t come up with his ideas in a vacuum, and they weren’t the result of a sudden epiphany. For centuries, people had been fascinated with the idea of animation, of making drawings appear to move. McCay’s achievements were just the next breakthrough in a long series.

      In prehistoric times, people probably waved flickering torches in front of cave drawings to make them appear to move. By the time of China’s Tang dynasty (618–907), shadow puppets—cut from buffalo hide and moved around behind a screen—were a common way to tell popular stories of the day. Centuries later, shadow puppets became popular in Europe as well. By this point, people were using mathematics coupled with new lens technologies to study light and motion. In 1645, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher published Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow). In the last chapter, he mentioned a lantern containing a candle and a curved mirror that, if manipulated in the right way, could make cutout shapes appear to move. This wasn’t technically animation, but it was exciting—so exciting, in fact, that some called it witchcraft. Kircher, who had always wanted to be a missionary and didn’t appreciate the witchcraft accusations, reassured everyone by using his device to show Bible scenes. Once everyone was calmed down, the path was then clear for other entrepreneurs to use Kircher’s techniques for something more important: making money.

      A Dutchman named Pieter van Musschenbroek quickly improved upon Kircher’s lantern by fitting it with a disc containing sequential images that, when turned, made the images appear to move in a more sophisticated manner. Then, a Frenchman, Abbé Guyot, compiled this and the growing number of other animation techniques in his book Rational Recreations in Which the Principles of Numbers and Natural Philosophy Are Clearly and Copiously Elucidated, by a Series of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments. Insofar as lantern showmen could remember the title, this was the book they couldn’t stop talking about. “Magical theater” shows took off like a dance craze.

      One lantern showman stood out from all the others, a Frenchman named Étienne-Gaspard Robert of Liège. In the 1790s he developed a spooky show, “Fantasmagorie,” which quickly grew famous. By 1794, at the height of the French Revolution, his crowds were so big that he had to move his show to the ruins of a large old monastery in Paris. Audiences filed into the darkened crypts, dim candlelight reflecting off piles of neatly stacked bones, to gaze at flickering СКАЧАТЬ