Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler

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СКАЧАТЬ 1912, one year after McCay premiered Little Nemo in Slumberland, Émile Cohl moved to America to begin making movies, including animated cartoons. Stepping off the boat onto Ellis Island, he was promptly met by a customs agent who asked him to shave his mustache for “sanitary reasons.” Cohl hesitated because his mustache—long and swoopy and twisted at the ends—had symbolic value. He had worn it for decades in honor of André Gill, a famous caricaturist who taught Cohl the art of political cartooning. Gill had once used a cartoon to lampoon the incompetence of Napoleon III, an act that got him briefly thrown into jail but also made him a legend among French cartoonists. Without the mustache, Cohl resembled a plain-looking shopkeeper, or perhaps a jeweler—the kind of “practical” jobs his father had once pressured him to take, before Gill taught him about cartooning.

      Cohl shaved the mustached but started growing it back immediately thereafter. Then he made his way to Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he started a job working for the American outpost of France’s Éclair Studio.

      Before Hollywood became the undisputed capital of America’s movie industry, many big studios were located in and around Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Almost all of Hollywood’s first generation of moguls—Adolph Zukor of Paramount, Samuel Goldwyn of MGM, and William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation, among others—had grown up in New York. Fort Lee offered ample studio space and easy access to shooting locations. Because of the area’s early role as a film center, it also became the center of the animation industry, which would linger there long after the live-action studios moved to California.

      One of Émile Cohl’s first assignments for Éclair was directing The Newlyweds, an animated series based on a popular American comic strip by George McManus, the cartoonist who first challenged Winsor McCay to make his animated cartoon Little Nemo in Slumberland. The studio wanted it as a regularly recurring series and Cohl did all the work himself. Because drawing the images by hand took a long time, he devised a shortcut using stop-motion photography and cutout figures similar to paper dolls. This was an enormous timesaver but resulted in a rudimentary appearance and jerky motion. In the end, the shoddy quality didn’t particularly matter because theaters wanted the cartoons mainly for novelty effect, to play as a short amusement before their main features. Advertisements for Cohl’s cartoons brought to mind flyers for a magician’s set. “The Newlyweds are not real people dressed up to imitate the famous McManus cartoons, but are drawings that move!” an Éclair poster read. Newspaper stories covering the new series mark the first time anyone used the term “animated cartoons.”

      None of the newspapers ever gave Cohl credit—the name of George McManus, as creator of the comic strip, was far more marketable. Émile’s name was recognizable in France, but rarely surfaced in American papers; when it did, it was often misspelled as “Emil.”

      In 1912, Cohl saw Winsor McCay’s second cartoon, The Story of a Mosquito, during a show at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. In his diary, he raved about it. The cartoon was spooky but also enchanting and fun, like the ideas the Incoherents used to come up with. It featured a mosquito named Steve that occasionally descends on a sleeping man to drink his blood, Steve's abdomen filling like a water balloon before finally bursting. In many ways, it captured the same playful sense that Cohl was going for, except that it was much more elaborate and better drawn. McCay had spent months producing the cartoon and the result was gorgeous. Cohl called him “the most skillful and most graceful draftsman of the United States.”

      In 1914, Cohl saw Gertie the Dinosaur, McCay’s third film, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. It was the kind of masterpiece that can change an artist’s perspective. Nobody knew it yet, but Gertie is the film that would inspire many young cartoonists to try animation. (Walt Disney spoke of his first time seeing Gertie the same way priests talk of finding God.) The film was only a few minutes long but had taken McCay nearly two years to make in his free time away from his day job drawing for the newspaper. Every part of Gertie was painstakingly precise. McCay had timed his breaths with a stopwatch in order to capture the motions of Gertie’s heavy breathing, and no matter what Gertie was doing—throwing rocks at a mastodon, munching on trees, performing a dance number—her movements were perfect. The cartoon had little plot, but what made it significant was that Gertie showed personality: petulance, docility, humor, anger. Winsor had been able to capture these emotions with the subtlest of gestures—a crinkle around her eyes, a slight change to her smile. This was the film that would cement his reputation and make him the patron saint of animation.

      Ever the showman, McCay started showing Gertie as part of a vaudeville act. As the cartoon played, Winsor stood to the side of the stage and shouted “commands” at his character. He wore long coattails and cracked a bullwhip, like a lion tamer, playfully telling the crowd that Gertie was “The only dinosaur in captivity!” For a sequence featuring Gertie eating apples, McCay would toss real apples up and behind the screen. The show was clever and drew large, paying crowds, prompting Cohl to later write, a bit huffily, “It was lucrative for McCay who never left the theater without stopping by the cashier to be laden with a few banknotes on the way out.”

      Émile Cohl’s frustration grew over the years. In the 1930s, long after he had moved back to France, reporters would occasionally visit but find him irritable. Sitting in his humble quarters—a dingy spare bedroom in his brother’s house—the reporters would ask him about his political cartoons, but Cohl would always change the topic to animation. He was annoyed that the French press called animation le mouvement Américain, ignoring the contributions that the French, and by French he mainly meant himself, had also made. He told one reporter from Pour Vous that the French didn’t promote themselves as well as the Americans did, and this also bothered him.

      Poor promotional skills might be one reason Cohl was forgotten, but another (much more likely) reason was that almost all the cartoons he animated in America were destroyed. A fire roared through the Éclair studios in Fort Lee a day after he set sail back to France, in 1914. Film stock back then was highly flammable, much more so than today, and the studio flared up like a Roman candle. Only one of Cohl’s Newlyweds cartoons survived, and few other prints ever surfaced later. Nobody was thus able to see his legacy, which survived mainly by word of mouth.

      During his later years, Cohl told another story of his time in America, this one verging on conspiracy. He said two strangers had visited him while he was living in New Jersey—one talkative, the other silent. They demanded to know how animated cartoons were made, but refused to reveal what they intended to do with the information. It remains unclear exactly what Cohl told them. Perhaps not coincidentally, a similar visit was made to Winsor McCay around the same time, according to John Fitzsimmons, McCay’s assistant during the time he made Gertie. He said that a man had showed up on McCay’s doorstep asking to learn his methods; McCay, eager to promote animation in the way that a missionary is eager to spread the word, gladly showed him. But this visitor had motives different from McCay’s. The blossoming industry had attracted the attention of men who were more interested in profit than art.

      Chapter 3

      “The Artist’s Dream”

      “Winsor, you’ve done it! You’ve created a new art!” George McManus told Winsor McCay after seeing Gertie the Dinosaur. What McManus should have then added was, “Now, go patent it!”

      “Had I taken out patents I would have strangled a new art in its infancy,” McCay later explained. Animation’s business potential didn’t interest him as much as its artistic possibilities. It also helped that McCay wasn’t particularly worried about money; he earned roughly $50,000 a year drawing for Hearst’s newspaper, augmenting his salary with earnings from his vaudeville act. Others, however, were more intrigued by animation’s commercial prospects. Among them was the man who darkened the doorway of McCay’s studio seeking to learn his methods: John Randolph Bray was another newspaper cartoonist, but, СКАЧАТЬ