Saturday, 30 August 2014
In 1923, a studio called Laugh-O-Grams went bankrupt and its owner, Walt Disney, opened a new studio in Los Angeles. Disney's first project was the Alice Comedies series, which featured a live action girl interacting with numerous cartoon characters. Disney's first notable breakthrough was 1928's Steamboat Willie, the third of the Mickey Mouse series. It was the first cartoon that included a fully post-produced soundtrack, featuring voice and sound effects printed on the film itself ("sound-on-film"). The short film showed an anthropomorphic mouse named Mickey neglecting his work on a steamboat to instead make music using the animals aboard the boat.
In 1930, Warner Brothers Cartoons were founded. While Disney's studio was known for its releases being strictly controlled by Walt Disney himself, Warner brothers allowed its animators more freedom, which allowed for their animators to develop more recognizable personal styles.
The first animation to use the full, three-color Technicolor method was Flowers and Trees, made in 1932 by Disney Studios, which won an Academy Award for the work. Color animation soon became the industry standard, and in 1934, Warner Brothers released Honeymoon Hotel of the Merry Melodies series, their first color films. Meanwhile, Disney had realized that the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories; he developed an innovation called a "story department" where storyboard artists separate from the animators would focus on story development alone, which proved its worth when the Disney studio released in 1933 the first-ever animated short to feature well-developed characters, Three Little Pigs. In 1935, Tex Avery released his first film with Warner Brothers. Avery's style was notably fast paced, violent, and satirical, with a slapstick sensibility—while Disney's was more sugar-coated and marketed towards children.
Snow transparent and the Seven Dwarfs
Many consider Walt Disney's 1937 Snow transparent and the Seven Dwarfs the first animated feature film, though at least seven films were released earlier. However, Disney's film was the first one completely made using hand-drawn animation. The previous seven films, of which only four survive, were made using cutout, silhouette or stop motion, except for one—also made by Disney seven months prior to Snow transparent's release—Academy Award Review of Walt Disney Cartoons. This was an anthology film to promote the upcoming release of Snow transparent. However, many do not consider this a genuine feature film because it is a anthology film. In addition, at approximately 41 minutes, the film does not seem to fulfill today's expectations for a feature film. However, the official BFI, AMPAS and AFI definitions of a feature film require that it be over 40 minutes long, which, in theory, should make it the first animated feature film using traditional animation.
But as Snow transparent was also the first one to become successful and well-known within the English-speaking world, people tend to disregard the seven films. Following Snow transparent's release, Disney began to focus much of its productive force on feature length films. Though Disney did continue to produce shorts throughout the century, Warner Brothers continued to focus on shorts.
