Introduction - Text 2
In fact the purpose of these studios was not, initially, to imitate live-action cinema: how could it be otherwise, when what was being industrialised at that moment was above all a conception of animated drawings much closer to the newspaper field (almost all of the earliest representatives of this new “genre” came out of this industry) than it was to cinema? The goal of the technological innovations of the 1910s was above all to establish a profitable industry which would make it possible to conceive animated drawings in a reduced amount of time in order to increase output, and thus returns. The main problem encountered by these manufacturers was the staggering amount of work represented by these filmic objects, something described numerous times by various instigators, such as John Randolph Bray: “It would require the life-time efforts of a Methusalah [sic]. … To make a film 1,000 feet long would apparently require 16,000 separate pictures to be drawn.”[2], or Émile Cohl: “To hold your attention for a minute – that’s not a long time, a minute – there are naturally 60 times 16 cartoons, or a total of 960, that [the draughtsperson] must execute… Almost 1,000 already, you see…”[3]
Hence the idea of allocating the labour and dividing up the tasks with the goal, if not of simplifying, at least of optimising output. This was very far from the earliest experiments with animation (Cohl, McCay), which rested on the shoulders of a single animator and thereby prevented mass production. It is not for nothing that John Randolph Bray has been described as the “Henry Ford of animation.”[4]
Nevertheless, we can see that the procedures which would make this industry viable tended to echo some of the technical principles inherited from live-action cinema. In the beginning, however, this connection was only incidental. It was only gradually that this increasingly noted twinning was taken up ideologically, in particular by animator-producers such as Walt Disney, who capitalised on an established form to provide aesthetic fodder for their productions and provide them with both cultural legitimacy and an economically viable role in the film industry. Initially, the reason the variety of methods developed and the actions taken by the animated drawing industry yielded almost incidentally an imitation, or at the very least an appropriation, of the way so-called “traditional” moving-picture cameras operated, is quite simply because the fundamental property of the latter was clearly the automatic nature of the recording, which the nascent animated picture industry sought to duplicate by human means.
In this sense, and in this sense only, we can remark that all the stages preceding that of photographing the drawings were seen as a form of bringing the moving picture camera’s inner workings up to date. What must be understood, in the case which concerns us here, is that imitation was not so much a desire to incorporate dominant film forms as a way to mechanise production: before the standardised techniques taken up in the following decades were achieved, in the 1910s there was a series of hesitations and experiments which belie the idea that from the beginning animated drawings were conceived, ideologically, as a technical equivalent of live-action production.
Each of the seven sections of this parcours will thus be devoted to one of the stages which made it possible to create the illusion of movement out of fixed drawings, and to the role they played in reinventing the way moving picture cameras operate. We will explore the sources and bases of this endeavour while at the same time introducing the techniques which preceded and, in part, determined it. For this reason, we will focus specifically on the first decade of this industry’s emergence, deliberately leaving aside the obviously essential question of sound, which raises other sorts of questions. The question here will be the following: in what sense was the animated drawing industry’s establishment of methods based on the technical imaginary of the moving picture camera less a desired imitation than a technical coincidence involving two procedures based on the mechanisation of moving image production?
