Cel Animation - Text 3
The primary difficulty posed by an animated drawing which combines characters and a background is obviously that of having to reproduce the decor for each image, increasing the animator’s workload even though these visual elements do not change from one image to the next. For this reason, when Winsor McCay made Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914, he tasked an assistant, John Fitzsimmons, with reproducing the decor of the cave and the lake for each image, enabling McCay to focus on animating his creature. Here McCay was inaugurating a singular trade which would grow in the era of cel animation: that of the “tracer.” The tracer’s work consisted in tracing already produced drawings onto sheets of tracing paper or celluloid. This division of labour clearly announced the logic which, beginning in the 1910s, would underlie the structure of the animation industry, that of dividing up the work to be carried out. Most of all, though, it illustrates the difficulty posed by the decor; for, as we see, the decor was not immediately addressed under the “realism” logic, because it was redone from one drawing to the next, as an integral part of the animation.
