TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Contrary to McCay’s approach, the logic of industrial animated drawings consists in eliminating “useless” tasks in order to increase production. In this sense, the stage in which the background drawing was redone from image to image was extremely time consuming, and as a result had to be eliminated. But the cel animation solution did not appear immediately, because it was preceded by several innovations, each of which tended to demonstrate that the very idea of a stratified drawn space (a character superimposed on a background using a transparent sheet) was not self-evident, or at least was in no way “logical.” The first of these, the slash system, was introduced by Raoul Barré when he opened his studio in 1914.