Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I’ve been rereading some of the animation books that were released long before this blog existed. This gives me the opportunity of reviewing them fresh. Rereading them means, most probably, that I liked them enough in the first place that I wanted to read them again. That’s probably true, at least it is in the case of today’s book. This was the third time I’ve read Donald Crafton‘s brilliant work of animation history, Before Mickey.

This book is one of those that has been THE source for many researchers once it arrived on bookshelves. It is, as its title states, a history of animation prior to the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, meaning the first recognized sound cartoon. As such it’s an invaluable work, and I do mean invaluable.

The subject matter for this book is a large one, and prior to this, no one had written extensively about silent film animation. Even after the book was first published in 1982 to today, there have been few others devoted to the subject of early animation.
- John Canemaker wrote two books: one about McCay and a second about Felix.
- There have been several about Disney’s work before the sound films, particularly Merritt & Kaufman‘s Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney and Timothy S. Susanin‘s Walt before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years, 1919-1928.
- Several have a wider scope, particularly Denis Gifford‘s scholarly tome, American Animated Films, the Silent Era, but even this book eliminates 2/3 of the world’s cinema. That’s pretty much it.

The surprise is that the book pretty much got it right with this first one. In the writing, Crafton records the short histories of many significant filmmakers from Bray to Terry, McCay to Messmer, from Disney to Dyer, Cohl to Fleischer. He gives an account of many animators who enter learning; people such as Tytla, Culhane, Huemer, Nolan and Iwerks among many others pass through the book before they become the giants of the industry.

The book is divided into numerous sections. At first there’s a focus on the various individuals that created the medium, people like Blackton, Cohl and McCay. Then we move to those who turned it into an industry, those like Bray and Fleischer and Terry.
Once all of the US studios are touched on, Crafton moves to Europe; we learn how the different countries such as Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Russia established their industries and animators. I’m sorry Crafton didn’t really go into the work in Japan and China since both countries developed strong and thriving animation studios, but the book could only house so much.

One of many ads printed in the book.

Following this, Donald Crafton goes back to a theme which slyly entered in the book’s opening, the subject matter of the films. At first he recognizes that animation follows the comic strips of the day with a heavy focus on human characters, but somewhere in the early 1920′s characters became animal – animals that stood upright and acted like humans. This is probably precipitated by the arrival of Felix the Cat and the Sullivan sudios. With his enormous success, there were a large number of imitators. From Terry to Disney, everyone found animated cats that were able to unscrew their tails and use them in a multitude of comic situations. Sullivan sued, and Terry’s cat went from being named Felix to Herman; Disney named his cat Julius. It is an important theme to Crafton, this concern whether a character is human or animal, and one can ultimately understand the need to categorize when one has to include so many wildly varying types of film.

The book is an enormous work, and Donald Crafton has got it right. It’s invaluable; that’s the only word I can muster for it. The book is invaluable. It’s as informative on the third read as it was on the first, and there’s a reason that all of the books mentioned in the third paragraph refer back to this book. It’s a big subject and is handled with seeming ease. The book reads easily; the author keeps your interest. This book is a corner stone for an entire section of the animation history section.

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If you’d like to see some silent animated films, I heartily recommend Tom Stathes‘ site where you’ll find a large number of films available. __________________
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A personal note. I had just finished reading this book, back when it came out, and was gifted with another copy from Bob Blechman. I’d done some favor for him, and the book was a small means of thanking me for it. I appreciated it, and I cherish the little Felix that Bob drew in the book for me.

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