Animated Cartoons: The Toy That Grew Up

Year Published: 1947

Creator: A F Films

Complete Record: The history of the animated cartoon from the traumatope through the zoetrope and praxinoscope. Traces the development of the animated cartoon from a nineteenth-century children's toy to modern Disney cartoons. Includes a complete animated show as it would have looked in the 1890's. ___________________________________ Opening scene: Horse and rider galloping in a field. As camera follows the horse in a curve, a second camera comes into view. This camera is being hand cranked. CU of the cranking action and mechanism. Camera is opened up. Cranking mechanism is visually accessible as a wheeled shutter spins. Cameraman takes out undeveloped film to show that the film with its sprocket perforations will have nothing on it until developed. VCU film next to cameraman's face. Cross fade to woman holding up same sized film that has been developed and reveals the pictures. Woman takes the film over to a moviola and loads the film. Shot is now MS: Woman sitting at projector. Next sequence of images is looking in the moviola eye piece as seeing what the woman is seeing. There is a single image of the horse and rider which can be viewed as a series of single images, or, through her use of the foot treadle gradually gaining speed until what was seen in the reality is now viewable on film. CU of treadle. CU woman removing film from the moviola. Cross fade to CU film being loaded in a projector in a movie house with audience. Film projected larger. Narrator tells us that we know that the basic principle of moving images depends upon an optical illusion. The scene changes to a darkened, late Victorian parlor where a magic lantern is set up for a family gathering and single images are being projected on a screen and illustionistically enlivened by the careful sliding in and out a cutout in front of the projector’s light. By blocking a part of the image, the horse’s legs look as if they are moving. CU of elongated projector lens and hand that moves the lever. The curtain that made the nineteenth-century room dark is pulled aside revealing a much earlier nineteenth-century family looking at a man demonstrating a viewing machine not unlike the magic lantern. The difference in moving images is in how the image is mechanically manipulated by the projectionist. A boy on a rocking horse comes from a child’s toy, the traumatope, a device invented by a British physicist Sir John Herschel. A twisted cord rapidly rotates a two-sided disk with a different image on each side. CU of device and motion is shown. MS shot of young boy making the device work. This visual trick is an optical illusion. Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (October 14, 1801 – September 15, 1883) was a Belgian physicist. He was the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image (1832). To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistoscope. The device consisted of two disks, one with small equidistant radial windows, through which the viewer could look, and another containing a sequence of images. When the two disks rotated at the correct speed, the synchronization of the windows and the images created an animated effect. The projection of stroboscopic photographs, creating the illusion of motion, eventually led to the development of cinema. There is shown an engraving portrait of Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau from a daguerreotype dated 1843. A human eye is shown. A model takes the place of the eye. This model is is taken apart to show where the image one sees is stored for a full 1/3 of a second. Footage of his experiment is shown to illustrate this scientific fact. A disk is notched on opposing sides. At the top notch, there is a lightbulb that is on and exposed. When the disk is spun around slowly, the light is on or off depending upon where the notch on the disk falls. At a certain speed of disk rotation, the light is seen to be continuously on. Victorian lady shown MS at her dressing table with the phenakistoscope (invented 1832) the disks and a handle. With CU, the disk’s engineering is shown. The disk has little openings all around the edge. When the disk is held to a mirror, the reflected spinning images seem to be moving. This is a good reconstruction of a barker at a fair. The point is made that many gadgets based on the phenakistoscope were made. Reconstructed scene LS and MS of vendor at fair or market place selling to a boy, a man, and a woman. The close by sign reads: “Tout l’amusement -- Jouets pour Etrennes Jeux de Societe et de Salon.” LS of passersby and MS of sign. Crowd gathers, and proprietor of booth demonstrates the spinning upright device and its interchangeable strips with sequenced series of movements. He says (in French) it is another of the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century; the greatest invention of all times. POV what individuals in the crowd are seeing. CU of how the device works. Crowd examines one of the strips that is put into this version of a phenakistoscope. Barker urges them to buy it now. Forty years later, Charles-Emile Reynaud, painter of slides for the magic lantern, saw the phenakistoscope. The idea of static images being able to convey movement fascinated and soon obsessed him for the rest of his life. LS and MS Reynaud his atelier and CU of his hands as he measures out drawings. He invented his own version of the phenakistoscope that he called the praxinoscope, an animation system using loops of 12 pictures. This device, was a more sophisticated version of the zoetrope. It used the same basic mechanism of a strip of images placed on the inside of a spinning cylinder, but instead of viewing it through slits, it was viewed in a series of small, stationary mirrors around the inside of the cylinder, so that the animation would stay in place, and provide a clearer image and better quality. There is a long sequence of the operating praxinoscope. Reynaud also developed a larger version of the praxinoscope that could be projected onto a screen, called the Théâtre Optique by which the viewer watched movement on a mirror set inside the spinning body of the machine. Reynaud, called the inventor of modern animation, started using white images on a black background. Combing this with painted slides he could create images moving on any kind of background. There is footage of how this device worked with the background. There is footage of the precursor of the praxinoscope. Théâtre Optique system by which the audience looks into a device that has a little proscenium arch like a theater. MS and CU of re-enactor changing the scenery and strips to start another show. The earlier strips only lasted twelve minutes, but Reynaud took the idea further. LS of Reynaud re-enactor using a larger projection to a seated audience using a system of mirrors and lights. MS and CU demonstrating exactly how this device worked. On October 28, 1892 at Musée Grévin in Paris, France he exhibited animations consisting of loops of about 500 frames, using his Théâtre Optique system - similar in principle to a modern film projector. A second lantern projects the background. LS of how this works. The moving images can be stopped and rolled backward. These animations were life-sized and the stories they told lasted 15 minutes. He called these longer works “pantomimes Lumineuses.” He publicly exhibited these ‘cartoons’ in Paris theaters that catered to olio acts. Late nineteenth-century audience at one of Reynaud’s showings. Actor in Reynaud’s primitive projection booth. Film is accompanied by piano player who is next to Reynaud as he turns the main devices in his projection machine. Film shows the setting up of the Theatre Optique. He made seven complete shows (each consisting of several projections). There is a complete showing of one of these films with bathers.