Animation, as a cinematic medium, does not begin and end with Walt Disney. He did not create the concept; truth be told, on his own merits, he was not even all that great of an artist. Instead, what Disney had was vision—the vision that animated cartoons could be something greater than mere novelty. He was not the only person to have this idea; since the very beginnings of film, there had been men and women intrigued by the possibilities presented by this new innovation. But unlike most of his predecessors, Disney was a true showman, with an incisive (some might say “ruthlessly single-minded”) ability to know what people wanted to see on the screen, and in his hands, animation became not only a viable cinematic form, but a highly marketable one as well.

It’s important to begin any discussion about the history of animation with its biggest name, if only to debunk the popular myth that Disney was the so-called “inventor” of animated film. While the Disney brand remains arguably the most ubiquitous source of animation today, the roots of animation in the movies run much, much deeper, to the days when film was something novel and untested. Indeed, there is no single figure to which we can point as the “creator” of the animated medium; the form developed over the years through the work of a number of artists in different parts of the world. The earliest filmmakers dabbled in various forms of animation, from the animated fantasies of Georges Méliès (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902) and Émile Cohl (Fantasmagorie, 1908) in France to the “lightning sketches” born from vaudeville routines and transferred to the screen by Americans J. Stuart Blackton and Winsor McCay.

Several pioneers in the field of animation began their careers in journalism, crafting editorial cartoons or weekly comic strips in a variety of newspapers (work which would, in many cases, provide the artists with ample material for the screen). Blackton and McCay were two of these; in fact, it was Blackton’s job as a reporter/staff artist that led him to discover the possibilities of filmmaking, when he journeyed to Menlo Park to interview Thomas Edison and became so fascinated by the process that he purchased one of Edison’s Vitascope projectors. Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, Blackton crafted several influential pieces of short animation, most notably Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906), a patchwork of live-action, sleight-of-hand, cut-out animation, puppetry, and stop-motion that is generally considered to be the first truly “animated” film.

Blackton’s ingenuity paved the way for McCay, an incredibly popular comic strip artist whose work remains significant even today. It is impossible to overstate McCay’s influence on the development of animation as pure art form; there is a reason many animation scholars refer to McCay as the “Father of Animation,” for it was he who almost single-handedly set the stage for Disney and his contemporaries by creating a series of groundbreaking, intriguing animated shorts that were remarkable for their sheer skill and bountiful imagination. In 1911, McCay teamed up with Blackton to present a brief animated segment based on the characters from his weekly strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. Its success led to the creation of three particularly influential animated shorts: How a Mosquito Operates (1912); Gertie the Dinosaur (1914); and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918). All three cartoons combined seamless movement with personality and storytelling; Mosquito and Gertie demonstrate the first instances of characters that display a definite, individualized persona, while Lusitania is a highly-effective form of animated propaganda that ably tugs at the heartstrings while inciting anger at the offenses of World War I-era Germany.


In his later years, as the next generation of cartoonists paid homage to him, McCay bemoaned the commercialization of animation. ”Animation should be an art—that is how I conceived it,” he stated in 1927, “but as I see what you fellows have done with it is making it into a trade … not an art, but a trade.” His issue, however, was not just with those who had followed in his footsteps; for even in the midst of McCay’s greatest success, he was faced with those who did not view the art of animation with quite the same reverence as he. John Randolph Bray, founder of early animation studio Bray Productions, was one such figure. Bray, who also began his cartooning career crafting newspaper comic strips, produced several well-received series of animated shorts, including Colonel Heeza Liar (Bray’s own creation) and Bobby Bumps (the brainchild of Bray’s business partner, Earl Hurd). But Bray—like Disney after him—knew that animation could be big, and he was determined to make money from his creations (like Disney, Bray was also fairly litigious—at one point, he sued McCay for copyright infringement, even though McCay began animating long before Bray ever did). His studio—one of the first ever founded, and the first one to be incorporated—became a veritable animation factory: Bray employed several units of animators, all of which worked concurrently on the different series so as to produce as many cartoons in the shortest time possible. Their efforts were helped greatly by Bray and Hurd’s innovative cel animation process; whereas McCay and others had been forced to redraw the backgrounds of their cartoons on every individual frame (which added up to hundreds upon hundreds of drawings per short), cels allowed artists to reutilize the same backgrounds from shot to shot, saving time and money. The Bray production model became the backbone of the fledgling animation industry, setting the stage for the studios to come.

It is undeniable that Bray was adept at finding talent. At one time or another early in their careers, a number of well-known figures from the world of animation passed through Bray’s doors, many of whom went on to found their own studios. Paul Terry, the creator of the Terrytoons series, was one of these animators. Under the auspices of Bray, Terry created the animated adventures of the hapless old Farmer Al Falfa, producing nearly a dozen shorts before leaving the studio. In 1920, Terry founded Fables Studios, through which he continued the Al Falfa series while also producing a series of adaptation of Aesop’s tales. One of the Al Falfa cartoons, 1928’s Dinner Time, was Terry’s first experiment with sound-synchronization, and predates Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie by more than a month (though it was not nearly as successful as the competition, nor was it as precisely synched as Disney’s toon). While Terry’s animated shorts never reached the same level of popularity as those of many of his contemporaries, his Terrytoons banner eventually gave rise to such well-liked characters as Heckle and Jeckle and Mighty Mouse, and found great success in the early years of television.

Another former Bray employee, Max Fleischer, was an innovator in his own right. He developed the Rotoscope, a method for tracing live-action figures in order to give animated characters a more realistic sense of movement. Fleischer’s brother, Dave, dressed up as a clown and was filmed frolicking around; Max then traced over the frames of Dave’s movements, giving birth to a character he named Koko the Clown. Koko starred in a series called Out of the Inkwell, which ultimately ran for more than a decade, and the Fleischers founded their own studio, forming a distribution deal with Paramount. Along with the Inkwell series, the studio also produced a number of sing-along shorts called Song Car-Tunes, a series of musical cartoons for which Max created the onscreen bouncing ball so audience members could follow along with the lyrics. Eventually, the Fleischer stable of characters grew to include the sexy Betty Boop in 1930; the animated adventures of the comic strip Popeye the Sailor in 1933; and the big-screen adaptation of the immensely popular Superman comic book series in 1941. The Fleischers also produced two feature-length films—Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941), though neither was an overwhelming success—before losing control of their own studio to Paramount in 1942.

Paramount was not the only major studio getting into the animation game. In 1930, Warner Bros. dipped a toe into the field with its brand-new Looney Tunes series, soon followed by a similar companion series, Merrie Melodies, a year later (both of which were initially intended to highlight the extensive Warner music catalog). The major star of these early shorts was Bosko, a broad blackface caricature; he appeared in over thirty shorts before his creators, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, left for MGM, taking Bosko with them. In the wake of their departure, Warner animation foundered for a couple of years, but by 1936, producer Leon Schlesinger had begun to put together an immensely talented crew of animators whose irreverent brilliance would test the limits of what animation could do. Led by “Tex” Avery, the Warner boys—among them animators Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, and Bob Clampett, as well as voice artist Mel Blanc—changed the face and the focus of animation. In their ramshackle bungalow on the Warner lot, which the animators not-so-affectionately deemed “Termite Terrace,” creative anarchy reigned, resulting in some of the most entertaining and influential cartoons ever produced. Their characters were cheeky and bold, the style fast-paced and more adult than that of their competitors. Avery stepped in and plucked Porky Pig from relative obscurity, making him the studio’s first animated star; later, he created Bugs Bunny, the wisecracking smartass to beat all smartasses, and the unrepentantly greedy screwball Daffy Duck. As the 1930s came to a close, the Warner cartoons were the biggest threat to the dominance of the Disney animation machine—a rivalry that would continue well into the 1940s and beyond.

By this time, for his part, Walt Disney was on a roll. After a dubious start in Kansas City, where he founded the Laugh-O-Gram studios in 1922 (a venture that went bankrupt after two years and nine shorts), Disney moved to Hollywood and founded a self-named animation studio with his brother, Roy. With the help of longtime friend Ub Iwerks, Disney began producing a series of live-action/animated shorts based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The success of the resulting Alice Comedies, of which nearly five dozen were eventually filmed, paved the way for the Disney studio’s first original creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (a character who was actually created and animated by Iwerks), in 1927. But a year later, Universal, the distributor for the Oswald shorts, exercised its rights to the character, essentially forcing Disney to give up ownership of the character (Universal’s production of Oswald cartoons continued, under the supervision of eventual Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz, until 1938).

In the wake of losing Oswald, Disney was determined to never lose control of one of his products again. With Iwerks, he created a new flagship character, an anthropomorphic mouse named Mickey. With Mickey’s third cartoon, the aforementioned Steamboat Willie (1928), a phenomenon was born. Animated entirely by Iwerks, the synchronized-sound cartoon was an absolute smash. Throughout the 1930s, Mickey and his many friends—his girlfriend Minnie, the cantankerous Donald Duck, the appropriately-named Goofy, and his faithful pup Pluto, among others—ruled the animated roost in a series of unbelievably popular cartoons. Additionally, Walt and company developed a series of animated shorts set to music, called the Silly Symphonies. These cartoons, two-thirds of which utilized the three-strip Technicolor process (for which Disney held an exclusive contract for several years), were also greatly popular with both audiences and critics; among the most memorable titles in the series are The Skeleton Dance (1929—the first Symphony produced), Flowers and Trees (1932—the first produced in Technicolor, and winner of the first Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject), and Three Little Pigs (1933—another Oscar winner).

Despite the success of his cartoons, Disney had his sights set somewhat higher. He longed to produce a feature-length animated film. It was not a wholly original notion; German director Lotte Reiniger utilized a unique (and gorgeous) type of silhouette animation to great effect in 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which remains the oldest surviving feature-length animated film. Still, it was an idea that had yet to materialize in Hollywood. And Disney had just the right property in mind—a full-length Alice in Wonderland. His original idea was to make a live-action/animated hybrid—similar to the Alice Comedies—starring Mary Pickford as the title character. But when Paramount released its own star-studded Alice film in 1933, Disney turned his attention to the fairy tale Snow White (though the studio did eventually release a fully-animated Alice feature in 1951). Production on the film took over three years, and many in Hollywood deemed the venture “Disney’s Folly.” But he proved the critics wrong when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became an instant hit upon its release in 1937. Suddenly, every studio in Hollywood was eager to produce its own feature-length animated film. But none reached quite the same heights as the Disney studio, which utterly dominated feature animation until the latter half of the century.

These are merely a scant few of the artists, directors, and producers who pioneered the field of animation in its earliest years. As 1940 took the art form into the start of its fourth cinematic decade, new generations of animators were taking up the mantle, creating some of the most enduring and treasured characters and cartoons ever produced. The 40s saw Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Chip ‘n’ Dale, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, Woody Woodpecker, Superman, and a host of other cartoon favorites emerge. But every single one of those characters has its roots in grainy, flickering, simplistic black-and-white sketches of morphing faces, a playful dinosaur, a mischievous little boy, a dancing clown. To forget those roots, or to dismiss these early cartoons as crude, unpolished, or primitive in comparison to their more modern counterparts, pays a grave disservice to the sometimes-forgotten men and women who built the art of animation from the ground up, through copious sweat, cramped hands, and intensive, heartfelt, eye-straining labor, all for the joy of making magic happen on the screen.

Brandie Ashe no longer eats cold cereal while wearing footy pajamas…but does maintain a love for all things animated. She is one of four passionate classic film authors at True Classics.