Pinocchio (1940)

d. Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen / USA / 88 mins.


Many argue Pinocchio is as close as Walt Disney came to technical perfection, and, although it is not my favorite film of his, I find it difficult to disagree. Of all the animated features he produced, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938 to The Jungle Book in 1967, the art of Pinocchio feels the most alive. Its location in the canon — as Disney's second animated narrative feature, released the same year as his first avant-garde film, Fantasia — seems to contribute to this sense. The excitement of feature animation hadn't yet become standardized, and the exuberance of his animation crew (which had honed its skills on Disney's Silly Symphonies and ultimately Snow White) is still radiates. Now remastered in preparation for its seventieth anniversary, it looks crisp and new. The artwork pops from its careful detail, and patented multi-plane camera produces its best work here, creating an illusion of depth that is almost as convincing as it is visually stunning.

They still make films this beautiful, but rarely do they animated films this frightening. Its parable is as subtle as its carnivorous whale: "good" boys get respect and love and become something, "bad" boys are cast out, isolated, punished, abused, and transformed into donkeys. Pinocchio (voiced by Dickie Jones) is a marionette made by the kindly and lonely old Gepetto (voiced by Christian Rub), who longs for the wooden boy to be flesh and blood, someone to love and someone who will love in return. Then, as these things are wont to happen in the world of animation, the Blue Fairy visits and anthropomorphizes the toy, giving him the chance at experiencing life and the opportunity to become a real boy. As a guide he has Jiminy Cricket (voiced by the magnificent Cliff Edwards), his insectoid and de facto conscience. But Pinocchio soon finds himself in the hands of villains.

Naturally in this realm we're stretching the limits of credulity and lacks almost any semblance of realism. So how does Pinocchio manage to still be disturbing? I think the answer lies in the boy's anxiety-inducing innocence. Even when he is lured by a walking-talking fox named Honest John and put into the hands of a Russian sideshow tyrant, he's all smiles. Pinocchio's famous number "I've Got No Strings" — performed on the sideshow where he dances with other puppets — is done with a smile. Sure, he's confused a little bit and very curious, but the film wisely (and nervously, for me) never imbues its character with any adult characteristics; the mission is to become a real boy. Pinocchio only realizes how much danger he is on until he is locked in a cage hanging from the ceiling. It helps too that Jones, the voice of Pinocchio, was only thirteen at the time, his light and cheery falsetto layered gently in the background of otherwise bizarre and suggestive imagery, which, let's not forget, is unsettling on its own. The bad children on Pleasure Island, who smoke and drink and gamble, are transformed into donkeys, stripped of their ability to speak and are eventually put to work on the salt mines. Even as an adult, it can give a chill.

When Pinocchio won Best Score and Best Original Song at the 1941 Academy Awards, it was the first animated film to win in a competitive category. It has truly wonderful songs — there isn't a dud in the bunch — and no doubt that comes from the fact that the film is economical with its music. Although it's 90 minutes long, there are only five songs in Pinocchio (and two reprises). All of them are catchy and appropriate to the film, and Disney front-loads them — we make our way through all five songs before plot of Pinocchio-gone-missing actually begins. They're all well known today: the lovely "When You Wish Upon a Star," frequently covered but never as tender as when Edwards sang it; Gepetto's "Little Wooden Head," Jiminy's "Give a Little Whistle," the aforementioned "I've Got No Strings," and Honest John's snappy "Hi Diddle Lee Dee (An Actor's Life For Me)."

Ironically, for all its stranger and unexpectedly twisted elements, Pinocchio is still often dismissed for sentimentalizing the sketches of Italian writer Carlo Collodi, whose fairy tales of a boy marionette became collected as the book The Adventures of Pinocchio. It's undeniable that the film has heaping spoonfuls of sugar in traditional Disney fashion, but the effect is remarkably balanced. One of Disney's purest talents (in addition to his visionary genius and knack for selecting engaging stories) is a striking sense of pace. If you'd asked me years ago what I thought of Pinocchio (or Snow White or many of the other golden age films), I'd have told you it was boring. Half-hour television might be to blame for why I remember these slim animated features as overly long, but when you enter adulthood, it's nearly impossible not to feel how fast the story gets underway. I've been watching animated films literally since I was an infant, but I was well into my teen years before I truly began to appreciate them. Re-watching Pinocchio, boring was the furthest thought from my mind. The film is slim, yes; stunning yes; terrifying, yes; but hardly boring.

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How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

d. Chuck Jones / USA / 26 mins.


Theodore Geisel and Charles Martin Jones – today better known respectively as Dr. Seuss and Chuck – were a wicked force in combination. Theirs was not a long-standing partnership, like other illustrators and animators, but their work together bears the best hallmarks of each. None is more popular or more widely known than their 1966 collaboration on the half-hour television special of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which the two adapted from Seuss's book of the same name.

In many respects, The Grinch is the yang to the yin of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The latter, adapted by Bill Melendez and Charles Schulz from Schulz's Peanuts comic strip, premiered only one year earlier. Both are about characters who discover the holidays are more valuable than commercialism and mere presents and decorations. Both brought together a popular illustrator with a popular animator, but they take decidedly different routes to acquiring their hearts. Charlie Brown embraces the literal and biblical meaning of Christmas and disinfects the commercialism away while reaching a satisfying middle ground of reason-for-the-season happiness and kindness. The Grinch is bathed in a surreal and mythical world of Whos and Grinches (or rather, one Grinch and a dog). The Whos are the townspeople in a valley below a mountaintop where the Grinch lives, and all we need to know for the special to have any resonance is that the Whos love Christmas and Grinch can't stand it. He is so anti-Christmas that he plots to steal it from them and spoil their morning joy, until his plan is rendered obsolete by their joy in spite of his thievery. The plot is absent any religiosity whatsoever but not missing an iota of the purity in kindness and heart that Christmas is meant to inspire. In many ways, the Whos gathering around the town tree – joining hands, and singing "Fahoo Foray" – is as arresting to the senses in its wondrous simplicity as Linus's tender and earnest rendition of the Gospel of Luke.

Both specials are great, but The Grinch is better. In addition to the remarkable poetry of Seuss's language and the incomparable voice-over by Boris Karloff, each frame brims with the endless possibilities of Jones's imagination. Like Seuss's writing, which contains no extraneous lines, the art produced and supervised by Jones is equally secure in its exact place. No matter how arbitrary something may seem, time and time again The Grinch proves itself to be an entire feast for the eyes. Perhaps it would not be fair to say Jones is the most influential animator of the twentieth century (the competition is wondrous and large), but he is certainly among the best, and this special – today as widely seen, circulated, and parodied as his contributions to the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts at Warner Bros. – is a golden testament to his skill as a director. The still drawings are as finely crafted as the animation (the "stealing" of Christmas is the most pleasurable aspect of the special), and it's in the seamless hybrid of the Grinch as both a sort-of animal and a sort-of human that brings him to life. He is unseemly but elegant, slithering and disgustingly green but with impeccable posture.

Only three voices get spotlight treatment, and the most prominent of those is Karloff, who earned his immortality in the Universal horror films of the 1930s. His textured baritone voice is the perfect as both the narrator and the Grinch. It is not widely known that Karloff didn't sing the famous song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," which was actually performed by Thurl Ravenscroft (known better as the voice of Tony the Tiger in Kellogg's television commercials). Bizarrely, Ravenscroft received no on-screen credit for his singing, so it was as unknown then as it is today, which led to Seuss personally sending letters to newspaper columnists so Ravenscroft would get his due. June Foray, a veteran voice artist who would contribute to Hanna-Barbara cartoons among others, has a small part as the voice of Cindy Lou Who.

Seuss's 1957 book and the 1966 special with Jones are both mainstays in our culture, certainly popular around Christmastime as a holiday tradition but entertaining as twisted parables any day of the year, much like Frank Capra's timeless (and season-less) classic It's a Wonderful Life. His literary output totaled more than 60 books, which collectively have sold more than 220 million copies worldwide. As far as English-speaking peoples are concerned, I'd wager a vast majority of men, women, and children are familiar with the man's works, even if inadvertently so. The word grinch, as any dictionary will tell you, is defined as "one who spoils the pleasure of others" and its etymology can be traced directly back to its first usage, in Seuss's 1957 book, where he made-up the word that has become so popular it is now wholly generic.

I referred above to Seuss's writing as poetry, which might make a few of my poet friends cringe, but as a writer, he employed the rigorous mechanics and tools of poetry as skillfully and as lyrically as anyone else writing in the twentieth century. His work is ostensibly for children, but perhaps those who reap the most intellectual pleasure from it are adults. Seuss made-up words left and right, but his work can be scanned for precise meter and rhythm, and heaven knows he receives much more circulation than most American poets outside Robert Frost. Seuss's writing is concise and compact, and like most poetry, doesn't withstand the addition of more words or ideas than it already contains; this is why Seuss's works translate the best in the short-film format and explains why so many feature-length adaptations of his work fail so miserably. How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a rare treasure because it is such a lively and brilliant adaptation of material that was already so lively and brilliant. As simple as that sounds, it's damn near impossible to pull off. But then again, Seuss and Jones together are like lightning striking twice.

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A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

d. Bill Melendez / USA / 25 mins.


This holiday season is the first airing of the Americana masterwork A Charlie Brown Christmas since the death of its animator and director, Bill Melendez, who passed away in September at age 91. Melendez was the only animator trusted by Charles Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, and he worked in collaboration with Schulz on bringing Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, and all the rest to life starting from 1959 through the cartoonist's death in 2000.

Aimed primarily at children (at least that's what it'd have you except), the story is deceptively straightforward. Charlie Brown, in a holiday malaise, confides in his friend Linus that he doesn't understand the cheerfulness of the season. After he finds himself appointed the director of the school Christmas pageant – and selects a weak, barren and natural tree instead of a neon-pink industrial-strength aluminum decoration – his cynicism at the commercialization of the holiday spills over the edge. Christmas seems without a point until Linus volunteers to explain the meaning of the holiday with a verbatim quotation from the Gospel of Luke to show "what Christmas is all about."

Reportedly Melendez thought Linus's reading of the New Testament was too strong. America was still in the middle of the Warren Court's broadly sweeping proclamations of equal rights and liberalism (which was absolutely correct, in my opinion), and school-sponsored prayer and Bible study had just been found unconstitutional in the three years before A Charlie Brown Christmas aired. Schulz's famous response to Melendez's concern was: "Bill, if we don't do it, then who will?" And it's difficult not to be swayed by Schulz's gentle logic. A Charlie Brown Christmas, as its title suggests, is an unabashed Christmas special; there isn't anything all-inclusive about the holidays here, and to a degree there's a fair amount of joy in that. The special doesn't try to be anything other than a clear and honest explanation of Christmas, referring to the source material requisitely and unblinkingly. Yet, the religion aspect doesn't drown anything out; if anything, it evens the playing field. Schulz wasn't looking for any converts to a particular creed, only converts to a particular attitude: commercialization changes things, often in the direction that we lose sight of the intended meaning. (The idea can be extended to almost any federal holiday in the United States, whether religious in origin or not.)

With the knowledge of Melendez's death upfront on my mind, I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas with an abiding respect for how something so technically simple and straightforward can become something so extraordinary. The sapling Christmas tree Charlie Brown selects is like a metaphor for the special painted into itself; the show is unadorned and on-point with its astute pillory of the commercialization of the holidays, and let's not forget this is perhaps the most definitive statement on that fact. (Although to be fair, the special has an ironically checkered relationship to commercialization, including brief sections that have since been removed that prominently featured the logo of its corporate sponsor, Coca-Cola.)

Melendez's career was devoted to animation, from his initial hiring into Walt Disney's team in 1938, where he contributed to Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo. After he parted ways with Disney over a union dispute, he joined Leon Schlesinger's animation team at Warner Bros., where he produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first full-length Peanuts special and Melendez's first animated film as a director (it spawned dozens of other Peanuts programs). Schulz wrote the script with his characteristic austerity and optimism, and the program won an Emmy Award and the George Foster Peabody Award.

The score, composed and jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi and performed by his trio, is almost as famous as the special itself and should be appreciated separate from the animation. The soundtrack album is a mainstay at my house around the holidays, and it's one of the only holiday albums I can bear to hear repeated. (Tracks include renditions of "O Tannenbaum," "What Child Is This?" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." Guaraldi's composition "Linus and Lucy," which would become known widely as the theme song to the Peanuts animated specials, is one of the only non-holiday related songs on the album.) Having not seen A Charlie Brown Christmas for many years, I was struck on a recent viewing at how cropped and short the score is within the half-hour running length. It seems to shuffle from incomplete song to incomplete song like an iPod fresh from the bathtub.

Given its immense cultural status and tremendous success, it almost goes without saying that CBS network executives believed in 1965 it was going to be a flop. (These sorts of great things are always "doomed to fail.") I don't think anyone at CBS programming would have predicted we'd still be watching a simple half-hour special more than forty years after its initial airing. I enjoy A Charlie Brown Christmas now as an adult more than I ever did as a child; the awe is still there, the silly humor of Snoopy and the advanced sophistication of holiday burnout and the gentle reminder that it should instead be a time for peace. It's enough to make you believe there's something powerful at play here, something at least more powerful than mere nostalgia.

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

d. David Hand / USA / 84 mins.


There are some films that are simply better when you know the whole story behind them. Citizen Kane is more thrilling when you realize RKO basically gave Orson Welles the keys to the studio. Singin' in the Rain is more magical when you learn all but a few of the songs existed before the film and MGM just wanted a musical, any musical, constructed around them. Casablanca is more endearing when you hear that everyone on the set thought it was going to be just another war-time film.

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – the first feature-length animated movie – is among those films that becomes more remarkable when you discover its story: that 750 animators worked on it for three years; that other studios nicknamed it "Disney's Folly" before it hit theaters; that critics thought 84 minutes would be too long for an animated picture and that Technicolor, an investment which had required Disney to mortgage his house, would hurt people's eyes over such a sustained amount of time. The two people most quoted in regard to the film are Disney's wife Lillian and Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Lillian Disney famously said, "No one's ever gonna pay a dime to see a dwarf picture." Eisenstein famously proclaimed it the "greatest movie ever made."

Today we know one of these is at least false; for two years Snow White reigned as the highest grossing film of all time, until the release of Gone with the Wind. To the matter of Eisenstein, well, he's certainly entitled to his opinion (circa 1937, of course), but a few movies have been released since then. Snow White is much more than a mere historical footnote, though. There are some films that are great because their content and construction make them so, and there are some films that are great because they were the first of their kind. Snow White, happily, is both.

As with most animated movies, you may have seen it as a child but you haven't really seen it until you're an adult. Snow White is not all singing and smiles; there are moments of darkness and horror, stupendous examples of the broad range of art that Disney's team was capable of producing. The film might become boring if it were all whistling birds and bumbling dwarves, but it is interspersed with a wicked underworld where trees reach out (no doubt an influence on The Wizard of Oz) and vultures follow the evil queen. Why did I not remember the Queen's cold-blooded look when she tells one of her guards to take Snow White into the woods, murder the girl, and bring back her heart in a small box? Probably because the studio would love you to remember only the happiness, the sing-songy parts, which is a shame because the studio sells short Disney's complex and multifaceted vision that produced a film for all audience members.

If the film seems simple today, it's because of a cynical retro-assessment. I wouldn't call it simple as much as I would call it familiar. Many of the archetypes of animation's were born within these frames – from heroine's innocence and the exaggerated dwarf personalities to the catchy songs that advanced the plot rather than distract. Not to mention the poisoned apple, the magic mirror, the valiant prince, and the evil stepmother, who is perhaps the most dynamic character in the entire film. (She looks more dynamic, too: more defined facial features, livelier eyes, careful movements, a visually engaging wardrobe. However, her unmitigated evil and persecution of Snow White ushered in another one of Disney's tropes, much more negative than others: the weak flower of a girl who needs saving.)

It's important to remember that genius breeds imitation, which in turn breeds familiarity. From the technical innovations to the character development and even the basic story structure, Snow White has been the spring from which all other animated films have flown. There are better animated films in my opinion – Beauty and the Beast, most of the Pixar movies, and maybe even Fantasia, Disney's journey into the avant-garde. They have all benefited from a pitch-perfect example. It's enough to make one admit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is still among the fairest of them all.

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Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies (1929-1939)

d. Ub Iwerks, Burton Gillett, Wilfred Jackson, David Hand / USA / Ten selected shorts, 84 mins.


Walt Disney could have gone the easy way. Mickey Mouse was a wildly successful character, and he could stuck with the profit-yielding formula. But he was a visionary who rarely satisfied (as clichéd as it sounds, it's still true). As his studio made Mickey Mouse cartoons, Disney also turned his attention to a new series – dubbed "Silly Symphonies." They were glorious experiments, short animated trial balloons if you will, each building upon the foundation laid by the previous. The ten-year run of Silly Symphonies pushed the skill of his animators, the imagination of his writers, the possibilities of the technology, and the judgment of the audience to new realms, all toward Disney's ultimate goal: a full-length animated movie (realized in 1937 with the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).

All together, there were 75 short films made under the banner Silly Symphonies – not all of them great. Seven won Academy Awards for Short Animated Film, including the first award ever given in the category. The studio dominated the category for six consecutive years. The best of the series are the groundbreaking ones and the surprising ones, whose influence continues to be felt all the way through to today's television cartoons – shorts like Ub Iwerks's The Skeleton Dance, the brilliant antics of The Tortoise and the Hare, the technological wonder of Flowers and Trees, and beautifully crafted art of The Old Mill.

Considering its grim sense of humor and delightfully dark subject matter, The Skeleton Dance (1929) might seem today a genuinely odd choice for the first of these Disney's shorts. After all, we have come to associate the Disney brand with wholesome and bubbly entertainment, yet lest we forget the disturbing elements of Disney's first films – the forest in Snow White, the underworld of Fantasia, the imprisonment of Dumbo's mother. The subject matter was a perfect fit for Iwerks's distinctive style of animation in the early Disney shorts. His thick and smooth lines, generous use of black ink, and comically bulbous character bodies are today as instantaneously recognizable as Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's post-impressionist swirls, or Hopper's isolated people. Iwerks was a tremendously efficient animator, rumored to have drawn Disney's Steamboat Willie by himself in only two weeks (or 600 to 700 drawings per day).

The Three Little Pigs (1933) proved to be the most popular of the shorts, with theaters running it alone several times per day. Adapted from the tale of the same name, the short hit the screen at the right time in American culture: the Great Depression was under way, World War II was coming to a boil in Europe, and audiences were looking for relief. "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" was the song two of the pigs sing as they build their shaky homes, and it became an accidental anthem in the days following Franklin Roosevelt's proclamation that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The short is notable, too, for bringing to life the ignorant stereotypes pervasive in Hollywood at the time: in the initial version of the short, the Big Bad Wolf appears the brick house dressed as a Jewish peddler. (Today the image has been excised from available copies, dressing the wolf instead as a Fuller Brush salesman.) The same cultural ignorance can be found in many other Silly Symphonies, including the stereotypical depiction of a black woman in Three Orphan Kittens (1935). Kittens seems to be the most superficial upon first glance, but it is one of the best in terms of developing the techniques of great animation: a powerful blizzard allowed the animators to practice drawing the weather; crystal clear reflections of the kittens on a shiny kitchen floor; and attempts at creating movable depictions of three-dimensional objects (instead of remaining static, a couch "twists" as real object would when a kitten runs past).

As the series continued, the animators grew in talent and skill. Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first film ever produced in three-strip Technicolor, an enormous visual leap in terms of developing color films. Disney gambled shrewdly on Technicolor and its inventor, and succeeded wildly. He signed an agreement with the inventor that allowed he and he alone to produce exclusively the only Technicolor shorts for the first three years. Today the film looks commonplace (we're so used to color), but its tender story – of two trees in love, fighting back an evil tree wishing to set the forest on fire – is still charming and entertaining. The Goddess of Spring (1934) was Disney's first attempt at actual human characters. Adapted from the Greek myth of Persephone, the beautiful girl travels with Hades on a disturbing and imaginative journey into the underworld.

Like The Three Little Pigs and The Goddess of Spring, some of the more successful shorts incorporated old fables and set the standard for animated adaptations. Aesop would be paid homage to in The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934), where a carefree grasshopper fiddles his way through happiness while proclaiming the "world owes me a livin'." (The grasshopper's voice is by the same man who would forever be remembered as the voice of Goofy.) The Tortoise and the Hare (1935) and its sequel, Toby Tortoise Returns (1936), reproduce Aesop's tale more effectively, with the famed race in the former and a witty boxing match in the latter.

In addition to their stories, both films were significant technological advancements, too. In supplemental features to the DVD release of the Silly Symphonies, Leonard Maltin notes The Grasshopper and the Ants used color as an actual component to tell a story, and The Tortoise and the Hare marked Disney's first attempts at depicting animated speed and giving its characters postures and actions that define their personalities. (Tex Avery admitted Max Hare from the latter film greatly influenced the development of Bugs Bunny.) Opposite the long line of adaptations, Music Land (1935) is one of the best original stories told. Riffing on Romeo and Juliet and the disapproval of jazz by stodgy old people in the 1930s, the short depicts a battle raging between two kingdoms – classical music and jazz music – when a violin and a saxophone fall in love.

From a technical standpoint, The Old Mill (1937) might be the most impressive of the Silly Symphonies. Its story is nearly nonexistent, taking a backseat to its atmosphere. Animals inhabit an abandoned mill standing serenely in the middle of a field and next to a pond, but when a harsh storm blows in, we watch how the animals take cover and protect themselves. The real star of the short is the multiplane camera, utilized and perfected here for the first time by Disney. (The multiplane camera gives a flat piece of animation unmistakable depth by moving several layers of art simultaneously.)

Disney's studio made a few more Silly Symphonies after The Old Mill, but the series was capped in 1939, ten years and seven Oscars after its debut. By that point Disney and his animators had learned the tools necessary to begin producing full-length animated features. They're prized for their experimentation, yes, but let's not forget how joyfully entertaining they also are.

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Steamboat Willie (1928)

d. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks / USA / 8 mins.


The near-misses and colossal failures of history are endlessly fascinating, and by that standard the story of Bert Glennon's 1928 independent film Gang War is the stuff of film legend. The movie had an all-star cast (including Olive Borden and the last performance of Jack Pickford, respectively playing the roles of a dancer and a saxophonist caught in the midst of a gang-related turf war). It was originally meant to be a silent feature, but synchronized sound – at that point, still a relatively new technical advancement – was added before it hit the screen. It might have been something big, but when it opened, reaction was rather flat. To make matters worse for those involved, in November 1928 a cartoon from a struggling entrepreneur would be attached to Gang War for a two-week screening at the Colony Theater in New York City. In two weeks Gang War had been completely eclipsed by the eight-minute cartoon that preceded it, and the film began its long descent into obscure cocktail party trivia.

It was not just any cartoon, mind you. Steamboat Willie, the labor of love from entrepreneur Walt Disney and animator Ub Iwerks, revolutionized animation and put the near-bankrupt Disney on the map. It introduced the public to the character Mickey Mouse and was the first cartoon in history to have a post-produced soundtrack of dialogue (or what passes of Mickey's squeaking dialogue) and synchronized sound effects with orchestral music that mirrored the on-screen action. Response to Steamboat Willie during the initial two-week run was overwhelming; after its engagement at the Colony, it opened at the Roxy in New York, at that time the largest theater in the world.

The mythology about Steamboat Willie sometimes gets carried away, much to its studio's pleasure I assume. It was not Mickey Mouse's screen debut; Disney and Iwerks had made two failed silent cartoons before. Although it is regarded as the first animated short with synchronized sound, it wasn't the first time animation had any sound at all. (Max Fleischer, of Betty Boop and Popeye fame, had produced some failed cartoons with sound effects previously.) And yet the effect of Steamboat Willie probably can't be overstated. November 2008 will be be eighty years since it premiered, and it's still being watched, analyzed, canonized, and broadcast, not to mention possessing a recognizable style that pops against the superhighway of slick, stylized, rainbow-glow animation. (The shot of Mickey spinning the wheel and whistling might be the most recognizable shot in animation.) Steamboat Willie gave Disney the boost he needed. From there he would go into making more Mickey cartoons and create his Silly Symphonies line of shorts, which allowed his animators to experiment on enough techniques to sustain what would lead to the first feature-length animated film and beyond.

Disney is usually given all the credit for the short's success (indeed, credit for most of the films he shepherded although he was hardly ever the director), but it's important to recognize Ub Iwerks's role in the production. Iwerks first sketched Mickey as a character; he and Disney wrote and directed Steamboat Willie together; and Iwerks animated it almost exclusively on his own. The combination of all the elements – a likable character, creative risks, personalized animation, the desire avoid failure – all made the film so popular in its initial release and durable as a work of cinema. It's remained fresh and crisp, and the jokes are worth a smile or two if you don't mind some casual animal cruelty. (All in good fun, of course.) It's one of those occurrences when the film is important historically and yet works as entertainment.

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The Short Films of Winsor McCay (1911-1921)

d. Winsor McCay / USA / Four shorts, 40 mins.


We marvel at the beauty and precision of animation today, but we no longer see animation the way previous generations must have. To fresh eyes, drawn pictures actually moving must have inspired awe; at least that's the impression one gets from Winsor McCay's short animated films.

Before there was Chuck Jones or Walt Disney, there was Winsor McCay, a cartoonist and animator who didn't invent the form but sits atop the pyramid as its most profound influence. McCay's films showcase not only the man's talent at illustration and creation but how much time, energy, and production went into the cartoons. No fewer than two of his films have real-life footage McCay "taking on a bet" that he wins through animation; no fewer than two of his films involve neatly stack reams of paper, upon which are implied to be the real drawings, that come tumbling down in chaos.

The films are simple and often surreal. His first film, Little Nemo (1911), was based on his famous newspaper comic strip and is only fractionally animated. Characters are literally broken down in lines, drawn, and shown coming to life, bopping around in humorous ways. His 1918 propaganda short The Sinking of the Lusitania imagines what the frightful torpedoing of the British luxury liner must have been like. (Watching it today, it's easy to spot how the images of the steamliner sinking bear a strange foreshadowing to the CGI of James Camerson's Titanic.) One of his Dream of the Rarebit Fiend films from 1921 shows how cheesecake can make a man have twisted dreams in which insects do acrobatic feats.

McCay's crowning achievement, however, remains Gertie the Dinosaur, a 1914 short film that is believed to be the first animated film to establish a character (and not simply be little goofy creations skipping around for chuckles), a fact that would have profound implications to Disney two decades later. Gertie, justly tucked away in the National Film Registry, has its roots in the theme of the miracle of animation; McCay is shown with his friends at a museum where they observe the skeleton of a dinosaur, and he makes a wager that he can bring the bones to life. Gertie – a jovial sauropod– is his animated meal ticket. Gertie lumbers around, eats rocks, gets embarrassed and has emotions, and teases a woolly mammoth named Jumbo (not the last time an elephant with the name Jumbo would be seen in animation). The cartoons are simplistic, but they're miniature feats of strength and ingenuity, perhaps more remarkable than the powerhouse Ub Iwerks, who drew all of his material alone more than a decade later. Just as one can watch A Trip to the Moon to appreciate Star Wars, or The Great Train Robbery to appreciate Red River, so should anyone who admires the art of animation take in McCay's short films for the history lesson.

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