After talking in detail about cartoons from the Golden Age of Animation from the great Studios (Disney, Warner Bros’, MGM, Fleischer), Yesterday’s Joe is back with his favourite animated clips by… the rest. These will be kind of throwaway posts, but nonetheless there’s a few interesting things to be found. First up is Charles Mintz’s animation studio, later named Screen Gems.
Mintz/Screen Gems
A few months before his death in 1939, Charles Mintz sold the studio to Columbia Pictures and the studio wasread more
Yesterday’s
Joe is back from yesterday to today, sharing some of his favourite cartoons
from the Golden Age of Animation. In this post I’m going to take a look at the
works of the Fleischer brothers for Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios. I
selected cartoons from the era post-Snow-White: from 1937-1949. As always, lots
of videos and pictures.
Fleischer Studios
Moustache = Max, glasses = Dave
What the hell is a Fleischer brother you ask? Well, Dave and Max Fleischer produced series of animated cartoons during the Golden Age of Animation.read more
Yesterday’s Joe is back, sharing some of his favourite cartoons from the Golden Age of Animation. This post will discuss Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation studio, and will mostly feature Tom and Jerry cartoon, post-Snow-White: from 1937-1949. As always, lots of videos, pictures and alot of attempts at being funny.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ’s Tom and Jerry
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer started distributing cartoons in 1930. They hired Ub Iwerks who produced a series with Flip the Frog (who?).
A fan’s subjective perspective on the early stages and evolution of traditional animation. It’s been a while since I’ve made my last post about animation, I’ve been sitting on this research for a while though. If there actually any returning visitors to this blog: I hope you can forgive my procrastinating ways.I promise I will be a better person soon. I just have to do this other thing first.Anyway: I ended up with 20+ pages of videos, so I’llread more
A fan’s subjective perspective on the early stages of animation history and the evolution of traditional animation. In part 2 of ‘The early stages of animation,’ I will talk about some famous cartoons by Disney, Fleischer Studios and others.
Early stages of animation: 1920-1937 – The rise of cartoons
3) Disney
America had a huge English-speaking market and more money to spend, so it makes sense that the biggest animation studios were founded there: Disney, Fleischer Studios, Warner Brothers Cartoons… I’m going to elaborate mostly on Disney, because they were simply the best for reasons I both can and can’t explain. There’s an observable quality difference between early Disney shorts and anything else from the same decade, but somehow they manage to make you feel involved with the characters and grip your attention. Even though Walt Disney seldomly animated himself anymore as years went by, his creative vision, drive and controlling nature shaped the way Disney’s animation would evolve. More about that further down and very possibly in a future post. Or maybe somewhere else, from a smarter person who knows what he’s talking about.
Early efforts
In 1923, Walt Disney founded a studio and started doing his own thing. Before he did some things (Laugh-o-grams). And then in his own studio, he did well, more of the same kind of things (Alice Comedies) . Oddly, in both videos a real live girl can be seen interacting with cartoon characters. I guess this was his way to introduce animation to the audience and attempt to involve them. They then tired of the mixed format and went on to full animation.
Disney introduced Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, as an answer to Felix the Cat and Fleischer’s Koko the Clown, and it looked amazing. For some reason, maybe because of this cartoon, animators became obsessed with trains and trolleys and cows on tracks. Oh, and here is one from when Disney lost the rights to Oswald and the character went to another studio. Spot the differences.
Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies
Mickey Mouse entered the stage to replace Oswald and at the suggestions of composer Carl Stalling, Disney developed the Silly Symphonies cartoons. The bulk of these animated shorts featured slapstick gags and anthropomorphic animals, plants and objects using each other and their surroundings as musical instruments. Music was an important part of the cartoon and every one of them featured a synchronized soundtrack.
You may have seen this one before or recognize it from a Simpsons homage. It was Disney’s breakthrough and the debut of Mickey Mouse. After seeing The Jazz Singer, the first movie with synchronized music and some singing and talking, Walt Disney decided this was the way to go for animation. There have been cartoons with sound before, and with synchronized sound, but not a fully synchronized soundtrack. Not only is Steamboat Willie innovative in this respect, they stepped things up a notch in terms of animation quality too.
Disney introduced Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, as an answer to Felix the Cat and Fleischer’s Koko the Clown, and it looked amazing. For some reason, maybe because of this cartoon, animators became obsessed with trains and trolleys and cows on tracks. Oh, and 
entered the stage to replace Oswald and at the suggestions of composer Carl Stalling, Disney developed the Silly Symphonies cartoons. The bulk of these animated shorts featured slapstick gags and anthropomorphic animals, plants and objects using each other and their surroundings as musical instruments. Music was an important part of the cartoon and every one of them featured a synchronized soundtrack.