Animation in Europe

In Europe animation had meanwhile taken a strikingly different direction. Eschewing animated line drawings, filmmakers experimented with widely different techniques: in Russia and later in France, Wladyslaw Starewicz (also billed as Ladislas Starevitch), a Polish art student and amateur entomologist, created stop-motion animation with bugs and dolls; among his most celebrated films are The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), in which a camera-wielding grasshopper uses the tools of his trade to humiliate his unfaithful wife, and the feature-length The Tale of the Fox (1930), based on German folktales as retold by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A Russian working in France, Alexandre Alexeïeff, developed the pinscreen, a board perforated by some 500,000 pins that could be raised or lowered, which created patterns of light and shadow that gave the effect of an animated steel engraving. It took Alexeïeff two years to create A Night on Bald Mountain (1933), which used the music of Modest Mussorgsky; in 1963 Nikolay Gogol was the source of his most widely celebrated film, the dark fable The Nose. Inspired by the shadow puppet theatre of Thailand, Germany’s Lotte Reiniger employed animated silhouettes to create elaborately detailed scenes derived from folktales and children’s books. Her The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) may have been the first animated feature; it required more than two years of patient work and earned her the nickname “The Mistress of Shadows,” as bestowed on her by Jean Renoir. Her other works include Dr. Dolittle and His Animals (1928) and shorts based on musical themes by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Papageno, 1935; adapted from The Magic Flute), Gaetano Donizetti (L’elisir d’amore, 1939; “The Elixir of Love”), and Igor Stravinsky (Dream Circus, 1939; adapted from Pulcinella). In the 1950s Reiniger moved to England, where she continued to produce films until her retirement in the ’70s.

Another German-born animator, Oskar Fischinger, took his work in a radically different direction. Abandoning the fairy tales and comic strips that had inspired most of his predecessors, Fischinger took his inspiration from the abstract art that dominated the 1920s. At first he worked with wax figures animated by stop motion, but his most significant films are the symphonies of shapes and sounds he called “coloured rhythms,” created from shifting colour fields and patterns matched to music by classical composers. He became fascinated by colour photography and collaborated on a process called Gasparcolor, which, as utilized in his 1935 film Composition in Blue, won a prize at that year’s Venice Film Festival. The following year, he immigrated to Hollywood, where he worked on special effects for a number of films and was the initial designer of the Toccata and Fugue sequence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). The Disney artists modified his designs, however, and he asked that his name be removed from the finished film. Through the 1940s and ’50s he balanced his work between experimental films such as Motion Painting No. 1 (1947) and commercials, and he retired from animation in 1961 to devote himself to painting.

Fischinger’s films made a deep impression on the Scottish design student Norman McLaren, who began experimenting with cameraless films—with designs drawn directly on celluloid—as early as 1933 (Seven Till Five). A restless and brilliant researcher, he went to work for John Grierson at the celebrated General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit in London and followed Grierson to Canada in 1941, shortly after the founding of the National Film Board. Supported by government grants, he was able to play out his most radical creative impulses, using watercolours, crayons, and paper cutouts to bring abstract designs to flowing life. Attracted by the possibilities of stop-motion animation, he was able to turn inanimate objects into actors (A Chairy Tale, 1957) and actors into inanimate objects (Neighbours, 1952), a technique he called “pixellation.”

The international success of McLaren’s work (he won an Oscar for Neighbours) opened the possibilities for more personal forms of animation in America. John Hubley, an animator who worked for Disney studios on Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia, left the Disney organization in 1941 and joined the independent animation company United Productions of America in 1945. Working in a radically simplified style, without the depth effects and shading of the Disney cartoons, Hubley created the nearsighted character Mister Magoo for the 1949 short Ragtime Bear. He and his wife, Faith, formed their own studio, Storyboard Productions, in 1955, and they collaborated on a series of increasingly poetic narrative films. They won Oscars for Moonbird (1959) and The Hole (1962). The Hubleys also created a much-admired series of short films based on the jazz improvisations of Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, and Benny Carter.

The evolution of animation in Eastern Europe was impeded by World War II, but several countries—in particular Poland, Hungary, and Romania—became world leaders in the field by the 1960s. Włodzimierz Haupe and Halina Bielinska were among the first important Polish animators; their Janosik (1954) was Poland’s first animated film, and their Changing of the Guard (1956) employed the stop-action gimmick of animated matchboxes. The collaborative efforts of Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk foresaw the bleak themes and absurdist trends of the Polish school of the 1960s; such films as Był sobie raz… (1957; Once Upon a Time…), Nagrodzone uczucie (1957; Love Rewarded), and Dom (1958; The House) are surreal, pessimistic, plotless, and characterized by a barrage of disturbing images. Borowczyk and Lenica, each of whom went on to a successful solo career, helped launch an industry that produced as many as 120 animated films per year by the early ’60s. Animators such as Miroslaw Kijowicz, Daniel Szczechura, and Stefan Schabenbeck were among the leaders in Polish animation during the second half of the 20th century.

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