Business screen magazine (1938)

This <2.teess Scenes jrnm the new all-color cartoon "Boy Meets Dog" sponsored by the Bristol-Myers Company for Ipana and noiv showing to theatrical audiences. The advantages and possibilities of the animation technique were pretty widely recognized in commercial film work long before the Disney era. The value of this treatment in demonstrating processes and principles, in achieving a light-hearted comedy cartoon sequence and in the vast field of education has been ably represented in the animated films of General Motors, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company and recently in a Technicolor release for Bristol-Myers Company entitled Boy Meets Dog, a noteworthy commercial subject. A recent survey of theatrical audiences to whom Boy Meets Dog was shown in several Eastern states showed practically unanimous acceptance. An extremely short advertising sequence on behalf of Ipana toothpaste was held unobjectionable in this thoroughly entertaining cartoon. In this case the sponsor^s investment in talent proved worthwhile and the music by Frank Churchill, composer of "Snow White", the symphonic-swing orchestra directed by Nathaniel Shilkret and the direction of Walter Lantz left little to be desired. The subject runs nine minutes: the advertising a few seconds. A short excerpt from an advertising brochure recently published contains an interesting viewpoint on the animating angle: '"Cartoon and technical animation often serve to lift a production from the commonplace. And to demonstrate a complicated idea or mechanism, animation is frequently the only means by which the objective can be accomplished. A trade-mark comes to life and directs a scene. Mother Goo.se tours the country in her new runabout, demonstrating safety in driving. A sectional view of a Diesel engine slowly changes shape as a piston moves up and down. Anything can happen in animation!" In his article for Nancy Naumburg's "We Make the Movies," Walt Disney says of the animated cartoon technique: "The world of the animated cartoon is the world of our imagination, a world in which the sun and the moon and the stars and every living thing obey our commands. We pluck a little character from our imagination, and if he becomes disobedient we liquidate him with an eraser. No dictator has power half so absolute. Our materials are anything which the brain can imagine and the hand can draw — all human experience: the real world and dream worlds, color, music, sound, and above all, motion. A fascinating business, but to explain it we must talk of registering pins and exposure sheets, frames and layouts, basic tempos and sweatbox sessions, acoustical beats and audio-frequency oscillators. It is all very technical and confusing to a layman. Often we spend an afternoon showing visitors how cartoons are made, and at the end they timidly inquire, 'But what makes the little drawings move?' "Well, as a matter of fact, all motion on the screen is just an illusion. When a motion-picture camera shoots a scene, it breaks the action into a series of still photographs, showing progressive stages of that action. When these photographs are projected on the screen, at the rate of sixteen hundred a minute, the illusion of motion results. This is because the eye-brain combination cannot register the images as fast as we can project them on a screen, so it overlaps them and the illusion of motion results. This persistence of vision was discovered by Peter Mark Roget in 1826. The same principle explains why our drawn figures seem to move. We make a series of drawings showing the progressive stages of an action. Then we photograph these on regulation motion-picture film and project them on a screen at standard speed. They seem to move for the same reason as the flip books of your childhood, when you thumbed the pages of a pad of drawings and figures moved from cover to cover: the persistence of vision. "There has been a great improvement in the mechanical end of production. In the old days before sound came into existence most of the cartoon equipment used was makeshift and crude. Gradually we have improved our cartoon technique by improved equipment, so that today the cartoon is steady and flickerless and the animators produce better and smoother action. But the main improvements have been in our understanding of the medium, better artists, drawing and story technique." Business can well afford to study the many applications of this technique to short sales and advertising films. What has been done most successfully in the world of make-believe (as witness "SnowWhite"! can be done as well in the realm of actuality. The cost need not be excessive — in fact it can be well controlled in animation. 24