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192 TRICKS, COMPOSITES, CARTOONS
Felix the Cat once loses his tail. He wonders what to do about it. This anxious question grows out of his head in the shape of a large question mark, demonstrating by graphic means that he is torn by doubts. Felix now gazes pensively at the beautifully curved question mark. He has a bright idea, grabs the question mark and sticks it to his rump for a new tail. The problem is solved. Someone might object to such impossibilities that the question mark was only an abstract symbol! But it appeared in the cartoon as a line and as such subject to the laws of draughtsmanship and none other. The question mark was a line, just like Felix's body, their substance was the same. In the world of creatures consisting only of lines the only impossible things are those which cannot be drawn.
In the case of drawings the creative power of angle and setup plays an even smaller part than in the case of puppets. Looked at from different viewpoints even a mask can be made to assume different physiognomies. But drawings are twodimensional and the film can do no more than reproduce them. What then is the nevertheless productive part played by the camera in the cartoon film?
It is that the film shows not only completed drawings but can show the coming into being of the drawing as a process, as an event. The lines emerge before our eyes, they happen. They are not graphic facts, but graphic events.
The natural style of such cartoons is the caricature, the grotesque. But the drawn film demands unity of style even more imperatively than does the realistic photography of some real object. A condition of such unity of style is that the draughtsman should see every figure from the viewpoint of some ideology; for all the figures must be equally absurd or funny. Such a film may for instance be a political satire, but in that case it can show only the political opponents of the draughtsman's side. For the draughtsman cannot draw the figures of his own side as caricatures in the same way; if on the other hand he draws them differently, then there is a discrepancy, an infringement of style in the picture.
George Grosz, the great German revolutionary cartoonist had to struggle hard with this dilemma. His portrait-gallery of caricatures entitled The Face of the Ruling Classes was mag