Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, the creative team behind similarly edumacational comics Action Philosophers and The Comic Book History of Comics, are back with a new chin stroker: The Comic Book History of Animation - and it’s a cracking read!
The book starts in the late 19th century and takes readers through the 20th century with the rise of animation thanks to the likes of the Fleischer brothers, Walt Disney, Osamu Tezuka, Hayao Miyazaki and John Lasseter, ending on 3D animation and the widespread popularity of anime.
The early days of animation were the most compelling for me. I’d heard of Winsor McCay before, the creator of Little Nemo, but didn’t realise that, in addition to his influential comics, he was also an animator and that, when he animated his creation, he literally hand drew each animation frame from scratch each time - no photocopies or assistants to help him! It’s amazing how he achieved such consistent fluidity of motion too - here’s the 96 second Little Nemo short that’s the end result of his efforts. It still looks fantastic to this day.
Then seeing Max Fleischer and his brothers improve on the technique was still more impressive. Dave Fleischer was a Coney Island clown and the brothers decided to film Dave in costume doing his act, then trace the individual frames to produce a smoother look. It took them 9 hours a day for a year (that’s in addition to working full time jobs!) but The Clown’s Pup remains an outstanding work.
The Fleischers were a remarkable bunch. Among many notable achievements, Charles went on to invent the arcade claw machine and it was their suggestion that Popeye got his strength from eating spinach.
Van Lente highlights many other figures from animation history too. Besides the most famous like Disney, we also learn about Ub (pronounced “oob”) Iwerks, who helped Disney set up his company but got treated horrendously by Walt (Van Lente thoroughly shows why Walt Disney was a colossal prick, and not just through his treatment of Ub), to Mary Blair, the designer of the Baby Mine sequence from Dumbo, who used her very real life pain of numerous miscarriages to lend the scene the power it has as Dumbo’s mother caresses Dumbo through the bars of her cage.
It’s also a very informative read, explaining the myriad animation processes. From “chalk-talking” (lightning sketches transforming images with lines from one thing to another in front of a live audience), to the tediously slow early days of animating, to the invention of xerox transforming the process (which directly led to 101 Dalmations), and eventually to where we are today with 3D animation.
There’s a helluva lot more besides - the story behind the triumph that was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (and the disaster that was Disney’s follow-up, Fantasia), where the name Pixar comes from and why the lamp is the mascot, the origin stories behind the various Looney Tunes characters, among others - but suffice it to say that anything most readers with a casual interest in the subject will want to know about animation is all here.
I liked how Dunlavey coloured the early pages in black and white, to reflect the animations at the time, and then slowly introduced colour as time went on when colour started appearing in the cartoons themselves. And I thought it was a clever idea to depict the various figures as famous cartoon characters (Mickey, Yosemite Sam, Woody, etc.) to add some playful variety to the visuals.
It’s a very text-heavy comic so it’s not the most relaxing read and I didn’t find the studio bickering back and forths with the animators all that interesting - it felt a bit repetitive as it kept happening through the years. Overall though, The Comic Book History of Animation is a great book full of compelling facts and stories on this remarkable medium told well with wit and enthusiasm by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey.
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