Why Are Cartoons For Kids?

There was a reason the big screen was populated with fairy tales and stories of little animals. That’s what the people wanted.

Walt Disney had won an Oscar for a cartoon starring flowers, trees, a fire. Mickey Mouse was a sensation when he debuted. Humans like Van Beuren’s Tom and Jerry and Ub Iwerks’ Willie Whopper were pretty much failures by comparison.

But one critic in England decided the screen needed didn’t need barnyard characters, it needed people. And he felt putting that on the big screen would create a whole, and necessary, British film industry.

The English had a movie industry over the years, and periodically jumped into animation. There were the Bonzo cartoons of the pre-sound era, the Rank Organisation hired ex-Disney director David Hand to run a studio in the ‘40s, and Halas and Batchelor came along with an interesting potpourri of designs over the course of several decades.

This thoughtful column appeared in Kinematogrpahy Weekly of January 24, 1935. I’m at a loss when it comes to the M-G-M series mentioned in it.

Give Us Adult Cartoons
says R.H. CRICKS
THE modern cartoon film has reached a high state of perfection, earlier problems of synchronisation have been entirely overcome, and the illusion of reality is lent to such incongruities as animals, and even furniture, talking. The cartoon provides an excellent vehicle for the demonstration of colour systems, and Walt Disney obtains a beautiful range of colours.
Some of Max Fleischer’s cartoons go further in obtaining a remarkable illusion of third dimension. One film in particular, “Little Dutch Mill,” appears to have been produced with the aid of models with superimposed cartoon characters; by movement of the camera position—the oldest known method of attaining stereoscopy—in conjunction with suitable construction of the sets, the background actually appears to be far behind the foreground.
Yet for all this perfection of technique, the majority of the cartoons are designed to appeal chiefly to the child mind rather than the adult. Is this a sound policy?
THE cartoon film takes the place in the kinema programme of the comic strip in our daily newspaper, or of “Our Usherette” in the KINE. itself; it provides a little light relief from the more serious part of the programme, and justifies the old couplet “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.” But there is the one point of difference between the newspapers’ comic strips and the majority of film cartoons. If the said strips, instead of basing their appeal upon showing people like ourselves doing things that we should never dream of doing, were suddenly to become all whimsy, showing us fairy princesses and fantastic animals, would they be as well appreciated by adult readers?
There is only one answer: such strips would be relegated to the children’s section. Yet our kinema patrons have so far been offered little in advance of fairy tales and fables.
CARTOONS have admittedly obtained an immense popularity by the use of such characters. Mickey and Minnie Mouse have won for themselves an unassailable place in the hearts of the world’s picture-goers. But it is no everybody who can create a Mickey and a Minnie, and there is no earthly reason why other producers should slavishly attempt such an imitation.
It has been argued that such cartoons appeal to the child mind, and the children can be relied upon to bring their parents along to see the rest of the programme. This may be a sound argument when children are home from school and out to enjoy themselves with their parents; but at normal times it is doubtful whether an appeal to the child mind is likely to bring much additional business. An attraction which merely succeeds in selling half-price tickets is not the most profitable of films.
PARAMOUNT has undoubtedly the right idea in taking for its characters the subjects of popular American newspaper strips. The doings of Betty Boop and of Pop-eye the Sailor are read by millions of Americans every day; they are syndicated to more than 250 American newspapers.
Is there not an excellent opportunity for British producers to effect a similar tie-up with the characters of some of our own daily comic strips? Characters which occur to one are The Nipper and his fatuous father in the Daily Mail, Colonel Up and Mr. Down of the Express, Jane of the Mirror, Dot and Carrie of the Star, Jiggs of the Sketch, Alec of the Herald.
THESE are characters designed to appeal to the love of nonsense in the adult mine. Jane in particular, like Betty Boop, has the valuable quality of sex appeal; the fault even of inimitable Minnie is that such sex appeal as she shows appeals rather to the schoolboy mind than the average adult.
F. Watts, of Pathé, recently deplored the fact that there appeared to be nobody in this country capable of making sound cartoons.

May one suggest, rather, that the difficulty has been that no British film has hitherto been willing to see a British cartoonist through his teething troubles, and, consequently, no British cartoonist has had an opportunity of mastering the technique of the coloured sound cartoon?

As mentioned elsewhere, a British-made series of cartoons in Dufaycolor is now in preparation for M-G-M, which is a step in the right direction. One necessary feature of these cartoons is that specially composed music is to be provided by a composer whose work may reasonably be expected to attain a certain popularity of its own, just as have the Walt Disney tunes.
The enormous popularity of the cartoon provides just the opportunity for not one, but several British films to seek out the few competent cartoon workers, link them up with known humorists, and get them busy on making adult cartoons, preferably of well-known newspaper characters, thus cashing in on the continuous publicity so assured.