How Cartoons Are Made – 1930

Disney has always dominated discussions about animation. There was a minor bit of hoopla amongst critics in the early 1950s about the “anti-Disney,” UPA, but by the time I was growing up in the 1960s, it was long forgotten. It took “Of Mice and Magic” to bring some knowledge of other cartoon studios to public knowledge; film publications of the ‘70s were doing the same thing to a more academic group.

There were many articles on cartoon studios during the sound era of theatrical cartoons, some of which were designed to satisfy the curiosity of how they were made.

Below is a story from the Los Angeles Times, dated April 13, 1930. It was published elsewhere. Most of it is about Disney, with a brief list of other studios. Several are not mentioned. Harman-Ising and Iwerks were just starting out, as was Paul Terry on the East Coast, whose first release was in February that year.

This was transcribed on the old GAC site in May 2009.

COMICS MEAN HARD LABOR
Creator of Mickey Mouse and Other Animated Cartoons Works Harder Than Composers
BY JACOB COOPER
A comic-strip artist and a master musician go into a huddle, and—Presto!—we have the animated sound cartoon. Or, rather, this is an abbreviated picture of what goes on in the little studio which hugs the small, green hills on Hyperion avenue, where Walt Disney directs the lives and fates of those droll zoological which his fertile brain creates.
Walt, you know, is, among other things, the daddy of Mr. Michael Q. Rodent, otherwise and affectionately known to his screen public as Mickey Mouse.
Besides the latter, Disney also produces the Silly Symphony series, and after seeing the involved process which goes to make up this one-reeler, it would be safe to wager that it carries behind it more anguish of soul a work-day minute than Tschaikowsky labored under during the creation of his Symphonic Pathetique.
PAINSTAKING DETAIL.
There is more than a keen sense of the humorous needed in the production of this type of opus, although this is one of its main ingredients. There is infinitesimal, painstaking detail to be done on the part of the thirty some odd persons engaged in the studio. Consider the fact that it takes about 6000 drawings to make up one reel of film, and you have an idea of just what these many people are doing. They must possess an understanding of movement involving every situation in which the human or animal body may find itself—an authoritativeness surpassing Michelangelo’s on the self-same subject. Then every person is expected to contribute to the fund of gags and droll situations as the ideas occur to them—and they are funny to the point of tragedy.
On the whole, the entire procedure is somewhat on the same order as any company may use in production of the over-famous back-stage revue. There is the scenario, in this case both written and drawn, in which the scenes are laid out according to the tick of the clock. The sets are drawn on pasteboard. The background of a scene need never be recopied; it is only the characters which move that have to be put through their copius [sic] gestures. These are first drawn on thin paper—one drawing for each frame of the film—and are then traced on a sheet of transparent celluloid. The celluloid drawing is then filled in with the necessary blacks and whites and superimposed over the background which has been placed under a hanging camera.
The cameraman’s job is no grind; far from it. He can only click one frame at a time and at this rate hardly ever exceeds an output of fifty feet per day.
There is very little cutting to be done on this type of film; it is almost in sequence when the exposed film is removed from the camera.
SOUND PREARRANGED
Then comes the musical and sound part. This has all been prearranged even before the drawings are made. In fact, many of the subjects are based on a musical idea. But this is no job for a thoroughly canonical musician. He must suffer to see Liszt made ludicrous, Bach a buffoon, and Debussy delirious. Whistles, horns, drums and perversions of the human voice add to this barnyard bedlam and Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphony venture forth into the world equipped with the utmost in risible accoutrements.
Then, lest we forget, there are the other cartoons which help fill our moments of frivolity. Two others are being produced in Hollywood: Mintz's "Krazy Kat," and Walter Lantz's "Oswald"—the latter being originally the creation of Walt Disney. It is rumored that Van Beuren's "Aesop's Fables," which now claim New York as their habitat, will move out to Hollywood. The eastern metropolis also sends forth Max Fleischer's "Talkatoons" and "Song Cartoons," declaiming and warbling into the world.