Dec 27, 2019

Youtube is a treasure trove of early animated shorts. Find them here.

If you're hungry for animation but uninspired by the holiday season's offerings, The New Yorker magazine has a suggestion for you. An article by Richard Brody, one of the magazine's film critics, highlights a surprising treasure trove of early animated films that have long since expired copyright but are available on Youtube. Click here to read the article.

Brody's thoughtful writing takes us back in time, past the CG revolution and the golden age of Disney and the Looney Tunes, to the silent era. He focuses on the brief, heady period between the invention of animation and its early industrialization (beginning with the patenting of cell animation in 1914).

Brody picks out notable films from those decades. Some are well known: Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur and Emile Cole's Phantasmagory. Others are new to me, like the clay animations of Chinese-American artist Joseph Sun. Helpfully, there is a Youtube video embedded in the article.

For practical reasons, these shorts tended to be visually simpler than the live-action films of the time (or animation today). Brody argues that early animators compensated for this by resorting to a kind of self-reflexive comedy, bringing themselves into the film in live-action sequences and interacting with the cartoon films. Thus they were able to portray the animation process itself and the difficulties it entailed.

Brody's article is a good example of a serious critique of non-mainstream animation by a high-profile publication. A nice holiday gift.