Animation 2006 Telotte 9 24

Animation http://anm.sagepub.com/ Ub Iwerks' (Multi)Plain Cinema J. P. Telotte Animation 2006 1: 9 DOI: 10.1177/1746847706065838 The online version of this article can be found at: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/1/1/9 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Animation can be found at: Email Alerts: http://anm.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://anm.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/1/1/9.refs.html >> Version of Record - Jul 1, 2006 What is This? Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by guest on September 26, 2013 article Ub Iwerks’ (Multi)Plain Cinema J.P. Telotte Abstract While pioneer animator Ub Iwerks has often been praised as a driving force behind the early success of the Walt Disney Company, his independent work has received scant attention. That relative omission from animation history seems curious given two key features of his cartoon work: an emphasis on gags involving protean, transformative effects – a characteristic often linked to avant-garde filmmaking; and his pioneering work on a multiplane camera – a device that would become crucial to a developing realist aesthetic in American animation. This article examines these features to situate his work in terms of American animation’s shifting aesthetic in the 1930s. It suggests that we see Iwerks’ cartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period between the avant-garde and an emerging realism, closely linked to the classical narrative mode of liveaction cinema, and the relative failure of his films as indicative of an inability to negotiate between these different pulls. Keywords animation, avant-garde, depth, Fleischer Brothers, Mickey Mouse, multiplane camera, realism, Sergei Eisenstein, Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney This had always been the objective of modernism: to flatten out, to bring to the surface in order to make the base show itself for what it is. (Leslie, 2002: 297) In his history of the American cartoon, Leonard Maltin (1980) offers a rather mediocre assessment of the contributions of a figure who had animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 1(1): 9–24 [1746-8477(200607)]10.1177/1746847706065838 10 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1) become almost legendary in the field, Ub Iwerks. He describes Iwerks as ‘a second-echelon cartoon producer’ (p. 185) and the products of his own studio, primarily the Flip the Frog, Willie Whopper, and Comicolor fairytale films, as ‘basically unmemorable cartoons’ (p. 192). Similarly, Michael Barrier (1999) has termed Iwerks an animator of ‘narrow technical skills’ (p. 168) whose cartoons lacked ‘a distinct comic or narrative shape’ (p. 166). While both assessments have much truth to them, they also suggest a kind of corrective response to a legend that had grown up around Iwerks in light of his contributions to the creation of Disney’s iconic figure Mickey Mouse, his near single-handed animation of the first Mickey cartoons, and his involvement in the spectacularly successful Silly Symphony cartoons with their early and innovative use of synchronized sound. Because of these connections it had often been suggested that Iwerks was really the genius behind the mouse, or as Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman (1993) put it, ‘the strong foundation on which the [Disney] studio depended’ in its early years (p. 64). Of course, these views are not necessarily contradictory, but the relative dismissal of Iwerks’ independent efforts has begged the question of where his own cartoons went wrong, and of how someone of near-legendary status could also be rather easily relegated to the footnotes of animation history. Because of his reputation for his drawing speed and seemingly innate understanding of the basic principles of the animated cartoon (squash and stretch, recoil, etc.), Iwerks has been described as essentially a master technician – a view only reinforced by his professed interest in mechanisms that would support the animation process, and his development, after returning to Disney in 1940, of such devices as the Xerographic Fusing Apparatus for inking cells and the Triple Head Optical Printer, and his perfection of a sodium traveling matte process for combining live-action with animation.1 Even when he was running his own studio between 1930 and 1936, Iwerks was rumored, after the first few years, to have relegated much of the daily supervision of the animation process to subordinates. In fact, Michael Barrier (1999) claims that Fleischer alumnus Grim Natwick ‘eventually wound up running the studio day-to-day, while Iwerks worked on mechanical improvements in the studio’s basement’ (p. 167).2 Yet one of those technical developments would have a marked impact on the reputation of the Iwerks cartoons and would forecast similar developments at other animation studios in the period, most notably at Disney and the Fleischer Brothers. This same technical interest might help us better situate his works in terms of American animation’s shifting aesthetic in the 1930s, particularly by helping us see his studio’s cartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period between the avant-garde and an emerging realist aesthetic that was closely aligned with the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema. That key development, of course, was the multiplane camera, a device designed to overcome the essential flatness of the animated Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 11 image by creating a three-dimensional space in which to photograph the animation cells. Yet it was a development that ultimately brought little success to Iwerks’ films, winning them neither great critical accolades in that period nor the embrace of a popular audience. Part of the problem, as the epigraph to this article implies, is that the critical community never agreed on the importance of the depth illusion for furthering animation’s development, so the value of a device for fostering this effect remained an open question. In fact, many commentators insisted that the real strength of the animated cartoon as it had developed up to this time lay precisely in the stylistic trait that so distinguished it from live-action film, that is, its essential flatness. For here was a characteristic that challenged the naturalism of Hollywood narratives and brought the cartoon widespread attention from the era’s avant-garde by suggesting that a similar informing spirit was at work. Even Disney’s animation was, early on, appraised from this vantage point. Thus, William Kozlenko (1979[1936]) lauded his cartoons of the early 1930s because he believed they exemplified the strongest appeal of animation; as he offered, ‘the uniqueness of the animated cartoon lies in the fact that, of all film forms, it is the only one that has freed itself almost entirely from the restrictions of an oppressive reality’ (p. 246). Yet Disney cartoons, propelled by Walt’s growing concern with what has come to be known as an ‘illusion of life’ aesthetic,3 would, as the decade progressed, gradually turn from that essential flatness, first by emphasizing more rounded characters that responded to forces just like real three-dimensional figures, and second by introducing in 1937 Disney’s far more complex and capable vertical multiplane camera, a device that would bring the studio an Academy Award for technical development. Depth would, as a result, increasingly become an important measure of animation skill and even quality, at least within the industry, just as the Iwerks studio was releasing its last cartoons in late 1936. Prior to this point there was, at least in the avant-garde community, a distinct value placed on flatness, owing to the belief that it supposedly signaled freedom from a kind of naked naturalism, and thus from the world of common experience and common values that conventional live-action films reflected. From J. Stuart Blackton’s chalkboard drawings that come to life and mutate, to the Krazy Kat and Ignatz cartoons with their nearly-empty or stylized backgrounds, to Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat, there was the sense that, in the words of Esther Leslie (2002), ‘everything in the drawn world is of the same stuff’ (p. 23), graphic representations or simple shapes that were equally available to the play of the imagination. Leslie further argues that a major attraction of early animation naturally follows from this impression, as it almost explicitly offered to audiences the ‘dissolution of conventional reality’ (p. 149), and thus, in a distinctly modernist fashion, made ‘the base show itself’, signaling that it was subject to question and eventual change. The protean nature of these early 12 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1) cartoons, that is, their consistent reliance on gags based on multiple and dizzying changes, and their sense of a fundamental impermanence, only reinforced this reading and furthered hinted of links to the avant-garde. Thus Leslie describes how Felix the Cat’s ‘permutable world’ readily suggested the surprisingly fluid visions produced by the surrealist movement (p. 22). Of course, these early cartoons’ frequent transformations – such as Felix’s easy conversion of his tail into any tool or device that the narrative situation might demand, or Mickey Mouse’s quick adaptation of various farm animals to musical instruments in a film like Steamboat Willie (1928) – largely followed from the very simplicity of the animation, as lines, circles, and basic shapes, unburdened by heft and dimension, easily combine, straighten out, or mutate. But that resulting combination, of a flat aesthetic and a vision of change, resulted in a sort of formal inconstancy that allowed these creations implicitly to both interrogate the cinematic illusion itself and humorously insist on the possibility of change in the world to which the cinema rather obliquely referred. It is these dual capacities that largely linked early animation to the world of the avant-garde and help explain the level of appreciation that was offered for the relatively flat styling of the first and more primitive Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons – works that were lauded by no less a revolutionary spirit than the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein4 and that were fundamentally influenced – and in some cases largely created – by Iwerks. Certainly, on one level, Iwerks’ cartoons readily show their own kinship to that combinatory aesthetic of flatness and a transformative, even modernist spirit, and to suggest, at least on a very basic level, some awareness of this appeal. And yet, stylistically these films were also beginning to anticipate a shift from this paradigm. The most obvious allegiance to that modernist sensibility shows up in what we might broadly term the mise-en-scène of the Iwerks films, which frequently mirrors the anarchic world of Felix the Cat and of the Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell cartoons. In his Flip the Frog films, made between 1931 and 1933, much of the action occurs on a horizontal plane, as Flip walks or drives a car from left to right or right to left; depth is simply less important than movement within a flat space. And in such a world it seems that almost any inanimate object Flip encounters can easily come to life or change shape, as evidence the anthropomorphized autos of The New Car (1931), especially one that dons make-up to allure new buyer Flip and later gets drunk after accidentally lapping up, as if from a dog bowl, spilled bootleg liquor. What A Life (1932) seems practically ruled by a logic of metonymy, as a howling dog suddenly turns into a seal ‘barking’ for a fish or a ‘shapely’ fiddle case becomes a female companion when Flip tries to fool a cop. And Movie Mad (1931) sees Flip trying to sneak into a movie studio by following a fat man, lifting his shadow as if it were literally a piece of carpet dragging behind him, and attempting to hide under it. The simplest impression made by such scenes is that any circumstance, any Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 13 Figure 1 Willie Whopper collides with flat space in Stratos Fear. Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reproduced by courtesy of Film Preservation Associates, Inc. thing, or any creature Flip encounters is a potential source for a gag, but at the same time they are sketching an engagingly fluid and protean world, one of surprising possibility, much like that found in such key avant-garde films of the era as Ballet mécanique (1924), L’étoile de mer (1928), and Un chien Andalou (1928), and one that suggests a modest modernist element ‘animating’ Iwerks’ early productions. While generally a bit more polished, Iwerks’ Willie Whopper cartoons of 1933–4 find their essence in a similar protean sensibility, although one that has been elevated to an almost formal level by their concept, as if that characteristic had been opened up for investigation. For the very subject of these films is change, embodied in the most wildly improbable of events, typically introduced by Willie asking the audience, ‘Say, did I ever tell you this one?’ It is his conventional prelude to the ‘whopper’ of a tall tale that follows and that finds its appeal in the extent to which his implied narrative manages to stretch reality, usually through various violations of probability and the laws of nature. One of the few ‘science fiction’ cartoons of the era, Stratos Fear (1933), nicely demonstrates the general character of these films, even as it also begins to suggest a more problematic attitude that was beginning to surface in Iwerks’ films. Beginning with Willie’s visit to a ‘painless’ dentist, it shows what happens after he is ‘gassed’: he inflates like a balloon, rises from the dentist’s chair, bursts through the ceiling, floats into space, and eventually arrives at a strange planet. There he encounters a trio of alien scientists who wield a ray that transforms objects – a cow becomes a heap of milk bottles and steaks; a pig is turned into hams, sausages, and footballs (pigskins). Later the lead scientist similarly transforms, becoming a seductive, veiled woman who plies Willie with Mae West’s line, ‘Why don’t you come up and see me some time,’ only to then return to alien form when he 14 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1) Figure 2 The threat of transformation: a beautiful woman turns into an alien monster (Stratos Fear). Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reproduced by courtesy of Film Preservation Associates, Inc. Figure 3 Flip the Frog fools a cop by turning his fiddle into a female companion in What A Life. Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reproduced by courtesy of Film Preservation Associates, Inc. succumbs to ‘her’ wiles. Willie has, very simply, stumbled into a world of dizzying transformation, and one that clearly holds much potential for interrogating the status quo, particularly with its scientists who all too eagerly reduce life to basic commodities. Yet the film also raises a challenge to that spirit of change, particularly as it develops a parallel fascination with flatness. For as Willie tries to escape from the aliens and their transforming ray, he pulls open a door only to find a blank wall instead of an opening; and when he tries to dive through a window in the background, he bounces back as the ‘window’ proves to be nothing more than a drawn shade, decorated with an image of the sky and again covering a blank wall. If everything here is prone to change or transformation, including Willie who is then captured, it also seems like a world from which there is no escape, Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 15 since it is almost literally a flat world – a cognate to the animated environments that had rendered such transformations the norm. Only Willie’s awakening in the dentist’s chair, in another dimension of space and time, just as that ray is aimed at him, saves him from also being transformed into some unimaginable product. At the level of plot and conception, this film is certainly one of Iwerks’ most imaginative, as well as one that suggests some awareness of the character of early animation, and it points up how many of the Iwerks cartoons, with relative consistency, seem moved by that modernist spirit that Leslie (2002), speaking of other cartoonists of the era, describes as the ‘imaginative work of renewal of matter’ (p. 96). And yet in its images of Willie bursting through the roof of a building, rising beyond the earth’s atmosphere, and even floating amidst various planets, the film also suggests a mindfulness of issues of depth and dimensionality, as if it were deconstructing the conventions of many popular cartoons. Moreover, its plot circuit literalizes the process that Leslie would accuse the Disney studio of, as it manages to ‘reinstitute the laws of perspective and gravity, and . . . fight against flatness’ (p. 121). In effect, it surprisingly pulls back from that ‘work of renewal’, from the spirit of change, and from the flatness that helped generate that spirit, while it also poses a challenge to that spirit, even hints of a kind of threat implicit in it. And indeed, Iwerks’ films do increasingly qualify their spirit of transformation, further interrogating the aesthetic that had dominated his earliest efforts. For even in the most anarchic moments of the Whopper series, even as Willie launches into ever greater tall stories, such as the one about his encounter with the devil in Hell’s Fire (1934) or his descent to the ocean’s floor in Davy Jones’ Locker (1934), there is always a kind of wink at the audience, one codified in his acknowledgement of the lie, his concluding challenge to the audience in some of the films: ‘Now you tell one.’ Of course, that challenge readily opens onto alternative readings: as an effort at pulling back from the preceding anarchic moments, or as a subversive effort at extending the cartoon’s work by reminding the audience of this world’s constructed nature and of their own ability to construct ‘one’ like it – or even better. However, as my introductory comments suggested, film historians have tended to read all of Iwerks’ efforts, including that recurring coda, in the former way, as a sign of his own simple playfulness, particularly in light of Willie’s inevitable return to reality after constructing another version of himself for his listeners, a version at which we are encouraged to laugh. Of course, reality has been enlivened by Willie’s often heroic experience, as if the flight of imagination were enough. It seems that Iwerks, like Willie, was increasingly being drawn to the three-dimensional world, to the solid world of machine rules and physical laws, as if, even at a distance, he may have been haunted by the spirit of his mentor Disney and that gradually developing ‘illusion of life’ aesthetic. 16 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1) I would suggest that we see Iwerks’ development of his multiplane camera precisely in this context, as an effort at allowing his cartoons to move away from – or develop beyond – the sort of modernist construct in which they had early on participated by offering an element of depth and substantiality to balance, if not quite overcome, their essential flatness. Certainly, the relatively small percentage of multiplane scenes in his films, even given the general effectiveness of his device, suggests that its development could hardly be described as an aesthetic evolution, as a sign of Iwerks’ complete embrace of something approaching Disney’s illusion of life. In fact, animation historian Joe Adamson notes how, even after the development of the multiplane camera, the Iwerks cartoons ‘kept veering from never-never land into the twilight zone. Things get really strange’ (Iwerks and Kenworthy, 2001: 131).5 But what the multiplane did was to offer a ground for that strangeness, an element of balance that, unfortunately, only made Iwerks’ cartoons seem a bit different – neither as challenging as the better ‘flatland’ works nor as comfortably within the pale of the new standard of conventionalized realism that Disney’s efforts were demonstrating. Built, according to top animator Jimmie Culhane, ‘out of parts from an old Chevy that he [Iwerks] had bought for $350’ (Iwerks and Kenworthy, 2001: 130), the Iwerks multiplane camera was a horizontally-oriented device – in contrast to the later Disney vertical mechanism – that simulated depth of field by placing the animation cels in vertical holders along various fixed planes in front of a stationary camera. Both simple and practical, the device produced a striking sense of dimension, although one that was never quite as impressive as a similar device created at the Fleischer studio, which actually used miniature sets and three-dimensional props,6 nor as well integrated into the plots or themes of Iwerks’ films as we find in a Disney cartoon like The Old Mill (1937) or a feature like Bambi (1941). The opening of The Old Mill, for example, is built around a series of track-in shots that maximize the new Disney device’s ability to move the camera towards its layered animation cells, creating a sense of movement into the world of the various animals that have taken over an abandoned windmill. The privileged and intimate vision that results forecasts the effect that Disney would later capitalize on in the live-action format of its True-Life Adventure films, when it would then exploit the capacities of the new telephoto and zoom lenses to allow the audience to feel a part of this natural world. The Iwerks cartoons produced after the introduction of his multiplane camera, though, offer nothing quite comparable, and indeed, much of the most obvious use of the device seems pedestrian and unimaginative. For example, in Mary’s Little Lamb (1935) we see Mary and her lamb in the foreground, dancing on the way to school, moving from left to right against a deep background of countryside. Since this film is essentially a remake of an earlier Flip the Frog cartoon – School Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 17 Days (1932) – in which we find almost exactly the same scene, as Flip and his dog frolic on the way to school, the use of depth seems particularly uninspired, almost as if were being used primarily to distract audiences from the recycled narrative – and indeed from some recycled footage used here. And it is the pattern of use we find repeatedly in Iwerks’ various Comicolor shorts, especially in a string of 1934 efforts, such as The Valiant Tailor, Don Quixote, and Jack Frost. Each narrative rather sparingly uses the multiplane, typically by exploiting the narrative opportunity to have a character, usually brightly colored, move horizontally across the frame, with that movement typically set in contrast to a deep background that is drawn and colored in a pastel, soft-focus style to increase the depth of field illusion. In this regard, then, a relatively late Comicolor short like Mary’s Little Lamb suggests little development of the possibilities opened up by the multiplane camera since Iwerks first introduced it in the previous year’s The Headless Horseman. Yet one of the cartoon’s more interesting variations on this effect is noteworthy. It involved imposing a static image in the foreground, in such a way that it masked a small portion of the frame. We see this approach in Mary’s Little Lamb when the schoolchildren watch a series of song and dance performances. Having established the children as audience, the cartoon then depicts the performances in the middle and back of the frame, while black silhouettes of heads and shoulders occupy the frame’s lower margins. Simply achieved, this technique neatly combines flatness and depth; in fact, it uses the former to enhance the latter effect, as if it were trying to strike a bargain between two guiding spirits. By no means a novel effect, it was achieved by placing black cut-outs along the lower border of the frame to create a stark contrast between a dark foreground and light background, thereby suggesting varying lighting levels and effectively Figure 4 Conventional use of the multiplane camera: Ichabod Crane rides across a deep-set landscape in The Headless Horseman. Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reproduced by courtesy of Film Preservation Associates, Inc. 18 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1) ‘throwing’ the eye deep into the frame. A version of this approach does prove more effective in building the eerie effect of Ichabod Crane’s ride across a night landscape, done largely in silhouette, as he anticipates a ghostly visitation in the much later The Headless Horseman. Yet even here the essential dynamic of the scene remains unchanged, with Ichabod basically riding horizontally across the frame in the sort of conventional depiction of action that typifies most cartoons of the era, as well as Iwerks’ efforts from both before and after the introduction of his multiplane device. What is rather more interesting in The Headless Horseman is not so much the use of the multiplane as the multiple efforts with other, complementary techniques of depth illusion, suggesting that this cartoon, as the first of Iwerks’ multiplane films, might have been more carefully designed with depth in mind, as a concerted effort to leave ‘flatland’ behind. For at almost every turn in this film we encounter a rather different design scheme than typifies many of the earlier Iwerks efforts – one that, while infrequently involving the multiplane camera, does employ a host of visual cues to suggest a three-dimensional world: action is arranged to move between foreground and background, compositions are designed at an angle to create a visual dynamic for the image, and visual effects – including shots within shots – suggest different levels of reality in the narrative. The combination of such techniques hints of an effort at trying to create a different realm of animation, a kind of multiplane world. From its opening, The Headless Horseman stylistically suggests this possibility of difference, as much of its world is depicted on an axis diagonal to the frame. An establishing shot opens the narrative, showing the schoolhouse in which Ichabod Crane teaches set at a 45degree angle in the frame, with a path leading from the school to an outhouse back left and another path leading into the right foreground, effectively tracing a compositional line from left rear to the right front of the frame. A cut to a long shot of the schoolhouse interior repeats but reverses that compositional principle, as we see Ichabod in the right rear of the frame with his desk set at an angle and the students’ desks angled into the left foreground. A subsequent scene as Ichabod prepares for Katrina’s party is similarly composed on a diagonal, with two walls angling into the background, forming a triangular composition, much like that used in the opening introduction of the central characters (as triangle insets are used for each character). And this principle then recurs as Ichabod enters Katrina’s house, not simply from left or right, but from a door again set at an angle, which enables the characters to move diagonally between background and foreground, thereby more effectively measuring out space for the audience. Subsequent shifts in this scene amplify that sense of space, as dinner is announced from the background of the frame, prompting everyone to rush from foreground to background and crowd through the dining room door, and when Ichabod is eventually thrown out of Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 19 Katrina’s house for trying to kiss her, it is from the background to the foreground, where he becomes a silhouetted figure against the brightly lit house, so that the light scheme enhances the depth illusion. At its conclusion, the narrative depicts a church steeple and church bells announcing Katrina’s wedding to Brom at an angle in the center of the frame, and it finishes with the wedding scene composed in depth: Katrina and Brom in the foreground and guests arranged in church pews leading into the background. Suddenly interrupting the ceremony, however, is a mysterious headless figure who emerges from that deep background, scaring off the bride and groom in the foreground, revealing itself as Ichabod in disguise, and thereby suggesting a kind of unexpected ‘depth’ of knowledge in this otherwise simplistic and dimensionless character – a depth allowing him to replay the joke previously played on him by Brom. Other than in this scene and when the partygoers run from background to foreground to squeeze through the dining room door, these compositional patterns do little to support the humor of the film or to advance the narrative, nor are they particularly innovative. However, they do project a consciousness of space, a space presented as substantial and realistic, as if to lead up to and support the similar effects achieved by the multiplane camera elsewhere in the narrative. To somewhat mixed effect, the film also employs a variety of graphic effects that build another level of dimensionality here. It does, for example, use several wipes and irises that inject a kind of visual dynamism, although they also tend to evoke the sense of a constructed and protean world. Triangular insets, for example, introduce the central characters and visually reach across the landscape depicted at the start of the film, and later diagonal wipes repeat this visual pattern, but simply to suggest shifts in scene. To more effect, the narrative employs several circular inset shots to depict Brom’s thoughts when he is introduced to his new rival, Ichabod. While the enclosed images of a snake, skunk, and a jackass suggest another level of depth, an unspoken psychological dimension, and the manner of their insertion again injects dynamism into what would otherwise simply be negative space, they are ultimately the stuff of flat cartoons, closely recalling the word balloons and common graphic effects of the comics, of an all-too-familiar flat and even static form of animation. The centerpiece of three-dimensionality, though, is clearly the scenes introducing and demonstrating Iwerks’ new multiplane technology. Early on the cartoon uses it in conjunction with a simulated tracking shot, as the camera seems to move around Ichabod to reveal that he is reading about the legendary headless horseman while his students are doing their lessons. It is a surprisingly effective shot, since the tracking motion, when combined with the multiple planes of the composition, seems to occur within real space and to offer an insight into Ichabod’s character, suggesting that he is a three-dimensional figure with secret if unmotivated interests. Yet the following scenes do 20 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1) little to develop this potential. Early in the narrative the multiplane effect occurs three times, and each instance follows the same simple pattern: a messenger rides to Ichabod with Katrina’s party invitation, moving left to right against a three-dimensional landscape; Ichabod rides to Katrina’s party, moving right to left against that same landscape; and Brom gallops past Ichabod, also moving right to left with the same soft-focused landscape forming the background. While these scenes effectively suggest motion through space, it is largely movement for the sake of movement, since the action could more easily have been handled with jump cuts. This movement simply anchors the story in a mundane reality rather than building any sort of narrative complexity. A similar pattern also forms the climax of the narrative, as Ichabod rides horizontally, with his image silhouetted in the foreground against a dimly lit landscape and fence. The appearance of the headless horseman has some dramatic impact, but the horizontal action mitigates the effect, since he just appears as a shadowy figure riding behind and then chasing Ichabod against the same dimly lit landscape. The depth illusion in these scenes is minimal, particularly during the chase, since there is little complication to the action and it occurs largely in shadow. In only one other instance does the multiplane show to some effect – when at Katrina’s house a partygoer begins telling the story of the headless horseman in front of a fireplace. With the fireplace and fire done as a separate plane in the deep background and the party guests gathered in the foreground, the scene produces valuable light and shadow effects, while providing a very real dramatic space to suggest how this specter was influencing the listeners’ imaginations; it is a vision that the film even injects into that space through another inset of a silhouetted horseman that the audience has now imagined. In this instance the film effectively employs that real space provided by the multiplane camera to link the real and imagined worlds, but this sort of dramatic contribution is otherwise generally missing here. The last Iwerks films, moreover, show little additional evidence that he sought to exploit such possibilities. While the Comicolor shorts of 1936, works like Ali Baba and Happy Days, clearly show more attention to physical details and to lifelike animation than in the earlier films, they also make little use of the multiplane camera, save in the presentation of backgrounds, particularly in the studio’s last effort, Happy Days. When the Forty Thieves attack a town in Ali Baba, for instance, the action is largely presented as diagonal movement across the frame, from background to foreground, using screen space but suggesting its depth only in a conventional manner and essentially substituting frenetic motion for a three-dimensional effect. And at the same time, these films still offer some throwback elements to the world of flatness and transformation, as when in Ali Baba a camel’s hump opens up like a car hood and a water hose is inserted to fill up its ‘tank’, and when in Happy Days a military hero’s statue, offended Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 21 Figure 5 Happy Days’ hardly happy vision of transformation, as a shell comes alive. Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reproduced by courtesy of Film Preservation Associates, Inc. by a group of boys, suddenly comes to life and blasts them with a stone canon, the shell of which anthropomorphizes, revealing an angry face as it chases them and shoots out, in turn, each tire on their car. In general, though, these late films are marked neither by advanced techniques of realistic animation after the Disney fashion, nor by a consistent effort to explore and exploit animation’s early strengths – ‘motility, change, movement, and its ability to be everywhere and anywhere at once,’ as suggested by Leslie (2002: 39). Demonstrating little aesthetic consistency, they are, quite simply, rather plain affairs. The aim of this brief overview has not been to suggest that the films produced by Iwerks’ studio were important steps in the development of a realist aesthetic, nor to argue that Iwerks was himself a kind of misunderstood or underappreciated avant-gardist. Rather, my aim has been to investigate the middle ground implied by such perspectives, one wherein we might find a better sense of why his films would have failed to catch on, and perhaps a better measure of his place in animation history. Michael Barrier (1999) simply suggests that there were two rather different pulls at work in Iwerks’ career, arguing that Iwerks ‘asserted himself most forcefully . . . by insisting on a sort of mechanical perfection’ (p. 167), but that artistically his films were ‘locked in time’, unable to break free from earlier styles (p. 165). The fact that the Iwerks studio lasted only from 1930 to 1936 is some testimony to that view, and certainly a reminder that audiences never quite warmed to its products. But that lack of response, I would argue, partly follows from what is implicit in these different pulls and that has never really been articulated: that is, the films’ mixed stylistic message, as they seem engaged at one level – and probably quite unconsciously – in pursuing ‘the objective of modernism’ for which many other cartoons were at the time being lauded, and on another in exploring new standards of realism, similar to that developed more successfully in 22 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1) Disney’s work. In effect, they seemed to be caught in a kind of paradox, variously working at both flattening out and fleshing out their animated worlds, resulting in a mixed product that inevitably sent mixed cues to an audience and troubled their response. The rather problematic nature of these films is also noteworthy given the period, for they appear – and disappear – at a time when modern culture was beginning to witness what Paul Virilio (1994) has described as ‘the advent of the logistics of perception’, that is, a developing emphasis on creating a kind of machinery for standardizing, enhancing, and even controlling vision, or as Virilio puts it, ‘cinematizing’ reality (p. 12). That logistics would, in a variety of ways, help push realist tendencies, in part because it would become central to the practical waging of the Second World War that was already on the horizon in the mid-1930s, a great drama in which even animation would come to play a valuable role through its use in training and propaganda films – in both of which a semblance of realism would prove highly valuable. Certainly Iwerks’ fascination with the machinery of film would position him to be a contributor to such developments, to a world in which perspective, line of sight, and depth cues would play crucial roles. In fact, once he had returned to within the Disney orbit in 1940, he would help advance that logistics by contributing to the studio’s new hybrid animation program, helping to make possible one of its most famous propaganda efforts, The Three Caballeros (1945). Yet ironically, that very move would bring Iwerks’ efforts full circle. For that hybrid work inevitably harkened back to similar efforts in the Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell cartoons, Walter Lantz’s Dinky Doodle shorts, Disney’s Alice in Cartoonland films of 1923–7, and various other early works that, in blurring the boundaries between the real and the constructed and in foregrounding reflexive effects, celebrated film’s power not as a representative form but as a fantastically creative and transformative medium. In fact, this sort of foregrounding, particularly of the very mechanism of reproduction and representation, is precisely what we find in such avant-garde efforts as Ballet mécanique or Walter Ruttman’s animated Opus films of 1921 and 1924 – works that testify to the avant-garde’s fascination with the mechanics of reproduction, while also drawing out of that concern some very unnaturalistic and nonrealistic effects. While Virilio (1994) has suggested that the end result of the cinematizing process is that we would all become, as he puts it, ‘victims of the set’, bound to the vision allowed us by the ‘industrialization of perception’ (p. 79), it seems that Iwerks could sidestep that fate – if not subvert it, in the avant-garde fashion – only by becoming a master of those mechanics. It is a move that we see forecast in the 1930s when, even as he was drawn towards the realist realm and, through his mechanical endeavors, contributed to that ‘industrialization’, he was still mining that world of flatness and transformation for some wonderfully imaginative effects. Yet the Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 23 cartoons that his studio produced could never quite negotiate this double pull, just as they could not help but reflect a similar vacillation in the culture: caught between worlds, between styles, between notions of what our cultural works might do. Able to point to the potentials in both of these approaches but never able to fully exploit either – and despite Iwerks’ own talent – his could eventually only be a plain cinema. Notes 1 For background on these and other technical developments and patents created by Iwerks, see Iwerks and Kenworthy (2001, especially pp. 193–8). 2 We should note that Barrier’s (1999) description of Iwerks’ increasing tendency to distance himself from the day-to-day animation process is echoed in many other accounts as well, including that of his granddaughter Leslie Iwerks and John Kenworthy (2001) who describe how, ‘as Grim’s importance within the Studio grew and with Dorothy Webster and Emile Offermann handling the business matters in the mid-1930s, Ub retired to the refuge of the basement’ to work on various technical projects (p. 129). 3 The best account of the development of this aesthetic can be found in the study of Disney animation produced by two of the studio’s famous ‘Nine Old Men’, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. These veteran animators worked on the classic Disney animated features that first developed the basic principles of the Disney style. 4 Steven Watts (1997) in his critical biography of Walt Disney details the mutual admiration that Disney and Eisenstein shared. The Russian, he argues, believed that Disney’s ‘protean animism’ represented both ‘a revolt against capitalist rationalization’ and a key contribution to ‘modernist aesthetics’ (p. 128). It was an assessment apparently shared by many in the 1930s. 5 That ‘strange’ sensibility might also help explain why Iwerks was able to adapt to a variety of other studios and their styles after closing his own operation in 1936. He would, for example, go on to do several Porky Pig cartoons at Warner Bros. and then move to Columbia for several years before returning to Disney as a technical consultant in 1940. 6 For discussion of the Fleischers’ three-dimensional turntable apparatus, see Maltin (1980: 109–10). Perhaps hinting at his dismissal of its importance, Barrier’s (1999) history of Hollywood animation offers no mention of this device. References Barrier, Michael (1999) Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iwerks, Leslie and Kenworthy, John (2001) The Hand Behind the Mouse. New York: Disney Editions. Kozlenko, William (1979[1936]) ‘The Animated Cartoon and Walt Disney’, in Lewis Jacobs (ed.) The Emergence of Film Art, 2nd edn. New York: Norton. Leslie, Esther (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso. 24 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1) Maltin, Leonard (1980) Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New York: New American Library. Merritt, Russell and Kaufman, J.B. (1993) Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thomas, Frank and Johnston, Ollie (1995) The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. Rev. edn. New York: Disney Editions. Virilio, Paul (1994) The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Watts, Steven (1997) The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. J.P. Telotte is a Professor of Film Studies in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. He coedits the journal Post Script and has published widely on film and media studies, including work on Disney animation. His most recent books are The Science Fiction Film (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Disney TV (Wayne State University Press, 2004). Address: 3780 West Cooper Lake Drive, Smyrna, GA 30082, USA. [email: [email protected]]