I thank for their assistance the staff of Fales Library, New York University Library; Patrick F. Ausband, Sailors' Snug Harbor; Amy Cacciola, Curator, John Noble Collection; Tony Lewis, Curator of Paintings, Mariners Museum, Newport News, Virginia; Walt Reed, Illustration House; Charles Sachs, New York City Transit Museum; Charles Silver, Film Study Center, and Terry Geesken, Film Stills Archive, Museum of Modern Art; Paula Willie, Daryl Gammons, and Barbara Mathey, Special Collections Library, American Museum of Natural History; Agnes Bogart; Ian Gordon; Charles McGovern; Anthony Peluso; Josh Brown; Christa Erickson; Krin Gabbard; and James Rubin. I extend special thanks to Leo Bogart, Sarah Burns, Mary Panzer, and Philip J. Pauly for their attentive readings.

1. See, for example, Crafton, Donald, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928 (1982; rept. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993Google Scholar; Kanfer, Stefan, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story (New York: Scribner, 1997)Google Scholar; Canemaker, John, Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat (New York: Pantheon, 1991)Google Scholar, and Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville, 1987)Google Scholar; and Maltin, Leonard, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons (New York: New American Library, 1987)Google Scholar. This essay is deeply indebted to scholars like John Canemaker, Donald Crafton, Harvey Deneroff, and Mark Langer, who undertook the crucial work of tracking down and interviewing early practitioners.

2. A key film studies text in this vein is Bordwell, David, Thompson, Kristin, and Staiger, Janet, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. On the connection to comic strips, see Fell, John, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974)Google Scholar. For two arguments that complement this one, see Miller, Angela, “Breaking Down the Barriers of Visual Production,” American Art 11 (Summer 1997): 11–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tom, Patricia Vettel, “Felix the Cat as Modern Trickster,” American Art 10 (Spring 1996): 64–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Rapid transit enabled Winsor McCay, Max Fleischer, and numerous others (including Pat Sullivan, Walter Lantz, and future movie director Gregory LaCava) to travel between homes in Westchester and the outer boroughs to studios, theaters, and schools in the center of Manhattan. On Pat Sullivan (producer of Felix the Cat), see Canemaker, , Felix, 33–34Google Scholar. On Lantz, see Adamson, Joe, The Walter Lantz Story (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), 28–40Google Scholar. On LaCava, see Klein, I[sadore], “A Vision of Katzenjammers,” Funnyworld 14 (1972): 29–30Google Scholar.

5. See Gordon, Ian, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), ch. 2Google Scholar. See also Zurier, Rebecca, Picturing the City (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

6. Among the artist-reporters and humorists who began to cross occupational lines over into animation beginning in 1896 were J. Stuart Blackton, John Randolph Bray, Winsor McCay, Louis Glackens, and Gregory LaCava.

7. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 50Google Scholar.

8. Smith, Albert E., in collaboration with Phil A. Koury, Two Reels and a Crank (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952), 27Google Scholar; and obituary, New York Times, 08 14, 1941, 17Google Scholar. The details of Blackton's birth date and place of birth vary depending on the source. Crafton reports Blackton's birth date as January 5, 1875 (Before Mickey, 44). Accounts state that Blackton executed 22 canvases for Sailors' Snug Harbor, but Patrick Ausband, the governor of the home for retired seaman, now in Sea Wall, North Carolina, states that only seven are extant. Ausband thinks it unlikely that Sailors' Snug Harbor would have deaccessioned Blackton's work had he done more (Ausband to the author, November 7, 1997). The Mariner's Museum in Newport News owns two undated “ship's portraits” by Blackton, Leonard J. Busby and The Aurora, both rendered in the flat, primitive style of an artist with little formal art schooling. Blackton became an avid yachtsman and a commodore.

9. On vaudeville, see Snyder, Robert W., Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

10. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 49Google Scholar.

11. Snyder, , Voice of the CityGoogle Scholar.

12. Smith, , Two Reels, 29Google Scholar.

13. Bogart, Michele H., Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3–6Google Scholar; and Burns, Sarah, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

14. Musser, Charles, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 115–20Google Scholar.

15. Ibid., 115, 120; and Hughes, Thomas, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Innovation (New York: Penguin, 1989), 88–91Google Scholar.

16. Musser, , Emergence of Cinema, 115–20Google Scholar.

17. Blackton, J. Stuart, “Early History,” in Richard Koszarski, Hollywood Directors 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 13–15Google Scholar; Musser, , Emergence of Cinema 118–20Google Scholar; and Crafton, , Before Mickey, 44–46Google Scholar.

18. Blackton, , “Early History,” 16Google Scholar.

19. Ibid.

20. Musser, , Emergence of Cinema, 120–21, 253–54Google Scholar.

21. Ibid., 254.

22. Blackton performed his act at Proctors, a high-class vaudeville theater (Crafton, , Before Mickey, 18, 21–23, 52Google Scholar).

23. Ibid., 22–23; and Musser, , Emergence of Cinema, 467Google Scholar.

24. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 21–23, 48–50Google Scholar.

25. On formal garb as the costume of the conjurer, see Crafton, , Before Mickey, 57Google Scholar. Crafton's description of the film differs from mine, suggesting that there were alternative versions. Crafton states that Blackton bows and departs at the end. The version I viewed on video did not show this. On blacks and Jews, see Rogin, Michael, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 101Google Scholar.

26. Blackton remained at Vitagraph until 1917. He returned to England for a time, there producing several live-action pictures. In 1923, he went back to Vita-graph as a producer, remaining there until 1925, when the corporation was sold to Warner Brothers. He went bankrupt in 1931, directed films for a federal work-relief project in 1935, and died in 1946 after being struck by an automobile. Black-ton, who contributed so significantly to the new culture of modernity, also became the victim of one of its other key technological innovations (obituary, New York Times, August 14, 1941, 17; and Blackton Files, New York Public Library, Theater and Performing Arts Division). On the physical dangers spawned by modern innovation, see Singer, Ben, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Charney, Leo and Schwartz, Vanessa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 72–99Google Scholar.

27. With the birth of cinema, around 1895, lightning-sketch acts were recorded in several of the earliest films in England and France. Blackton was the first to bring the lightning sketch to American cinema (Crafton, , Before Mickey, 50Google Scholar).

28. Historian Donald Crafton has characterized the lightning sketch and concomitant allusions to artistry as self-figuration. In lightning-sketch films and cartoons, he notes, the artist would draw his images, which would then “become endowed with the magic ability to move, spontaneously change their shape, or become ‘real’ (three-dimensional).” Crafton states that these acts represented the birth of animated cartoons “because as lightning sketches made their entry into early films their iconography provided the mechanism by which self-figuration first occurred” (Crafton, , Before Mickey, 11, 49Google Scholar; quotation, 337–38). For additional discussion of self-reflexivity in animated cartoons, with a more theoretical emphasis on authorship and textuality rather than on psychosocial identities, see Lindvall, Terry and Melton, Matthew, “Toward a Post-modern Animated Discourse: Bakhtin, Intertextuality and the Cartoon Carnival,” Animation Journal, Fall 1994, 47–63Google Scholar.

29. On the links between spontaneity and sincerity in 19th-century European art theory, which was influential in the United States, see Shiff, Richard, Cezanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

30. Bogart, , Artists, Advertising, 3–6Google Scholar; and Burns, , Inventing the Modern Artist, 277–99Google Scholar.

31. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 37Google Scholar.

32. See the illuminating discussion in Burns, , Inventing the Modern Artist, 277–99Google Scholar. A March 6, 1913, cartoon, reproduced in the New York Sun (illustrated in Burns, , Inventing the Modern Artist, 298Google Scholar) takes these issues one step further. Employing the performance gestures of a lightning sketcher, of the sort who had often come from the ranks of newspaper comic artists (who frequently worked freelance, like painters, but creating commercial, popular art on demand), this cartoon pokes fun at the disingenuousness and lack of virtuosity of the new “aestheticist,” the modern abstract artist. Whereas the lightning-sketch performer of ten years prior presented himself to his audience as a conjurer, one who could bring pleasure by first insisting upon, then overturning, the edict “seeing is believing,” the cartoonist of 1913, rendering a creator of meaningless surfaces, “animates” his artist to expose him as a “sincere” charlatan, one who hides unsuccessfully behind a cloak of artiste-ry (as his alcoholism intimates).

33. Like McCay, Frenchman Emil Cohl (1857–1938) took the possibilities of animation very seriously. Like McCay, Cohl was fascinated with the animator's potential for evoking alternative, irrational psychic states: dreams, hallucinations, insanity. The two of them explored animation as an instrument of psychological and aesthetic liberation.

A member of the antiacademic artistic group Les Incoherents in France, Cohl pursued these interests through an anti-illusionist mode of representation influenced by late-19th-century Symbolism. His elemental, childlike imagery, representative of the contemporary avant-garde equation of “primitivism” with proximity to nature and truth, was intended to express fundamental emotions in its own right, quite apart from the narrative. McCay's animation, on the other hand, was more naturalistic and refined. While hardly emphasizing representation of appearances, his work always used academic illusionism as a reference point.

Both Cohl and McCay set out to exploit animation as independent artists. Committed to maintaining complete control over production, both sought to execute their work virtually single-handedly. Cohl, the Beaux-Arts trained artist of the mid-19th century, devoted his life to animation and sought to become a part of the emergent corporate industrial system that developed in the United States before World War I. Yet, because his efforts met with little success, and because he spent only a little more than a year in the United States, his work is outside the scope of this essay. On Cohl, see Crafton, 's Before Mickey (59–88)Google Scholar and Emil Cohl, Caricature and Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. On McCay, see Canemaker, Winsor McCay.

34. Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 22–23Google Scholar.

35. Influenced by P. T. Barnum's famous American Museum, the dime museums were amusement establishments that flourished in the last two decades of the 19th century. They combined vaudeville, freak shows, funhouse attractions, and curios (ibid., 24).

36. Ibid., 34–35.

37. Ibid., 39–57.

38. Sammy Sneeze ran from September 24, 1904, to December 9, 1906. Little Nemo (running from October 15, 1905, to July 23, 1911, and in the New York American from September 3, 1911, to December 26, 1914) and Rarebit Fiend (August 10, 1904, to June 25, 1911) explored themes addressed by artists since Goya and Füseli: dreams, inner fears, and the clash of the stable, autonomous ego, the threatening forces of urban modernity, and the unconscious. John Canemaker has attributed McCay's fascination with irrationality as an effort to come to terms with the traumas experienced by his brother, who suffered from mental illness. The strips also included elements that McCay would explore in animation, including “accelerated changes in size and age … [and] metamorphosis.” In 1908, McCay earned a salary of $175 a week for his cartoons, and received supplementary income for additional pages of work” (ibid., 60–107; quotation, 68).

39. McCay earned $500 a week on the vaudeville circuit (ibid., 110; see also Gordon, , Comic Strips, ch. 2Google Scholar).

40. Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 119Google Scholar; and Crafton, , Before Mickey, 98Google Scholar. The show ran for 15 weeks in New York and then went on the road. McCay and his vaudeville act accompanied the cross-country tour.

41. The phrase cinema of attractions coined by film historian Tom Gunning, refers to a cinematic form, prevalent between 1895 and 1907, in which the “display of curiosities,” that display of film's own “ability to show something,” is paramount rather than a concern for development of coherent narratives (see Gunning, Tom, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3 and 4 [1986]: 63–70Google Scholar; and Gunning, , D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991], 6–7, 41–42Google Scholar). Judith O'Sullivan characterized the action as abstract animation (as quoted by Crafton, , Before Mickey, 103Google Scholar).

John A. Fitzsimmons, McCay's assistant on two later films, provided the following information on McCay's procedures; compared with Blackton's primitive approach, which involved a relatively limited number of frames, McCay's cartoons involved making hundreds of drawings: “After each drawing was completed and a serial number assigned to it, marks for keeping it in register with the other drawings were placed on the upper right and left corners. To facilitate handling and photographing of the drawings mounting them on slightly larger pieces of light cardboard became the next step.” Such practices were crucial because the image would appear to vibrate if the drawings were not in proper register. McCay's cartoons included both complex movements that appear to occur over time in space and more localized movements in which the primary figure or object remained stationary. Canemaker shows how McCay also relied on a method called cycling, an action in which the same drawings would be repeated in sequence to reduce the number of new drawings that would need to be made (Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 132, 141Google Scholar).

42. On the importance of newspaper comic strips as a factor in the emergence of consumer culture, see Gordon, , Comic Strips, ch. 2Google Scholar.

43. Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 47, 101Google Scholar.

44. On the Hearst IFS studio, see Crafton, , Before Mickey, 178–84Google Scholar; Klein, , “Vision of Katzenjammers”; and “Powers Pens Film Fun,” Motography, 01 15, 1916, 106Google Scholar. See also Klein, I., “The I. Klein Story,” IATSE Official Bulletin, Autumn 1967Google Scholar, n.p. (located in Box 13, folder 122, Series 1, Subseries B, John Canemaker Collection, Fales Library, New York University — hereafter Canemaker Collection, New York University); and Canemaker, John, “Grim Natwick,” Film Comment 11 (01/02 1975): 58Google Scholar.

45. Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 149Google Scholar.

46. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 107Google Scholar. In a prologue, McCay, at his summer home, is plagued by mosquitoes. The artist meets a professor who specializes in study of the insect and who encourages McCay to make a film of how the mosquito attacks his victim. The animated portion of the film depicts a mosquito, with top hat and carpetbag, entering a bedroom and tormenting a sleeping man until he becomes so engorged that he explodes.

47. Canemaker points out that the animated Lusitania was based on a misperception; he demonstrates that subsequent scholarship has proven that the British shared responsibility for the disaster. Financing for the ship had been approved on the condition that it be equipped for possible conversion to naval purposes. The ship was listed as an armed auxiliary cruiser as early as 1913. At the time the ship was torpedoed, unbeknownst to the passengers, it was carrying 4,200 crates of United States-made rifle ammunition and 51 tons of shrapnel shells (Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 148–56Google Scholar). McCay's Lusitania cartoon had a precedent — an actuality film, directed by Georges Méliès, of divers searching for survivors of the explosion of the battleship Maine (see Brown, Bill, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996], 134Google Scholar).

48. Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 151, 156–59Google Scholar (subsequent films). See also Crafton, , Before Mickey, 117, 120Google Scholar.

49. McCay was a family man of the hard-drinking persuasion, typical of many urban newspaper men and animators. His home life fluctuated between suburban respectability and metropolitan artsiness. On first moving to New York City, the McCays lived in an apartment hotel (the Audubon), thereby participating in a semicommunal domestic arrangement still considered vaguely nonconformist and daring. The family subsequently moved to a house in the resort area of Sheepshead Bay, but spent winters in an apartment in the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights (see Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 103Google Scholar). On apartment hotels, see Cromley, Elizabeth Collins, Alone Together: A History of New York's Early Apartments (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), ch. 4Google Scholar; and Davis, John, “Our United Happy Family: Artists in the Sherwood Studio Building, 1880–1900,” Archives of American Art Journal 36, no. 3–4 (1996): 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. In the 1920s, after others like John R. Bray had capitalized on the invention of laborsaving animation methods, McCay lent his name to a different kind of commercial enterprise: a correspondence school course in animation (see McCay, Winsor, “Animated Art,” in Illustrating and Cartooning Animation [Minneapolis: Federal Schools, 1923]Google Scholar, in Box 17, folder 181, Series 1, Subseries B, Canemaker Collection, New York University; since all citations from the John Canemaker Collection are from Series 1, Subseries B, these references will henceforth be omitted). On McCay's lack of ambition, see John A. Fitzsimmons, “My Days with Winsor McCay,” typescript, March 1974, Box 17, folder 189, John Canemaker Collection, NYU.

51. Winsor McCay, “New Moving Picture Art,” undated clipping (ca. 1912), Box 17, folder 191, Canemaker Collection, NYU.

52. Burns, , Inventing the Modern Artist, 10–11Google Scholar.

53. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 122–29Google Scholar.

54. Crafton has noted that the film brings together Hearst cartoonists Thomas A. Dorgan, Tom Powers, Roy McCardell, and George McManus. He states that because the date of filming is unknown, it is unclear whether it served publicity purposes or represented a show of solidarity in the wake of McCay's feud with Hearst (Before Mickey, 112).

55. On the gap between audience and screen reality characterized by Michel Foucault as heterotopia, see Hansen, Miriam, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 107Google Scholar.

56. On the new Apatosaurus displays, see Rainger, Ron, An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History 1890–1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 94–99, 157–58Google Scholar. On the popular fascination with dinosaurs, see Mitchell, W. J. T., The Last Dinosaur Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 124–135, 141–52Google Scholar. See also Bogart, Michele H., “Lowbrow/Highbrow: Charles R. Knight, Art Work, and the Spectacle of Prehistoric Life” (Fenway Court 29 [2000])Google Scholar.

McCay himself had incorporated the topical Apatosaurus subject into a 1905 strip of the Dream of the Rarebit Fiend for the New York Evening Telegram, depicting a jockey atop an Apatosaurus skeleton in a lineup for a horse race. For a picture, see Crafton, , Before Mickey, 130Google Scholar.

It is unclear whether paleontologist and American Museum of Natural History president Henry Fairfield Osborn ever saw Gertie, but his wife Lucretia certainly made efforts to do so. Seeking to screen the cartoon for a ladies' club, but having difficulty locating it, she leaned heavily on the museum's director, George H. Sherwood, who wrote McCay claiming that Dr. Osborn wanted to show Gertie at a meeting of scientists (Beatrice Hitchcock to George H. Sherwood, April 7, 1916, and Sherwood to Hitchcock, April 26, 1916, both in file 713; and Sherwood to Winsor McCay, November 18, 1916, file 697; see also W. R. Sheehan to F. B. Smythe, October 23, 1914; F. L. Lucas to W. R. Sheehan, October 27, 1914; and, regarding McCay's requests to photograph the dinosaurs, F. L. Lucas, handwritten note on memo of October 31, 1914, in file 836 [1913–24]). All of this correspondence is in Central Archives, Special Collections, American Museum of Natural History.

57. I am indebted to Julie Castellano, who first brought Gertie's feminization to my attention. A second prototype for Gertie, depicted in a McCay strip episode of May 25, 1913, was male. A hunter tries unsuccessfully to shoot the brontosaurus. The dinosaur counters with equal aggression, “shooting” back with boulders he has ingested. The gender inversion was quite deliberate. According to a Disney film director Paul Satterfield, McCay got the name Gertie by changing the [male] name “Bertie,” which McCay had overheard being drawled out by some “sweet boys” backstage (“Oh Bertie, wait a minute!”) (see Canemaker, , Winsor McCay, 139Google Scholar).

Thus, Gertie was both an acknowledgment of the ubiquity of gays in the theater and an attempt on McCay's part to distance and differentiate himself from such associations. Furthermore, off-color allusions would not have been acceptable for a family show like McCay's. Thus, instead of appearing in drag, as did the vaudevillian Blackton, McCay found it prudent to feminize his creation. Such a substitution was less threatening and easier to control. That the name was inspired by the presence (and threat) of homosexuals in the theater is hardly surprising. For discussion of gay activity in early-20th-century New York, see Chauncey, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994)Google Scholar.

58. “Making Motion Pictures by Pencil,” Box 17, folder 191, Canemaker Collection, NYU.

59. For an enlightening discussion of how this tension was played out in American world's fairs and theme parks, see Harris, Neil, “Expository Expositions: Preparing for the Theme Parks,” in Designing Disney's Theme Parks: An Architecture of Reassurance, ed. Marling, Karal Ann (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 19–27Google Scholar.

60. Fleischer scholars, reflecting the deep internecine divisions between Max and Dave, debate which of the two brothers actually invented the rotoscope and other Fleischer studio innovations. I have highlighted the role of Max for two reasons: there is a dearth of reliable biographical information on Dave; and the elder Max, who began his career as Brooklyn Daily Eagle colleague of Bray, was most centrally involved with the art worlds and other institutional frameworks that launched animation in its earliest decades.

61. Like many Jews, the Fleischers sought to escape persecution and to find a better life. For biographical information on the Fleischers, see Cabarga, Leslie, The Fleischer Story (New York: Da Capo, 1986), 10–14Google Scholar. For information on German-Jewish immigrants and the American garment trades, which puts William Fleischer's travails into context, see Waldinger, Roger D., Through the Eye of the Needle: Immigrants and Enterprise in New York's Garment Trade (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 50–52Google Scholar.

62. The grittiness and toughness of that neighborhood experience would ultimately find expression in Fleischer studio cartoons. On the neighborhood, see “Recollections of Dave Fleischer,” interview by Joe Adamson, An Oral History of the Motion Picture in America, UCLA, 1969, 24 (transcript), Box 11, folder 98, Canemaker Collection, NYU.

63. Although dates for Max's high school years are unavailable, if he attended high school while he was in his teens, it would have been prior to the progressive campaigns to encourage retention, which began after consolidation. See Ravich, Diane, The Great School Wars: New York City 1805–1973 (New York: Basic, 1974), 168, 182–83, 189, 190–91Google Scholar.

64. These individuals would include the Canadian Raoul Barré and Gregory LaCava. Fleischer's contemporary Walter Lantz also studied with Bridgeman (Cabarga, , Fleischer Story, 15Google Scholar).

65. Transcript of interview with J. R. Bray, by John Canemaker, March 25, 1974, 16, Box 5, folder 16, Canemaker Collection, NYU. Fleischer's contemporary Walter Lantz also studied with Bridgeman.

66. Cabarga, , Fleischer Story, 15, 18Google Scholar; and Langer, Mark, “The Fleischer Rotoscope Patent,” Animation Journal, Spring 1993, 67Google Scholar. Fleischer worked briefly as a retoucher and photoengraver with the Electro-light Engraving Company in Boston and then as a commercial artist for Crouse-Hinds Corporation in Syracuse, for whom he created designs for a catalog.

67. On Dave Fleischer, see “Recollections of Dave Fleischer,” Box 11, folder 98, Canemaker Collection, NYU; Langer, Mark, “Max and Dave Fleischer,” Film Comment 11 (01–02 1975): 48–56Google Scholar; Cabarga, , Fleischer Story, 10, 14, 24Google Scholar; and David Fleischer biography, written by Hamp Howard, Fleischer Studios (public relations press release), 1939, Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

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70. At the News, Bray made studies of cadavers to reconstruct sensational accidents (Crafton, , Before Mickey, 139Google Scholar; J. R. Bray, interview with John Canemaker (transcript), March 25, 1974, Box 5, folder 16, Canemaker Collection, NYU; and Canemaker, , “Profile of a Living Legend,” Filmmaker's Newsletter, 01 1975, 28–31Google Scholar.

71. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 142–45Google Scholar; and Bray—Canemaker interview, Box 5, folder 16, Canemaker Collection, NYU.

72. The first Bray patent was dated January 14, 1914, and the second was November 9, 1915 (Crafton, , Before Mickey, 149–54Google Scholar).

73. “In my process a single background is used for the entire series of pictures necessary to portray one scene. The background shows all of those portions of the scene that remain stationary and may conveniently be drawn, printed or painted on cardboard or other suitable sheet. I prefer to paint the figures of the background in strong blacks and whites upon a medium dark gray paper and when the transparent sheet carrying the movable objects is placed over this gray tone of the background, the objects on the transparent sheet appear to stand out in relief, giving what may be termed a ‘poster effect’” (Earl Hurd, quoted in Crafton, , Before Mickey, 150Google Scholar; see also Bray—Canemaker interview, Box 5, folder 16, Canemaker Collection, NYU). On the cel method and its implications, see Callahan, David, “Cel Animation: Mass Production and Marginalization in the Animation Film Industry, Film History 2 (1988): 223–28Google Scholar; Thompson, Kristin, “Implications of the Cel Technique,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. DeLauretis, Teresa and Heath, Stephen (New York: Saint Martin's, 1986), 106–20Google Scholar.

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81. “How the Movies Helped Win,” 25–26.

82. Culhane, Shamus, Talking Animals and Other People (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), 56Google Scholar. For reviews of these films, see “Relativity, Filmed, Is as Lucid as Ever,” New York Times, 02 4, 1923, sec. 2, p. 1Google Scholar; “It Simply Can't Be Done,” New York Times, 02 6, 1923, 5Google Scholar; “Science as Entertainment,” New York Times, 02 18, 1923, sec. 4, p. 3Google Scholar; and “Dayton Closes Its Doors to Film about Evolution,” New York Times, 08 2, 1925, sec. 7, p. 4Google Scholar. Variety (February 15, 1923) described the film as a “labored exposition of the obvious…. and will probably bore the film fan stiff.”

Although publicity and some subsequent accounts of Evolution have made it appear that the film was produced under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, there was no official connection. Fleischer used the museum's Pithecanthropus skull and various other images from the collection in some of its shots, and Edward J. Foyles told museum director George Sherwood that he had edited the film (Fleischer to William D. Matthew, June 16, 1925, and Foyles to George Sherwood, June 17, 1925, both in file 1259, Central Archives, American Museum of Natural History).

83. According to Leslie Cabarga, Max met Hugo Riesenthal while working as an assistant stage director of presentations for Riesenthal's theaters. It would not be surprising, however, if the link dated farther back, to Max, 's work for Popular Science (Fleischer Story, 24–25, 34, 38)Google Scholar. On Lee de Forest, see Hughes, , American Genesis, 16, 18, 61–64, 89–90Google Scholar. Out of the Inkwell Incorporated was located at 129 East 45th Street (Crafton, , Before Mickey, 175)Google Scholar. Fleischer highlighted these projects and his scientific interests in his 1939 public relations autobiography (see Max Fleischer autobiography, Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art).

84. Langer, , “Disney—Fleischer Dilemma,” 343–59Google Scholar.

85. Cabarga, , Fleischer Story, 18, 25 (quotation)Google Scholar.

86. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 11, 298Google Scholar. “This little inkwell clown has attracted favorable attention because of a number of distinguished characteristics. His motions, for one thing, are smooth and graceful. He walks, dances and leaps as a human being, as a particularly easy-limbed human being might. He does not jerk himself from one position to another, nor does he move an arm or a leg while the remainder of his body remains as unnaturally still as if it were fixed in ink lines on paper” (“Inkwell Man,” 9).

87. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 298–99Google Scholar; see also Frierson, Michael, “Clay Comes Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Brothers and Clay Animation,” Animation Journal, Fall 1993, 4–19Google Scholar. In The Clown's Little Brother, the clown's lifelike movement contrasts notably with the more cartoony movements of his brother. In many cartoons, Perpetual Motion, for example, supposedly distinct realms of activity, the actual and the animated periodically intersect, as when the live-action magnet stretches out and distorts Koko's costume. Like Little Nemo, Koko cartoons exploit the artistic metamorphosis, the transformative potential of the medium.

88. Crafton, (Before Mickey, 298)Google Scholar describes the characters of personality animation as the artist's “alter-ego.”

89. Sklar, Robert, Movie Made America (New York: Vintage, 1975), 178–87Google Scholar; Smoodin, Eric, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons From the Sound Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993): 30–39Google Scholar; Cabarga, , Fleischer Story, 53–81Google Scholar; and Kanfer, , Serious Business, 69–75Google Scholar.

90. Cartoons like Mr. Nobody (November 1932), released immediately after the presidential election, sent up the overblown, empty reassurances of presidential wannabes. The cartoon pits presidential candidate Betty Boop against the black, derby-wearing, Al Jolson—style stick-like Mr. Nobody. Betty promises socialism (“If you send me to Washington, I'll just divide the dough”) and people's culture (“Now we will get things for nothing, movies, cabaret, and jazz”). Mr. Nobody spouts platitudes (“Who will make your taxes light? Who'll protect the voters' right?”), reassuring voters in syncopated rhythms that his concern for them extends even into the private sphere, the realm of infidelity (“Should you wake some early dawn, find a new milkman is on, Who cares if your wife is gone? Mr. No-body!!). Betty offers concrete, if inane, solutions. A gigantic umbrella opens up over a rainy lower Manhattan. A promise to keep streets clean is represented by a red carpet dropped onto the street. After a horse and buggy pass over the carpet, a street sweeper cleans up the dung left behind and the rug is rolled up. Law and order are insured by effectively castrating hardened, muscular criminals, one of whom steps into an electric chair and emerges after a jolt transformed into a lithe and swishing “fairy” stereotype — an image that sends up macho pretensions while simultaneously appealing to the homophobic fears of the audience. Mass transit becomes more convenient when a trolley car scales a high-rise apartment building and picks up its passengers through the windows. Though all the constituents are barnyard or jungle animals, the cartoon identifies with the urban ethnic interests that formed the basis for democratic victory in 1932; such associations are made all the more explicit when Betty morphs into a raspy-voiced Al Smith, a Catholic whose 1928 race for the presidency symbolized the incipient shift in the orientation of national politics from the “hinterlands” to the metropolitan center. As Betty is endorsed by the Democrats; elephants reject her platform (“We accept it!” shout rows of seated donkeys. “We reject it!” retort elephants. “You're an elephant!” “You're an ass!”). The cartoon ends with Betty's victory and a Times Square celebration, which proves to be actually in honor of the end of Prohibition: a large foaming beer mug appears as the last shot.

91. Smoodin, Eric, “Introduction: How to Read Walt Disney,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Smoodin, Eric (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3Google Scholar.

92. The literature on Disney's accomplishments is immense. Recent sources include Canemaker, John, Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists (New York: Hyperion, 1996)Google Scholar; Finch, Christopher, The Art of Walt Disney (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976; rept. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994)Google Scholar; Thomas, Frank and Johnston, Ollie, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (New York: Abbeville, 1981)Google Scholar; Thomas, Bob, Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976; rept. New York: Hyperion, 1994)Google Scholar; Schickel, Richard, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1968)Google Scholar; Maltin, Leonard, The Disney Films (New York: Crown), 1984)Google Scholar; Watts, Steven, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997)Google Scholar; Smoodin, Disney Discourse; and Marling, Designing Disney's Theme Parks.

93. On the formidable impact of Marceline, see Watts, , Magic Kingdom, 3–23Google Scholar; see also Marling, Karal Ann, As Seen on TV: Visual Culture of the 1950s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 101–15Google Scholar.

94. Thomas, , Walt Disney, 22–61Google Scholar.

95. Ibid., 33–43.

96. Merritt, Russell and Kauffman, J. B., Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 33–46Google Scholar; and Thomas, , Walt Disney, 56–59Google Scholar.

97. Crafton, , Before Mickey, 200Google Scholar.

98. The Fleischer studio of the 1920s and 20s exemplified the changing demographics and prosopographic profile of animation. Although a number of the young animators of the 1920s continued to be migrants from the Midwest and the West Coast, more often than not they were native New Yorkers or residents from nearby. Many of them now attended high school and aspired to enter the medical professions, but were forced (or so they claimed) to drop out for economic reasons. Profiles of Fleischer animators can be found in Culhane, Talking Animals; and Adamson, “Working for the Fleischers,” 23–28. See also John Canemaker interview with Al Eugster, May 13, 1976, Box 18, folder 201, and “Recollections of Dave Fleischer,” Box 11, folder 98, both in Canemaker Collection, NYU; Canemaker, “Grim Natwick;” and Thomas, , Walt Disney, 117Google Scholar.

99. Paul Terry's career trajectory, for example, had taken him from San Francisco in the pre-earthquake years, up the coast to Montana and Oregon, and then to New York (and the Bray studio) before the war. See Paul Terry Oral History, interview by Harvey Deneroff, Rough Transcript, July 28, 1970, Box 24, folder 237, Canemaker Collection, NYU.

100. Starr, Kevin, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 65–68, 120–50Google Scholar; and Watts, , Magic Kingdom, 16–25, 31Google Scholar.

101. Merritt, and Kauffman, , Walt in Wonderland, 50–57Google Scholar.

102. Ibid., 50–51.

103. Walter Lantz's Dinky Doodle cartoons for Bray relied on animated animals superimposed on and acting within live-action scenes with real people. See, for example, Crafton, , Before Mickey, 186–90Google Scholar; and Adamson, , Walter Lantz Story, 50–57Google Scholar. “Pinnacle” to describe Winkler, in Merritt, and Kauffman, , Walt in Wonderland, 50, 53)Google Scholar.

104. Merritt, and Kauffman, , Walt in Wonderland, 66–68, 86–99, 120Google Scholar; Thomas, , Walt Disney, 114Google Scholar; and Recollections of Richard Huemer.

105. On differences in attitude between Disney and Fleischer toward the relative importance of the Story versus Animation Departments, see Langer, Mark, “Institutional Power and the Fleischer Studio: The Standard Production Reference,” Cinema Journal 30 (Winter 1991): 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Disney studio, new sound technologies, and other aesthetic innovations, see, for example, Watts, , Magic Kingdom, 34–35Google Scholar; and Maltin, , Of Mice and Magic, 34–53Google Scholar. See also Klein, Norman M., Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (London: Verso, 1993), 59–67Google Scholar.

106. The full-length feature grew out of several circumstances: the movement of the film industry out west was one; another was the expiration of the original Bray patents, which opened up new technical and aesthetic possibilities; a third was the need to make cartoons economically viable, especially crucial in times of depression. Also an issue was the fact that, as a business, animation production was driven by the needs and demands of distributors and the elaborate networks of exchanges and theater owners. Studios were under tremendous pressure rapidly to churn out new material. Production schedules left little time for reflection, and good cartoons were tremendously labor intensive. The full-length feature was one very expensive solution. It was no longer merely a short accompaniment to the main attraction, but became the main attraction and, if successful, was more cost effective because it would remain in theaters for a longer time.

107. Thomas, , Walt Disney, 115–16Google Scholar; and Culhane, , Talking Animals, 114–27, 132–37Google Scholar. Don Graham's students worked on rapid life sketching. They also had longer sessions drawing from the model and trips to the Los Angeles zoo to study animal anatomy and movement.

108. Interview with Art Babbitt, by Mike Barrier, Box 5, folder 3, Canemaker Collection, NYU.

109. Sklar, , Movie Made America, 195–205Google Scholar; and Watts, , Magic Kingdom, 3–23, 64–100Google Scholar.

110. Kanfer, , Serious Business, 58Google Scholar.

111. Seldes, Gilbert, “The Goblins Catch Up,” Esquire 14 (07 1940): 92Google Scholar, and “Disney and Others,” New Republic 71 (06 8, 1937): 101–2Google Scholar; Feild, Robert, The Art of Walt Disney (London: Collins, 1944)Google Scholar; and Grafly, Dorothy, “America's Youngest Art,” American Magazine of Art 26 (07 1933): 336–42Google Scholar. See also Kammen, Michael, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 223–25Google Scholar; Mikulak, Bill, “Mickey Mouse Meets Mondrian: Cartoons Enter the Museum of Modern Art,” Cinema Journal 36 (1997): 56–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Disney and the Art World,” The Early Years,” Animation Journal, Spring 1996, 18–42Google Scholar; Luckett, Moya, “Fantasia: Cultural Constructions of Disney's ‘Masterpiece,’” in Smoodin, , Disney Discourse, 214–36Google Scholar; Smoodin, , Animating Culture, 96–135Google Scholar; and Watts, , Magic Kingdom, 120–42Google Scholar.

112. I have made much of Blackton's, McCay's, and Fleischer's self-reflexive allusions to artistic identity. One might well ask, however, what were the effects of such workings out of identity? Were animation audiences aware of such issues or did they simply view the cartoons as straightforward comedy? In the realms of turn-of-the-century painting, sculpture, and illustration, these questions of artistic identity were addressed in public and clearly had an impact. Artistic identity and status were negotiated through critical discourse, which in turn shaped public opinion. By contrast, there is little evidence of how audiences responded to animation. For one thing, children were a major element in the audience; for another, there was virtually no print criticism of animated cartoons; McCay's cartoons received short, enthusiastic, but unenlightening notices. Not until Walt Disney did people really pay close attention to cartoons and offer critical analysis. Animators, however, did take notice. Indeed, a broad range of animators besides those mentioned here took up the “artist in the studio” trope. Animators were the ones who had a stake in animators' relations to artists and were clearly aware of the issues. The artistic identity themes served as ways to work through problems that animators did not do more formally in institutions, clubs, or in print. I thank Sarah Burns for raising these issues and for offering, through her own work, instructive points of comparison.

113. Langer, , “Institutional Power,” 3–22Google Scholar; Maltin, , Of Mice and Magic, 38Google Scholar; and Watts, , Magic Kingdom, 109Google Scholar.

114. On the strikes at Fleischer, see Deneroff, Harvey, “‘We Can't Get Much Spinach’!: The Organization and Implementation of the Fleischer Animation Strike,” Film History 1 (1987): 1Google Scholar. See also Deneroff, 's “Popeye the Union Man: A Historical Study of the Fleischer Strike” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1985)Google Scholar; and Cabarga, , Fleischer Story, 140–44Google Scholar. On the Disney strikes, see Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 403–22 (written with Holly Allen)Google Scholar; and Watts, , Magic Kingdom, 203–27Google Scholar.