The problem with animated cartoons was baked in on Day One.
Winsor McKay was not the creator of cartoons, but he’s close enough for discussion’s sake. Right away with his inaugural film,, he devotes half the running time to emphasizing how gruelingly hard the whole enterprise is: the months of work, the towering stacks of drawings. Eventually the animation starts, his famous newspaper cartoons spring to life, and all that effort is legitimized. But as thrilling as the fruits of his labors are, he makes sure to keep the labor part of it in full view.
This was the problem: making pictures moves means drawing an absurdly unreasonable number of pictures. As magic tricks go, this one’s nightmarishly hard.
And this sets something of an upper limit to the enterprise: detail-intensive work like this can’t be easily rushed. So, as a business concern, making animated cartoons profitable means one of two things. Either a) upselll the hard work and try to get audiences to pay a premium for the technically difficult work you’re doing, or b) try to find a way to get away with having the pictures not move.
This is the story of Plan B.
In a way, Winsor McKay’s repeated invocation of how much time and how many drawing it took him to make his films was his version of Plan A. Walt Disney perfected this approach. Starting with behind-the-scenes footage in The Reluctant Dragon and continued in the Disneyland TV series, he monetized his own overhead costs, selling audiences on the notion that Disney films were superior because of all the innovative, exhausting work that went into them.
As the preeminent brand name in animated entertainment, Disney was also an expert in Plan B.
Of course, the simplest way of avoiding animation is to use live-action instead—as Winsor McKay did for the first half of his debut film. As audiences became accustomed to animated cartoons, such cheating would be harder to get away with.
A variation of the idea was to commingle cartoons and live-actors in the same frame—a la Mckay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, or Walt Disney’s Alice series. But this technique was sufficiently challenging as to present too many problems of its own.
Actually, McKay’s use of live action in his debut film is more of a Plan A move—a way to remind audiences that they should be grateful to be seeing any cartoon at all.
Walt Disney was a master of the Plan A promotion—in The Reluctant Dragon and TV’s Disneyland series he used behind-the-scenes footage (both real and faked) to play up his studio’s commitment to being on the innovative cutting edge of the form (never mind if this was true—it was his sales pitch).
The problem with the Plan A sales pitch though is that there was no mechanism by which to charge audiences a premium for premium quality entertainment. If you say Snow White and the Seven Dwarves cost more to make than a comparable live-action feature, Disney had to make up the difference in volume sales.
Thus the allure of Plan B. Ironically, it was the Plan A-focused Reluctant Dragon that made substantial in-roads on Plan B cost-cutting. One of the best remembered and most celebrated sequences in this poorly-remembered and little-celebrated film is the “Baby Weems” sequence. Presented as a story pitch by Disney artists using storyboards to explain what the cartoon would look like when they get around to making it, the gimmick is that this “pitch” is the cartoon. There is no “other” version. The mostly static storyboards tell the story with panache.
Disney’s Three Caballeros continued the thread of Plan B entertainment: a mix of live-action and animation, and in increased reliance on beautiful and evocatively rendered static images in place of motion for motion’s sake.
Meanwhile over at Warner Brothers’ Termite Terrace, an artist named Chuck Jones was cooking up an even cleverer solution to the problem.
There are lots of reasons to lionize Charles M. Jones. One was his impeccable understanding of comic timing. He knew exactly how many jokes he needed to make a Road Runner cartoon (11, if you were wondering). Jokes have rhythm—a punchline, then a topper, then a take, then a double take. The key to it all was in mediating (read: controlling) an audience’s reaction. You will laugh when I want you to, and you won’t stop until I’m ready.
The masters of the great “take” (Edgar Kennedy, Jimmy Finlayson…) understood that their role was to give audiences a chance to laugh at the jokes. And this did’t require them to do all that much. Just strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.
Jones ported the concept into Toontown—punctuating his jokes with well-timed “takes” where the action freezes to let the laughter land. The funnier Chuck Jones cartoons involve a high quantity of motionless poses—what was funny was also economical.
Yet few of his competitors picked up the technique for themselves—perhaps it depended too much on a hard-to-replicate mastery of comic timing.
The final word in limited animation was, naturally enough, the “Limited Animated” promulgated by Hanna-Barbera on TV. It was a technique rooted in the mathematics of showing films on TV. A Winsor McKay or Walt Disney or Chuck Jones film was made up of 24 discrete images every second. But an American television broadcast consisted of 30 frames per second. To show a Bugs Bunny cartoon on TV meant that some of those 24 frames had to be duplicated to turn 24 into 30. And no one noticed.
So if that wasn’t objectionable, where was the limit? How many frames per second could be duplicated before audiences found in bothersome?
Turns out the sweet spot was 15. In any second you could duplicate each frame once, and only need 15 discrete pictures per second. That, and since you needed to redraw only the parts that actually moved, if you kept the action limited you didn’t need to redraw very much at all.
This made cartoons cost-effective for weekly television. But this itself carried a cost.
Back in 1941, Disney learned the hard way on The Reluctant Dragon that Plan A and Plan B tend to cancel each other out. It’s tough to sell audiences on the prestige factor of entertainment that is self-evidently full of cost-cutting cheats.
As for the generation that grew up saturated with The Flintstones, Johnny Quest, and Rocky and Bullwinkle, animated cartoons came to be defined by the lowest-end budget product.
This effectively killed the premium end of the business, until the likes of Toy Story and a new era of CGI-based ‘toons could emerge untainted by the lingering odor of Plan B.