Early Cartoons PDF

STAGE 5 Unit focus: Cartoons Text focus: Information Text Fantasmagorie Early Cartoons Have you ever returned home, thrown yourself onto your sofa or bed and slobbed-out in front of your favourite cartoon series? It may surprise you to know that this is something that children (and adults) have enjo...

STAGE 5 Unit focus: Cartoons Text focus: Information Text Fantasmagorie Early Cartoons Have you ever returned home, thrown yourself onto your sofa or bed and slobbed-out in front of your favourite cartoon series? It may surprise you to know that this is something that children (and adults) have enjoyed doing for over 60 years, since the 1960s! Animated cartoons have actually been around nearly twice as long as this, though. The first animated cartoon is widely considered to be a short film called Fantasmagorie, which was made in 1908 by a man named Émile Cohl. The short feature was just over a minute long and can still be watched on YouTube. It involves simple white line drawings on a dark background and no sound at all. That’s probably not a surprise considering that actual movies didn’t successfully have sound until the 1920s. For a while, cartoons remained short and curious li le things that were shown before or after longer feature-length films. The first full-length animated cartoon didn’t appear until 1917 when an Argentinian man named Quirino Cristiani released a 70-minute animated film called El Apóstol. Though we know it existed, no copies survived to the present day, so it isn’t possible to watch it now. The first full-length film that survived was one called Adventures of Prince Achmed (although its original title was in German). It was released in 1926 by Lo e Reiniger and her husband, Carl Koch. The 1920s proved to be a turning point for animated cartoons. It was in this decade that Walt Disney began to make his name. The first full-length Disney cartoon was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was released in 1937. Walt Disney began his animation career in the early 1920s when he created a company called Laugh-O-Gram Films. They created short animations for local theatres; they soon moved on to create animated versions of classic fairytales, each one around seven minutes long. This love of fairy tales formed the basis of the Disney company’s first films. In 1927, Walt Disney created a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He lost the character and his animators to a rival the following year. He bounced back by all resources ©2023 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com creating a plucky young mouse called Mickey, who, it’s fair to say, was quite successful! Many of these early cartoons were animated in black and white. This was largely because cinemas weren’t able to show colours at the time. The first full-colour animation was Flowers and Trees, a collaboration between Disney and Technicolor in 1932. Disney had the exclusive rights to use Technicolor until 1935. After that, coloured animations became the standard. So, if cartoons were commonplace from the 1930s, why did it take 30 years before the first animated cartoon TV series hit people’s screens? Quite simply, very few people owned a television set until the late 1950s! The cinema was the only place to go and watch films or cartoons. The first animated series shown on TV was Crusader Rabbit, which aired between 1949 and 1951, and then again in 1959. By the 1960s, more people owned a television, especially in the United States, and it was time for animated sitcoms like The Flintstones and The Jetsons. SUMMARY FOCUS 1. What was the main difference between Fantasmagorie and El Apóstol? 2. How did the first animations by Walt Disney link to the later films? 3. Who came first, Mickey Mouse or Oswald Rabbit? 4. Why didn’t Disney continue to use Oswald Rabbit? 5. Why weren’t cartoons popular on televisions in the 1950s? R R V V I VIPERS QUESTIONS What was special about Flowers and Trees? What was the name of the first cartoon series shown on television? What does the phrase “began to make his name” mean? If something is “commonplace”, what does it tell you about it? Why is it hard to know much about El Apóstol? all resources ©2023 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com