”You have these very early experiments with drawings that move. You have these ideas of taking characters that were either in a comic, or in the newspaper and turning those into animated shorts,” Says Kimson Albert. “For example, Gertie the Dinosaur with Winsor McCay was an early version of animation.”
He had a Gorgo act where he actually interacted with an animated version of Gertie the Dinosaur. Behind him, he would throw grid an apple and all these interactive things. It was very new. It was kind of a novelty thing at that time.
You have the early Disney shorts, and you have early Fritz the Cat shorts. Everything is a mouse or some sort of animal that’s cute or mischievous or any of these things.
Steamboat Willie is a short that’s the first sound short animated short. Before then, you wouldn’t have sound synced to the action, which is a Disney film. This turns everything around. Now that the cartoon has sound to it, we’re in a whole of the universe essentially. Film goes from like a Dark Age and then after one film into this incredibly new territory of sound. Then there’s time to adjust that.
With Disney, he was able to experiment with these shorts, prove the kind of ideas, and prove the experiments that they were working on with movement and character in the shorts. They would do all these incredible things with camera. They would test out things with the facts and everything like that.
Then when it came time to do his first feature, which was Snow White, he takes all of this knowledge and his best animators and effects people and throws them on this incredible project that transforms the entire film industry period. It is the biggest thing at the time. Snow White is the definitive mother of invention when it comes to animated film. If you do your research, you will know that the DNA of all animated film features comes from Snow White and character animation.
The evolution of the animated feature is basically the evolution of the Disney studio. They were the ones who were rolling out the Cadillacs of animation. They were the highest level of quality in terms of character animation, in terms of backgrounds, and in terms of camera.
