Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

History has belied the field of animation with misplaced emphases and ethnocentric retellings. First, animation did not start with Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse; the first animated show was Pantomimes lumineuses , produced in Paris in 1892 by Emile Reynaud. Second, the pioneers were not solely the Americans James Stuart Blackton, Winsor McCay, John Randolph Bray, or the Fleischer brothers; others were animating in Argentina, where Quirino Cristiani made the world's first feature-length film, El Apóstol (The Apostle), in 1917; and in the UK, Spain, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, and Scandinavia, and parts of Asia, such as India, Japan, and China. Early in the twentieth century, the German avant-garde film community took to animation through the experiments of artists such as Hans Richter, Walther Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, and Lotte Reiniger, and in France, Emile Cohl and Georges Méliès added much to the quality of early animation; Cohl with his graphics, Méliès with his ability to blur the line between live action and animated cinema. Some of the earliest animation in Asia resulted out of necessity and experimentation. In India it happened when in 1915 →  cinema pioneer G. W. Phalke did not have sufficient film stock to continue making features and resorted to doing animated shorts. In Japan Seitaro Kitayama, Junichi Kouchi, and Oten Shimokawa in the 1910s separately and successfully ... log in or subscribe to read full text