Never Like the First Time!

The career of every great master has a starting point, usually a masterpiece that they create in order to be accepted by the representatives of their profession based on its quality. A particularly important aspect of the life story of a genius, and one that is fascinating to the wider public, is the question of “How did it begin?” What was the first milestone, without which no further milestones would have followed?

Animated films, like other genres of the moving image, grew out of fairground stunts. The first animated films in the history of cinema were the product of an entertainment industry sustained by a paying public, since the technical characteristics of the art of filmmaking mean that the morals of art history are lost in the question of financing. It is often difficult for the filmmaker to decide whether to be considered a worker of mass entertainment or of high art. But the moving images of Émile Reynaud, Georges Méliès, Segundo de Chomon, Émile Cohl and Winsor McCay are not serial works created in the same fashion: we recognise them from afar, as the films bear the fingerprints of their creators. In fact, the presence of the creator and the master was an integral part of the films at the dawn of cinema history: Méliès and McCay are the protagonists, and the creation itself is the subject of the films. Their films were often screened or shown to their audiences by the creators themselves, as was the case with both the pioneers of European and American animation, Reynaud and McCay, respectively. This self-reflexivity, which was in each film individually shaped, was gradually eclipsed (or became the topos of series, as in the case of the Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell), just as cartoons became a regular programme of film theatres in the USA, thanks to the widespread serialisation of the 1920s.

The creator’s tangible presence can be seen in the artistic animations of European independent filmmakers working without a studio background, whose art predates auteur filmmaking, such as Lotte Reiniger or Berthold Bartosch’s films. In many cases, the financial backing for these large-scale works came from applied films: animation artists financed their autonomous works from the incomes of commissioned artistic commercials (e.g. Oskar Fischinger, Alexandre Alexeïeff), while these short, one- to two-minute commercials built on a strong punchline were also the forerunners of later longer, storytelling films (cf. the commercials of the Hungarian Gyula Macskássy).

These non-serial and non-commissioned animated films were able to reach audiences in Western Europe in alternative screenings organised by film associations or in other, more limited settings. The films of avant-garde artists from the 1930s and 1940s, such as Norman McLaren, Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger, were shown at the first event to present experimental films, the EXPRMNTL International Festival of Experimental Cinema (Festival international du cinéma expérimental) in Belgium, which was held for the first time in 1949.

By the second half of the 1950s, with the advent of television, animated shorts were increasingly being edged out of cinemas. Meanwhile, the number of non-profit animated short films made by independent filmmakers working in the US, Canada and Europe increased year by year. This was also due to the fact that by the end of the 1950s, ideological and stylistic censorship in the countries of the Sovietised European bloc had eased and creators working in state-funded studios such as the NFB, like Zagreb Film, were increasingly able to experiment with animation. At the same time as the New Wave cinema, during the new wave of animation in the 1950s and 1960s, the first short films by authors provided a platform for technical and stylistic experimentation with different artistic approaches. These films often pushed the traditional limits of animated film content. The first works of these animation authors not only bear the hallmarks of masterpieces, such as the mastery of professional basics and skills, but also the hallmarks of their later films, whether in terms of their ‘external’ formal and stylistic form, or in terms of their tone, humour or subject matter.

These short films were presented at specific film festivals, above all the Annecy Festival in France, which was created in 1960 with the declared aim of giving publicity to ‘anti-Disneyesque’, innovative, high-brow, autonomous animated films that pushed the boundaries of filmmaking and reception, and were not functional but artistic, in contrast to the mass-produced mainstream animated films that were being made in Hollywood. At the initiative of ASIFA (Association internationale du film d’animation), animation festivals like Annecy have spread as bastions of animation art, first in Europe and then worldwide: animation film festivals that still exist were born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1972, in Espinho, Portugal, and Ottawa, Canada, in 1976, and in Stuttgart, Germany and Hiroshima, Japan, in 1985. At these major festivals, up-and-coming filmmakers such as Georges Schwizgebel, Caroline Leaf, Joanna Quinn, Piotr Dumała, Priit Pärn, Michaela Pavlatova, Paul Bush, and others have already burst onto the stage with their first films in the full glory of their creative armoury and became instantly part of the larger animation community. The festival organisers quickly recognised the importance of the first film awards, which focused the attention of the industry and the public on the new, noteworthy voices of the growing world of animation. This special prize has been awarded in Annecy since 1962 and in Zagreb since 1974. With the proliferation of digital filmmaking and screening technologies after the turn of the millennium, smaller thematic film festivals and competitive shows have been enjoying something of a boom all over the world. Among these, the Primanima Festival in Hungary was specifically designed to showcase emerging animation filmmakers, whether students or débuting directors with their first professional films.

Anna Ida Orosz

animation film historian

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Novice