This month we take a slight digression from last month’s 1930s era of Hollywood’s Golden Age to step back and look at the early years of animated film.
Nowadays, of course, cartoons are big business – not just on screen, but in terms of theme parks, merchandise and all the many and various ‘experiences’ available for consumption today. But back in the early 1900s, animation was a creative endeavour, driven by curiosity and experimentation.
Watching the earliest animated films and seeing them evolve, it amazed me how quickly animation matured into essentially the same art form we know today, and how watchable those early movies still are.
The first flickers
Back in the 19th century, before cinema was even invented, there were various forms of illusions that wowed audiences with their visual effects, from spinning zoetropes to magic lanterns to eerie phantasmagoria shows. I did some reading around all this when I started this column and I’m still not sure whether these early precursors lean more towards animation rather than film per se.
By the early 1900s, artists had begun experimenting with ways to bring drawings to life, frame by painstaking frame. One of the first to succeed was J. Stuart Blackton, an Anglo-American filmmaker with a vaudevillian sense of humour. His 1906 film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is often considered the first animated film.
It’s not long, and like most of the films of this era, it’s freely available online.
Watching it now, it’s both easily identifiable as old, and also familiar: the stop-motion technique it uses wouldn’t be out of place today and it’s full of charm. If it was in HD it would look perfectly modern (except, perhaps, for the smoking). There’s no story or plot, just transformation.
A few years later, across the Atlantic, French caricaturist Émile Cohl made Fantasmagorie (1908), a work that still feels like a fever dream.
Stick figures ride elephants, fall apart, reassemble, and float through surreal vignettes that prefigure both surrealism and slapstick. Again, there’s no coherent story here: Cohl’s film wasn’t about characters or consistency, but rather about motion, and seeing what could be done in this new format.
Then came a creature who truly moved with personality: Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), created by Winsor McCay.
McCay was already a celebrated newspaper cartoonist, but Gertie was something else entirely. She had weight, emotion, and charm. McCay was also a Vaudeville performer, and Gertie was conceived as part of a live act, where McCay interacted with the film itself.
Eventually it was prepared for cinematic release but I love the idea of a live stage show with interactive animation – it makes me think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
From experiments to industry
By the 1920s, animation was evolving from a curiosity-driven art form into a business. Studios sprang up across the United States, often producing short films to screen before feature films in cinemas. The big names of the silent era – Bray Studios, Fleischer, Disney – began developing house styles and recurring characters, often rooted in vaudeville and slapstick traditions.
Among these, two men would shape the course of animation more than any others: Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. Their partnership was the fusion of dreamer and technician.
Together they created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, then, after a messy contract dispute, reimagined him with rounder ears and a squeakier voice. Thus, in 1928, Steamboat Willie introduced the world to Mickey Mouse.
It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary Steamboat Willie was. It wasn’t the first cartoon with sound, but it was one of the first where sound and movement were perfectly synchronised. Every whistle, foot-tap and tail wag matched the rhythm, causing audiences to erupt in laughter and applause.
Meanwhile, the Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, were pushing in a very different direction. Where Disney polished and sentimentalised, the Fleischers leaned into surrealism and the energy of the jazz-age.
Their Out of the Inkwell series, starring Koko the Clown, blurred the boundary between the real world and the animated one. Later came Betty Boop, an icon of 1930s glamour and mischief, and Popeye, the gruff sailor with a spinach-fuelled moral compass.
Their animation style was all rubber limbs and risqué humour – less wholesome than Disney, but brimming with life. When I was a child watching these cartoons, I knew they weren’t modern, but I didn’t realise quite how old they were.
Colour, personality, and the 1930s boom
The 1930s brought technological breakthroughs that would allow animation to take it’s place in the Golden Age of Hollywood: Technicolor and the multiplane camera. Suddenly, animators could layer depth, light, and rich colour into their drawings. The world of animation exploded into vibrancy.
Disney’s Silly Symphonies series was the testing ground. The lack of recurring characters and the short length of the films allowed animators to experiment with mood, tone, and design.
The Skeleton Dance (1929) is macabre and playful; Flowers and Trees (1932) won the first-ever Oscar for animated short; and The Three Little Pigs (1933) – which I remember from my own childhood – proved that even a five-minute cartoon could have emotional resonance. Audiences left humming “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”, a Depression-era anthem of cheerful defiance.
The rest of the industry followed suit. Warner Bros launched Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, introducing characters with sharper wit and faster pacing – precursors to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. The Fleischer Studios refined Betty Boop and Popeye, while Walter Lantz created Woody Woodpecker’s manic laugh.
Each studio found its own rhythm and identity, reflecting the changing moods of a turbulent decade.
This was also when animators began to think in terms of acting, focusing on imbuing their work with intention. Disney’s animators developed “the illusion of life” – principles of squash, stretch, anticipation, and follow-through that made characters feel genuinely alive. A wink, a sigh, or a stumble could suddenly express psychology.
The first animated features
By the mid-1930s, Walt Disney had his sights set higher. He wanted to make a feature-length animated film – a concept the press called “Disney’s Folly”, so sceptical was the general consensus that feature-length animation could ever be successful. Disney had to mortgage his own house to fund it, as well as taking out a further loan in order to complete it.
In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered. It was an immediate triumph, both critically and financially. The film’s emotional depth and visual beauty stunned audiences. Snow White wasn’t a gag or a sketch; she was a character with fragility, fear, and grace. The dwarfs, meanwhile, each embodied distinct personalities – a miracle of expressiveness in ink and paint.
Decades later, Snow White still ranks among the greatest animated films ever made, not merely for its historical significance but because it remains so watchable. Its pacing, colour design, and emotional sincerity hold up remarkably well; it set a standard for character animation that countless films have since followed but few have matched.
Beneath the technical innovation lies something timeless – a genuine emotional core that continues to move audiences, no matter how sophisticated animation has become in the decades since.
Other studios soon followed. Fleischer Studios released Gulliver’s Travels (1939), ambitious in scope but less cohesive than Disney’s fairy tale. Yet it proved that feature animation wasn’t a one-off novelty. The door had opened to an entire genre.
The end of the beginning
By the close of the 1930s, animation had travelled a long way from chalk faces and stick men. It had become a fully-fledged cinematic language – one capable of humour, pathos, fantasy, and emotion.
The medium that began as a magician’s trick had become a way of dreaming on screen.
From Fantasmagorie to Snow White, early animation is really a story of curiosity refined by craft. Every frame carries that early wonder – the belief that even the simplest line, if drawn with care, might spring to life. Watching those early films today, the simplicity is part of the spell. We can still see the hand behind the illusion, the artist coaxing something into being.
There’s something endlessly touching about those first experiments. They remind us that before there was spectacle, there was play
And perhaps that’s why Snow White endures. For all its polish, it still feels handmade – a human creation born of imagination, patience, and a belief that drawings could hold emotion.
It bridges the earliest sketches of McCay’s Gertie and the digital wonders of today, although there is a charm to these older, hand-painted animations that for me will always be more visually pleasing than computer animation.
Animation has never stopped evolving, of course. Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Disney’s golden age, and Japanese animé all grew from these early sketches. But there’s something endlessly touching about those first experiments. They remind us that before there was spectacle, there was play. And before there was Pixar, there was Gertie the Dinosaur, lifting her foot and taking the very first step.
Do you have a favourite animated movie? I’m excited to watch more animation as I progress through the decades, but this month’s films were such a delight. Let us know on our social channels.