NitrateVille.com • View Topic - Interview With Animation Historian Tom Stathes

4/21/15, 3:31 PMNitrateVille.com View topic - Interview with animation historian Tom Stathes

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Interview with Animation Historian and Collector TommyJos Stathes, On His Cartoon Roots Blu-Ray ReleaseTom Stathes started collecting obscure animation titles as a kid because they were availableon VHS in bargain bins. Now he has one of the largest collections of silent and early soundanimation on film, primarily from small independent studios, in existence, and he's becomean advocate for rediscovery of this neglected corner of film history and its leading pioneers,including John Randolph Bray, Otto Messmer and Max and Dave Fleischer, among manyothers. After years of screening films from his collection(http://www.tommyjose.com/collection.html) and releasing and contributing to home-brewcompilations on DVD, he curated an assortment of these films for Turner Classic Movies onthe occasion of the 100th anniversary of Bray's studio last October, and (with the aid of hisfriends at Thunderbean (http://www.thunderbeananimation.com) , another label releasing obscureanimation titles) produced a professional blu-ray release called Cartoon Roots, showing thedevelopment of early animation and making the case for paying it attention. (You can orderit directly here (http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Roots-Blu-ray-DVD-Combo/dp/B00O5TOD0K) .) Iinterviewed him by email about his interest in early animation.

Images courtesy of Tom Stathes.



J.R. Bray's The Artist's Dream (1913)You obviously think John Randolph Bray is an important, underrated figure not leastbecause you named one of your sites for him. What makes Bray worthy of rediscovery?

Brays studio (formed 1913, incorporated 1914) was simply the first successful studiodedicated to animation production, and that fact alone makes his accomplishments andhistory worth rediscovery. Over the last few decades, Bray has been researched and coveredin history books, but there has usually been a certain level of discomfort among historiansand animators surrounding the subject. Bray had figured out how to organize and monetizea new frontier, and in doing this, he often stepped on others toes and most likely stoleideas from others. Bray was also terribly litigious, often making it difficult or impossible tolet others enter and succeed in the animation industry without paying his patent companyfor a license to use the cel technique.

From an artistic and creative standpoint, its very easy to understand this discomfortsurrounding Bray. However, almost from the start, animation quickly became a verycommercialized industry rather than an independent, outsider art form. Aside from beingcurious about the valuable histories and studio stories attached to Bray, and the more thanfive hundred animated films produced by him, I think its important to wonder what of those



wonderful beloved Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons would have been produced, as thecommercial products they were, without Bray initially founding the industry.

You call Col. Heeza Liar the first recurring character in animation. What makes himseem a consistent character in a way that hadn't been done before?

To be more specific, Heeza Liar was the first character created specifically for the cinemascreen, and it happened to be a recurring series at that. Previously, Emil Cohl wasresponsible for a series of films featuring The Newlyweds, which were characters from anewspaper comic. Col. Heeza Liar was created specifically for film, and Bray produced twoseries of films starring the tall tale-teller, from 1913 to 1917 and 1922 to 1924.



One of the lines about early film that I always think about is Charles Musser's, that weshouldn't look at early films as merely tentative steps toward later film they had theirown purposes, artistic intentions etc. and those might be very different from whatbecame standard filmmaking technique and language. That's a real issue withanimation, because we unconsciously assume everything is an imperfect step towardone ultimate goal, Disney-style feature perfection. So what do you think is differentabout early animation how should we be looking at it to see what people wanted todo when they saw that drawings could be made to move?

This point and Mussers sentiment you bring up is an incredibly important thing to considerwhen looking at early animation, and one that I feel is lacking in popular or typicaltreatments of animation history. Sure, there are quite a few people who love and appreciateearly works as-is, purely for what they are, but this unconditional appreciation is rare.Generally speaking, the dominant thinking in animation fandom and research tends to bewhat you mentioned; that Disney-style perfection is the ideal. Another school of thoughtprofesses that Golden Age Warner Bros. animation is the alternate ideal, in terms of visualstyle but especially in terms of humor, pacing, and cleverness in gags. In both cases, the twostudios 1930s-1940s product (especially Technicolor) can be considered the artistic heightof commercial animation on many levels, and I would have to agree.

Early animation, particularly of the silent era, often exhibits wonderful artistic styles andfascinating techniques, and more importantly, it boasts a significant record ofexperimentation and discovery that the later popular classics only built upon. The earlyanimated cartoons are a valuable visual record of artistic and technical accomplishmentsmade by illustrators and early filmmaking pioneers who were learning as they went along.Save for one book in the 1920s, there were no written guides or classes for learninganimation, and naturally the resulting early cartoons were often laden with crudities. Itsalways fascinating to me to see the evolution (and improvement) of techniques when certainfilms are watched chronologically; however, later polished productions do not detract fromthe earlier, simpler, and more crude product in my view. It is all very whimsical to me.



How Animated Cartoons Are Made (1919)In the first few years of animation, the simple fact that an inanimate object could be made tomove across the frame was groundbreaking and enough of a novelty for viewers not torequire complex narratives or fine-tuned art on the screen. All of this came about during thetime of trick films, with animation eventually supplanting trick films, and there really was noneed for Disney or Warner Bros. at this point. They came along at the right time, whenaudiences simply tired of pre-existing product. Aside from Winsor McCays efforts, therereally was not even much overly artistic intention in many of the early films. The idea wasmore Hey, I recorded the movement of that object and an audience can watch it later! asopposed to We need to regularly make mini-masterpieces that our distributor, and theaudience, will consistently be happy with. Once you begin to look at the 1920s, the moreadvanced artistry of Otto Messmer (Felix the Cat) and the Fleischer studio (Out of theInkwell) begin to emerge, though they are still far different from mainstream classicanimation many of us know. I think once a person begins to look at early animation whiletaking all of these points into consideration, it might be easier to appreciate what these filmsare and why they look the way they doeven if one might not enjoy them as much or laughas loudly as they would at a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Do you think silent animation is a distinct art form from sound animation, which relies



so heavily on synchronization to music, especially in the early years?

The answer to this is both yes and no. Its true that early sound animation relied heavily onmusic, and in many cases, the animation was produced rhythmically to coincide with amusical soundtrack. Many silent cartoons were obviously not created this way, and play outin a way that makes it obvious no sound elements were kept in mind during production.However, some films and series do work particularly well with post-synched soundtracks,whether the tracks were made for reissue in the 1930s or today. This means even if acartoon was created in the silent era, it often does contain a certain rhythm that works wellwith a custom score or soundtrack.

What got you interested in early animation, versus the familiar characters andfrequently-shown-on-TV shorts of studio era animation?

Its difficult to give a truly definitive answer to a why question like thiswhy does John Doelike baseball or Jane Smith like acid jazz? They just do. In my case, like most children Isuppose, I really enjoyed cartoons. I also had a very intense interest in history from a youngage, and I think thats why the two interests were married, and I began looking into earlyanimation history. Again, its difficult to really explain why, but I always enjoyed Golden Agecartoons (whether on VHS tapes or TV) more than contemporary animation, noticing visualand humor differences (or, shall we say, superiority), and I was always very drawn tomonochromatic films and photographs whenever I saw them. That said, I loved MickeyMouse and Bugs Bunny as a kid. I was always asking people how old something was, andwould often think Whats the oldest example of that object I can see? which is why I beganfocusing more on animations beginnings rather than its climaxes. Especially so once Irealized research and archiving in that particular early period was lacking on a large scale.



How do you find cartoon shorts from this era? Were they widely released to the homemarket?

For as much as theyve been ignored in modern film history scholarship, and generallyneglected in an archival sense all along, many of these films enjoyed lengthy shelf lives insecondary markets. Many of them were copied, sometimes illegally, for home use andeventually for television. In the late 1940s, while distributor M.J. Winkler was ordering thedestruction of her archive of silent 35mm Krazy Kat cartoon negatives, Paul Terry, MaxFleischer, and even Bray were busy re-selling their remaining early films to televisiondistribution. Scholars of dramatic or comedy films may not always like animated films, but



the truth is that cartoons from all periods had more of a timeless commercial value thanolder live action films. While they dont turn up constantly, 16mm prints of many silent-eratitles made for home use, rental, and television were plentiful at one time, and that formatmakes up the bulk of my archive.

So I guess your releases and those from Thunderbean have found an audience forwell-curated programs of early animation, as they keep coming and now they're onblu-ray. What's the reaction to these releases been, and what's next for you afterCartoon Roots?

The reaction has really been fantastic. Making use of the newish Blu-ray format and new HDremastering/restorations/releases helps immensely, in my opinion. Releases like this help fillin a lot of gaps where the major studios and bean counting distributors will not or cannotventure. Most of the time, the films on our releases are "orphan films," meaning that theoriginal production studios or ensuing rights holders folded years ago, nor were intellectualproperty rights enforced after a certain point. That might seem like a bad thing from anarchival standpoint--but keep in mind just how many of the historic major studios, some ofwhich still exist, willfully destroyed films through the decades, which they still owned inbeautiful master materials. While many orphan films may have been handled poorly over theyears, if not entirely lost, their very nature gives us license to breathe new life into the filmsand begin sharing them again.

As for the Cartoons On Film label, I'd love to have a new collection come out sometime thisyear. Perhaps an introductory Bray set; a potpourri of important and fun films from thestudio, much in the spirit of Cartoon Roots. With just one professional release out of thegate and no snowball effect of buyers ordering multiple Cartoons On Film releases, yet,Roots isn't bringing in quite enough to both provide me with meals and fund a secondrelease. I'll probably have to put together a pre-order fundraiser to make this happen. In anideal world, and based purely on the amount of material I have, I could envision having atleast a couple dozen releases out there. There are just several logistical and financial hurdlesto overcome first, and I'm very happy about how supportive everyone has been right off thebat.



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