Whether a film is for the purpose of amusement or to educate, the plan should show that the attainment of something is being striven for. In an educational film this is brought about by an adherence to pedagogical principles. If it is a comic story, due regard must be paid to dramatic construction.
It is obvious that if a humorous scenario has but two characters this will simplify the telling, and the idea of their antagonisms, obstacles, and embarrassing difficulties are easily told. The clash and the struggle between the two can be expressed in many simple ways, the story carried on, curiosity stimulated, and an expectant feeling engendered as to what will happen. The final episode is apt to be some calamitous fall with the whole picture area perhaps filled with a graphic representation of an explosion, to be followed by an after-climax, when the smoke has cleared away, of the victim rubbing his head.
To be sure, an animated cartoon needs a good many more incidents than one calamitous occurrence. It is indispensable, for the sake of an uninterrupted animation, that it should have a succession of distressing mishaps, growing in violence. This idea of a cumulative chain of actions, increasing in force and resultant misfortune, is peculiarly adapted to animated drawings.
The animator, if he is a good draftsman, can manage his little picture people much easier than the theatrical manager does the members of his company. A great danger, nevertheless, is that the animator, with this facility of doing whatever he pleases with his characters, may overdo the matter. He must be careful that he does not create too much business for his actors, and so retard the sequence of those episodes proper to the plot.
The very best type of animated cartoon tells the story from the very first incidents and throughout its whole continuance to the crisis, and the ending by pantomimic acting only. This means that there is no dialogue lettered on the drawings themselves. Symbolical signs, like exclamation-marks, sound-suggesting letters, or the like, are naturally proper and happy additions to drawings; but as little dialogue as possible should be used in drawings. They break the continuity of the animation, for one thing. Although it is true that balloons with their wording make an easy way for the animator to have the automatic counter register “footage” (a consideration appealing to the business sense of the artist), it is only when there is a good jest brought out that lettering on the drawings themselves can be forgiven.
THE PLAINT OF INANIMATE THINGS CAN BE RENDERED EFFECTIVELY ON THE SCREEN.
In the early period of the development of animated comic drawings, not even subtitles were interspersed throughout a film. The entire story was told by pantomime. Nowadays it is becoming the fashion to use subtitles, and have them to introduce incidentals, mark a change of scene, or bring in a witty remark. Wording brought into a cartoon film this way is often felicitous and technically legitimate. But dialogue, as has been stated, should be kept out of the drawings themselves, not only for the sake of artistic form, but for commercial reasons. (Films intended for exportation to countries where English is not spoken are much more valuable if they are without lettering in the pictorial parts. With all wording on separate titles, it is very easy to change them and have them joined to the film proper.)
The above statement with its frank allusion to a matter of business seems to be getting away from our subject; but it is not, as it calls to our attention the principal quality of a comic screen drawing—namely, pantomime—and it emphasizes, too, the universality of pantomime. An animated cartoon clever in gesturing is understood by all races.
It is to be remembered that pantomime is a matter of interpretation, both on the stage by an actor and by the artist when he essays to represent it pictorially. If it were an actual copying of nature, it only would be as interesting as a normal photograph; and that is not very interesting. As in all interpretative arts there is a slight betrayal of the mechanical means, or processes, so in pantomime there is a suggestion of the mechanistic. Let us recall the rhythmical and toy-like movements of the actors whom we have seen playing in some whimsical dumb show.