Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

  As recounted in Stefan Kanfer’s fantastic history of animation, Serious Business (1997), early in 1933, Walt Disney gave a personal tour of the Disney animation studio to movie star Mary Pickford. Disney was considering making a live-action version of Alice in Wonderland with Pickford in the title role, and in fact shot some test footage of the actress…

Now THAT’S comedy.

I’ve previously mentioned my all-abiding love for the 1990s cartoon series Animaniacs here on the blog. Produced by Steven Spielberg, the show was more than a mere cartoon–it was a cleverly-constructed show that appealed to both adults and children with a hilarious combination of slapstick-y violence, meta references, and witty send-ups of pop culture icons. This week,…

Wait ’til you get a view of sweet Betty.

In 1918, Max Fleischer, the innovative mind behind early Walt Disney Studios rival Fleischer Studios, began producing a series of silent cartoon shorts called Out of the Inkwell. Much like earlier efforts by animation pioneers such as Winsor McCay, many entries in this series combined live-action with animation, showing Fleischer drawing the figures that would then…

Hey, Pluto!

By 1930, Mickey Mouse had become a bona fide animated star. Since his creation two years earlier at the hands of Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, he had starred in almost two dozen black-and-white shorts, ranging from his ever-popular debut in Steamboat Willie to Mickey’s Follies (1929), which introduced “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo,” the song that would remain Mickey’s theme for…