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MAGIC-LANTERN CARTOONS TRAIN ARMY MECHANICS

Magic lanterns have joined the Army.

Projectors that are direct descendants of the parlor lanterns of a generation ago are now being used to train rookies in the mechanics of modern motor vehicles.

They are used with what are known as “educational reading slidefilms,” because this has been found to be the speediest and most effective means of training mechanics. And speed is necessary, because by this coming June the Army expects to have 190,000 motor vehicles. Read the rest of this entry »

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Animated Cartoons for the Amateur Cameraman

by HI SIBLEY

With your amateur movie camera you can make amusing animated cartoons which will give a new zest to home entertainments. In this article Mr. Sibley tells you just how to go about it to produce creditable animated cartoon films.

THE amateur movie cameraman has a broad field of experiment before him, and trying out animated cartoons will afford no little amusement.

Of course, the comical little figures we see in the theatres, with their exaggerated but still lifelike movements, are the result of long and painstaking experience, but the amateur, by beginning with the simplest ideas will eventually develop very creditable skill in this unique work.
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Draw Me!
TRY FOR A FREE ART COURSE
Copy this girl and send us your drawing — perhaps you’ll win a COMPLETE FEDERAL COURSE FREE! This contest is for amateurs, so if you like to draw do not hesitate to enter.

Prizes for Five Best Drawings — FIVE COMPLETE ART COURSES FREE, including drawing outfits. (Value of each course, $185.00.)
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Making Mickey Mouse Act for the Talkies

How do they make those animated movie cartoons of Mickey Mouse and his animal relatives which have proved so popular? In this article the author explains the tedious process by which cartoons are brought to life.

by Gordon S. Mitchell
Mr. Mitchell is a member of the Sound Department of Universal Pictures Corporation, and is well qualified to write on technical phases of movie production.

THE next time you drop into your favorite theater and watch Mickey Mouse, Oswald the Rabbit, Krazy Kat, or any of their familiar cartooned brethren scamper across the screen in a series of animated musical episodes, stop and ponder for a moment on these weighty facts: Read the rest of this entry »

CARTOONISTS MAKE BIG MONEY

Every time Sid Smith makes a stroke of his pen, mil-ions of people laugh. Every laugh means money for the man who creates it. Andy and Min earn big money for Sid Smith every day.
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Charles Addams: Car-toonist

THE day that Charles Addams drew the strange skiing cartoon at the left he became famous. That ski sketch even became a test for insanity—if you could see nothing wrong, the keeper had a nice padded place for you. But the day for Charlie was the one a year ago when Playwright Philip Barry gave him a beat-up Mercedes-Benz. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mickey Mouse Goes Classical

By ANDREW R. BOONE

MOVING sound has been added to moving pictures to bring greater realism to the screen. Accompanying Walt Disney’s newest Technicolor creation, “Fantasia,” in which Mickey Mouse and a host of new companions perform to the rhythms of classical music, this latest Hollywood invention made its first public appearance a few weeks ago at the Broadway Theater in New York.
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Nutty Inventions Paid Me A Million

by RUBE GOLDBERG
Famous Cartoonist as told to Alfred Albelli

Four hundred inventions a year, all of them of exceedingly “nutty” brand, qualify Rube Goldberg, the famous cartoonist, as one of the country’s most prolific and best paid inventors. The fact that his inventions never get beyond the pen and ink stage doesn’t prevent him from “cleaning up” from them.

“How did you get that way? How do you do it? How do you get away with it? How do you get them to fall for your stuff? How are you, anyway?”

There you have the barrage of questions which are popped at me every day of my life, including days when the game is called on account of rain. It’s a good thing a humorous cartoonist has got a sense of humor. Or I might borrow from that jolly English expression and say, “It’s fortunate my humor is not bad.”
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What Makes MICKEY MOUSE Move?

Illustrated by Walt Disney

Fifty highly trained artists and scores of sound engineers unite to bring fast-moving animated talking cartoons to screen. Here’s how amazing job is accomplished.

by EARL THEISEN – Honorary curator motion pictures, Los Angeles Museum

MAKING Mickey Mouse move is not a mysterious technical process that Walt Disney does behind studio walls. It is an interesting thing that everyone can understand. The methods of animating a cartoon are fascinating. The fact that a hand-drawn picture can show motion is little short of miraculous.

A cartoon studio, in many respects, may be compared with a real life studio. In both they have stars or characters, a story or scenario, a director, and sets. In the Disney studio, the stars are cartoon pictures painted on sheets of celluloid and the sets are not made of wood by a carpenter, but are water color paintings made by an artist. The cartoon director is known as the “layout” man. As the term implies, it is his duty to lay out the story. He does this in the form of rough pencil sketches which serve as a guide for the artists who draw the story action. These sketches illustrate the various things the cartoon character does in the story. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sound Tricks of Mickey Mouse

Squeaks, squawks, oinks and music—it’s another animated cartoon hit set to music in a brand new way. Read how the hay baler joins a symphony.

by Earl Theisen
Illustrated by Walt Disney

MUSIC and noises in the animated cartoon interpret the action of the story. The narrative theme of the music and what is called the “sound effects” punctuates and emphasizes the story.

By playing on the aural nerves with symbolic sounds and noises the psychological reaction of the audience is controlled and varied according to the dramatic and emotional needs of the cartoon story.
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Real Scenery for Popeye

MIDGET SETS GIVE DEPTH TO NEW MOVIE CARTOONS

LIKE immense slices of pie on a twelve-foot plate, curious miniature movie sets made of clay, wood, sponges, plaster, and cardboard now add new realism to animated cartoons by creating an illusion of depth. In the New York studios where Popeye, Betty Boop, and other famous characters of the screen cartoons come to life, such sets are replacing the flat, sketched-in backgrounds familiar in the past.
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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

A Famous Fairy Tale Is Brought to the Screen as the Pioneer Feature-Length Cartoon in Color

By ANDREW R. BOONE

BEHIND the black walls of an air-conditioned Hollywood studio laboratory, the shutter on a strange eight-deck camera flicked open and shut the other day, exposing the last of 362,919 frames of color film. At that instant was completed the first feature-length motion-picture cartoon ever created, one requiring more than 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawings and water-color paintings. Also, at that moment, depth, a sense of perspective and distance hitherto seen only in “live action” pictures, sprang into being for cartoons.

Both the giant camera and the picture had their beginnings in a decision made four years ago by Walt Disney, famed creator of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to produce a feature based on a well-known folk tale. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a movie version of Grimm’s famous fairy tale filmed by the multiplane camera, is the result.
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