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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BIG NEWS FOR ALL 8MM-16MM HOME MOVIE FANS

Now Own and Show In CASTLE FILMS
Walter Lantz’s Famous Cartoons

WOODY WOODPECKER
IN FOUR GREAT COMEDIES
PANTRY PANIC-Winter catches Woody unprepared! He and Tom Cat both starved! Wild kitchen riot ensues ending in a fun-filled climax.
KNOCK, KNOCK-Woodv drills through Andy’s roof! Andy tries vainly to chase him until Woody falls for beautiful decoy pigeon! Hilarious finish!
THE CRACKED NUT-Daffy Woody carves trees into totem poles with beak! Tries it on marble! OUCH! Sees nutty doctor for treatment! Uproarious ending!
THE SCREWDRIVER-Woody’s crazy driving disrupts traffic! He slugs cop and returns in various disguises until cop goes daffy! Laugh-loaded finish!
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Making of a Funny

By EDWARD W. MURTFELDT

RESEARCH workers studying the reading habits of newspaper buyers have found out that more people look at the “funny” pages than at any other single section of a newspaper. Yet few cartoon enthusiasts realize how elaborate is the process that brings a comic from the brain and drawing board of a cartoonist through the involved stages of coloring, engraving, mat making, stereotyping, and printing to its final form as
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How Disney Combines Living Actors with His Cartoon Characters

UP GOES another character in the Walt Disney Hall of Fame. Out comes another surprise from the Disney bag of tricks. To be specific, Panchito, a Mexican rooster with as much personality as Donald Duck or Joe Carioca, is making his first appearance; and on the screen with him will be live, three-dimensional actors.
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How THREE COLOR MOVIES ARE MADE

WOULD you like to know how the color in a Walt Disney Silly Symphony or in “La Cucaracha” is obtained? Have you ever wondered how a motion picture film, in which each picture is about the size of a postage stamp, is colored so it can be magnified 35,000 or more times and still retain the beautiful coloring of a Silly Symphony?
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How Comic CARTOONS Make Fortunes

The “funnies” you read every day bring $8,000,000 a year to a small group of 200 cartoonists. How they rose to the top and how you can enter their select circle is told here by leading comic artists.

THAT laugh you had today over your favorite funny strip is worth money— $200 to $1,000 a day to the cartoonist that made you chuckle.

His pen and ink characters are part of a great $8,000,000 industry that is far from overcrowded and that is practically depression proof.

Of the 200 successful cartoonists today the majority were not “born artists.” In many cases they were not artists at all, but just fellows with a knack for sketching who thought of a good idea or a funny character that “made a hit” with an editor and eventually with newspaper readers.
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