Animation Before Disney

Mickey Mouse arrived in 1928; by then animation was thirty years old and had already produced its first stars. This Reel is the pre-history, from chalk drawings to the studio cartoon.

J. Stuart Blackton's The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) are the first films to animate drawings frame by frame. Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908), 700 drawings photographed on a light box, is the first fully animated film. Winsor McCay, the greatest newspaper cartoonist of his day, took the form to another level: Little Nemo (1911), How a Mosquito Operates (1912), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) — the first animated character audiences fell in love with — and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), the first animated documentary and the longest animated film made until then. All four are on the National Film Registry.

Ladislas Starevich's The Cameraman's Revenge (1912), made in Moscow with embalmed beetles, is the first masterpiece of stop-motion. The American studio cartoon emerges with John Randolph Bray's Colonel Heeza Liar (1917), Earl Hurd's Bobby Bumps (1917), the Krazy Kat and Mutt and Jeff series (1916–1920), and Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables (1925).

Max and Dave Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series — The Tantalizing Fly (1919), Fishing (1921) — put Koko the Clown into live-action New York with the rotoscope they had patented. McCay's late films, The Centaurs and Bug Vaudeville (both 1921), show him experimenting even as the studios took over. And Felix the Cat, created by Otto Messmer for Pat Sullivan's studio, was the first true cartoon star: Felix in Hollywood (1923) and Felix Finds 'Em Fickle (1925) show why Chaplin was said to be his only rival in popularity.

Everything here was published before 1929 and is in the public domain in the United States; most titles are also free in the EU, though McCay's estate rights lasted until 2005 and Messmer's until 2054 in countries that apply life-plus-seventy to the animator.