Readers of The American Cinematographer have frequently asked how modern animated cartoons are made. [American Cinematographer feels] particularly fortunate, therefore, in obtaining this series of articles in which Mr. Fallberg will detail the progress of a Walt Disney cartoon from the inception of the story-idea to the completion of the final technicolor print.
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BEING funny is a serious business. Particularly in the animated cartoon industry: a cartoon studio's raw materials are ideas, and it must take these ideas, put them through an assembly line, and mold them into a commercial product to be sold on a competitive market.
And assembly-line methods are essential to successful animated cartoon production on anything approaching a commercial scale. It is technically possible for one person to do everything from the first preliminary story-sketches to photographing the finished drawings on film: but there is such an infinitude of detail involved (if you count the sketches and tracings, there are probably two or three drawings to be made for every frame in the completed film!) that the number of hands doing the work simply must be multiplied. And if the product of these many hands and brains is to be a coherent whole, their work must be coordinated — standardized — to get the desired results.
Standardization, then, is the necessary element in animated cartoon production. Conformity of methods and systematized procedure is absolutely essential in all phases of the production of a cartoon — from the initial story idea right on through to the finished color print. A picture passes through so many different hands during the course of production that confusion would result from inconsistent methods. After all, a cartoon studio is a factory in which entertainment is manufactured by the assembly-line method; and the secret of success on the assembly line lies in doing the job the same way each time, for a uniform result.
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