The making of animated cartoons is one of the most difficult, most complicated, and most highly skilled operations in the whole ot motion picture production.
When a film actor has learned the speed at which he should move before a motion picture camera, his work becomes easy. It is simple for such an actor, for example, to lift a hand above his head while walking across a floor.
There is, however, no known method of making a pen and ink drawing lift a hand or walk across a floor.
The illusion of such an action must be created by the photography of a series of individual drawings, and the perfection of the illusion, of course, depends on the progression of the drawings them- selves and the speed at which they are photographed.
For the making of each Mickey Mouse cartoon, as a rule, about 5,000 different drawings have to be made, which means that, generally, an individual picture is not seen for more than one-fourth of a second.
Then, infinite care is taken to ensure that the action of the Mickey cartoon flows with the musical setting.
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