Showing How They Made Them Move: Early Making-of Documentaries on the Production of Animated Films

Abstract

Contrary to popular belief, ‘making-of’ documentaries are not a phenomenon of contemporary home cinema culture, but have a long pre-DVD history. This article engages with a special subcategory: ‘making-of’ documentaries on the production of animation. With a focus on French and American examples, the author retraces the transition of production imagery from metaleptic cartoons to emergent documentary genres of the 1930s, arguing that this historical shift reformulated the question of how the creation of animated films can be captured cinematically. Providing decidedly nonfiction (but not necessarily ‘objective’) images of the making of animation, the films challenged established concepts to address the realm of cinematic production. The article seeks to examine this theoretical potential, using the notion of a cinematic hors-cadre as a key example.

Keywords

advertising animation animation history Disney documentary featurette Fleischer Studios French animation making-of industrial film

Introduction

In 1938, RKO released the short film How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made. The 8-minute featurette was designed as a special trailer to promote the nationwide release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937). The film begins with the complete opening credits of Snow White, followed by the famous opening of a fairytale book and intriguing questions, posed by a (male) voice-over narrator: ‘Just how was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs created? And how are the famous Disney short films made?’ Following images of beaming neon lights on top of the studio’s main building, and long shots of the staff crossing Hyperion Avenue, the narrator promises an exclusive peak behind ‘the closed doors’ of the ‘famed Hollywood studio’. Decades later, footage from the short film would reappear, albeit in slightly different contexts. Scenes featuring rough animation tests or Hollywood stars attending the Snow White premiere were repeated over and over again in TV documentaries and home video bonus features.¹ Today, these films are equally accessible on online video platforms. Here, they constitute a vital part of what could be described as a digital ‘making-of’ culture: the increasing availability of behind-the-scenes footage online.

However, ‘making-of’ and ‘behind-the-scenes’ films (hereinafter abbreviated as ‘making-of’, unless specified otherwise) date back to formats significantly older than online video platforms or disc media. The aim of this article is to examine a distinct strand of making-ofs from the 1930s, of which How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made is a prominent, yet not sole example. In a decade marked by the emergence of the feature-length cartoon and operational expansions at Disney and its competitor Fleischer, but also by the introduction of the Hays code, economic instabilities and labour-related unrest, various making-ofs sought to advertise animation as a regular part of the film industry. They strategically portrayed animation studios as well-organized providers of morally unsuspicious, technically sophisticated screen entertainment.

This promotional goal corresponds with a notable historic shift. Throughout the 1930s, moving images about the production of animated films would migrate from the silent cartoon to a new environment of decidedly factual filmmaking, such as the newsreel, the educational and the industrial film. In this sense, making-ofs about animation can be regarded as a bridge between the playful, self-referential cartoons of the 1920s and subsequent documentary formats, such as the behind-the-scenes footage used in Disney’s first television show Disneyland (1954–1958) and later series (Telotte, 2004: 16).

The aesthetic transfer of production imagery from one format to another provides an opportunity for theoretical reflection. With the growing references to more serious documentary formats, the 1930s making-ofs reformulate the question of the very representability of cinematographic production processes. Seen in this light, the narrator’s opening lines in the Disney featurette go beyond mere introductory remarks. The promise to unveil how a given animated film is made relates to the general problem of how this making can be rendered visible and intelligible for a non-professional audience. To this end, making-ofs need to break down a potentially unwieldy and chaotic production process into distinctive components, compress them into specific documentary shots of production personnel and their equipment, and integrate these views into comprehensible editing patterns.

This article examines several nonfiction making-ofs on animation – one from France, the others from the US – that bear witness to this historical development as well as to the challenges in documenting animation by means of live-action filmmaking. Situated at the intersections of non-fiction cinema, industrial and educational films, as well as screen advertising, these films do not constitute an exhaustive sample to define stable generic boundaries or to survey larger aesthetic trends. But they are nevertheless exemplary in the way they deal with the problems of the representation of animated film production, and in the way they transfer existing tropes about the creation of animation into a nonfiction genre.

Analysing this kind of film carries historiographic and methodological implications. Lorenz Engell (1992: 10) based his seminal study Sinn und Industrie: Einführung in die Filmgeschichte (Meaning and Industry: Introduction to Film History) on the premise that film history, as a phenomenon in itself, is situated in aesthetic differences and virtual intervals between individual films. Looking at making-ofs or other minor cinematic genres, it becomes apparent that film history not only emerges in between, but also next to and alongside traditional (feature) films. Genres such as the making-of documentary help to establish historiographic coherence among a convoluted network of numerous audiovisual artefacts. They actively produce film history by attributing value to certain films, by relating them to and comparing them with one another, and by placing them in the context of individual careers or overall technical and aesthetic developments. However, this does not mean that making-ofs, as peripheral films, should be reduced to a simple paratextual support function for ‘greater’ and more important works. Making-ofs generate their own audiovisual structures; they are open to both discursive and formal analysis.

Before offering a brief overview of existing research on the topic, another caveat is necessary. In the following, I am not implying that making-ofs are neutral and authentic accounts of production processes in the respective studios. While this does not necessarily contradict their documentary qualities (I will elaborate on this argument later on), they should be understood as a form of deliberate industrial ‘self-theorizing’, i.e. as a means to comment, to reflect on and to provide images of the film industry’s workings and inner functioning (Caldwell, 2008: 15–26).² As the late Thomas Elsaesser (2012: 329–340) has argued, it is this recursive feedback-loop which sets the film industry apart from other modern industries. Hollywood in particular, but also film companies in other countries, managed to continuously project aesthetic qualities of its product onto its very own public images (and vice versa). Making-ofs are paradigmatic examples in this close-knit system of ongoing self-evaluation, self-criticism and self-promotion. Only recently, film and media studies have begun to unravel this complex.³

Theorizing the ‘making-of’

Making-of films unquestionably gained momentum during the economic heyday of the DVD. After Laserdiscs introduced various types of bonus content in the late 1980s, the proliferation of the DVD since 1997 has greatly increased the popularity of making-ofs (McDonald, 2007: 63–66) and led to the first academic examinations of the form. Critics like Paul Arthur discussed making-ofs in terms of a new cinephilia for supplemental ‘extras’ and auteur-ish production stories (Arthur, 2004); film historians tried to trace back the evolution of the modern-day making-of to magazine reports, set photos, promotional studio tours, trailers, and television featurettes (Atkinson, 2018: 141–177; Caldwell, 2008: 283–306; Hediger, 2005). Against the background of a growing interest for peripheral genres such as educational, utility, advertising and industrial films, these scholars stressed how the modern making-of could be seen as the continuation of a variety of historical predecessors. Indeed: if a simplified working definition of a making-of was ‘a camera that films another camera and its operator at work’, the very first films to qualify would be two Lumière vues from 1899: Concours d’Automobiles Fleuries (catalogue N° 1008, camera operator unknown) and La Sortie de l’Arsenal (catalogue N° 1279, shot by Gabriel Veyre).⁴

Going back to these early examples, it becomes apparent that making-ofs are subject to formal and aesthetic changes over time as much as any other minor (or major) cinematic form. Yet, existing scholarship largely refrains from detailed aesthetic analysis. Authors primarily discuss discursive and rhetorical strategies, i.e. the ways in which a given film communicates knowledge about production processes to its audience, predominantly in the form of verbal commentary. Vinzenz Hediger (2005), for instance, discusses the development of the making-of as varying combinations of four different discursive layers: film technology, stars, directors as auteurs, and the portrayal of (industrial) labour as pleasure. Compared to this close-reading of making-of discourses, the actual cinematic images that carry these discourses are not analysed in similar detail.

A second common feature in academic accounts on the topic is the curious fact that authors will usually distance themselves from the content discussed. Many feel compelled to formulate a critical disclaimer (admittedly much like the author of this article did in the introduction), stating that making-ofs deliberately misrepresent a film’s production, e.g. by pretending that an actor performed his own stunts (Caldwell, 2008: 157), describing how making-ofs attempt to re-mystify rather than demystify film production processes (Klinger, 2006: 73), and by understanding them as pseudo-documentaries with questionable factual value (Hediger, 2005: 56; Wortmann, 2008: 48–49). Apart from the fact that this critique perpetuates an understanding of making-ofs as a rather static genre (in close alignment with the use of the term by the film industry itself), it also relies on an ahistorical notion of documentary. It seems necessary to recall that the first theories of documentary cinema explicitly highlighted the rhetorical, constructive and creative nature of certain nonfiction films, in opposition to a simple cinematographic recording of actual events (Grierson, 1966[1926]). A vast majority of scenes in films such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) were obviously staged, carefully rehearsed and shot multiple times. Moreover, several documentary films of the 1930s were commissioned works or industrial films, overtly promotional at times, and in some cases financed by private corporations (Ellis and McLane, 2009: 60–63). Documentary aesthetics, creative interventions, and promotional purposes did not mutually exclude each other, as is also evidenced by the history of animation as advertising (Cook and Thompson, 2019). Similar intersections characterize making-of films of that era – even though pioneers like Grierson might object to their aesthetic proximity to ‘inferior’ formats like cinematic travelogues or news films. I therefore suggest retaining the notion of documentary to designate a recognizable quality of the films in question. The 1930s making-ofs are decidedly nonfiction; they do not aim to establish a fictional world. Instead, they are set in the same epistemological reality as their audiences. The films circulate knowledge about real-life environments, captured in a number of audiovisual records. Yet, by means of framing, highlighting, omitting, etc., this knowledge can be utilized to promotional ends.

Thirdly, existing literature on making-of films does not take animated films into account. Authors focus exclusively on the production of traditional, live-action (feature) films, although some argue that the studio tour in Disney’s The Reluctant Dragon (Alfred L Werker/Hamilton Luske, 1941) served as a significant blueprint for later making-ofs (Wortmann, 2008: 46–47).⁵ An examination of cinematic accounts on the making of animation would be necessary to fill gaps in the aesthetic and discursive histories of the peripheral genre. But even more importantly, a closer look at these making-ofs can help shed light on the theoretical potential of the form itself. Traditionally, a making-of shows production activities that are not visible in the respective film. As much as a film shields its audience from witnessing its own making, the making-of promises an exposure of these areas that would otherwise remain invisible and offscreen (as implied in the trope ‘looking behind the scenes’). French terminology provides a special term to distinguish the offscreen sphere of actual film production from diegetic offscreen spaces. While diegetic offscreen space is usually called hors-champ (following Noël Burch), offscreen spaces of a film’s production constitute an hors-cadre – not the ‘outside’ of diegetic screen space (hors-champ), but rather the real, empirical space ‘out of frame’ (Aumont et al., 1992: 15–18).⁶ Making-ofs actively recast this hors-cadre of another film into cinematic images. They offer views of what this hors-cadre might look like, what kind of people, places and equipment it includes, where cinematographic production activities begin and where they end.

Given that the making of an animated film differs from other modes of cinematic production, making-ofs on animated films, consequently, will bring forth a very particular articulation of a cinematic hors-cadre. They expand traditional notions of what it entails to make a film. However, the structural conditions for these representations have evolved differently for animated films than for other modes of moving images.

From fictionalized cartoon studios to documentary views

Some of the very first animated shorts largely consisted of live-action shots that illustrated how the artificial movements in the animated sections were created. For instance, several of Winsor McCay’s films from the 1910s highlighted the unusual aspects of their production, e.g. by showing him in his studio next to enormous piles of paper, or by stating the alleged number of individual drawings that had to be made and photographed. These films clearly retained an ‘aesthetics of making’⁷ (Glaubitz, 2018), inherited, inter alia, from the lightning sketch tradition. Conventional live-action filmmaking pursued a rather different path: the growing ‘narrativization’ of early cinema (Gunning, 1990) was paralleled by a thoroughgoing exclusion of everything that did not seem to belong to the projected fictional world from the cinematographic frame. All visible aspects of the very making of this world were moved offscreen. This relegation gave rise to the hors-cadre as a specific, production-related offscreen space of the apparatus, while an emergent system of camera positions, angles, axes, matches and editing patterns enforced spatial and narrative cohesion among the individual shots onscreen (Thompson, 1988).

Hediger (2005: 56, 62) understands the conceptual split between production spaces and fictional worlds during the 1910s as a necessary prerequisite for the appearance of the first making-of formats, particularly the filmed studio tour. The Goldwyn-Bray Pictograph short How Animated Cartoons Are Made, produced by John R Bray and Wallace A Carlson, was the first nonfiction film about the production of animation that clearly followed this structure. While some scenes bear resemblance to McCay’s films, the focus is not so much on animated characters or events, but also on different stages of the production process as such. The film ends with Carlson and Bray watching the finished scene. Visibly dissatisfied, Bray wants his young animator to rework a female character’s unnatural walk, following his studio’s overall aesthetic doctrine (Moen, 2015: 133).

Despite obvious connections to earlier animated films and first magazine reports on the production of animated films (Gavin, 1917), the pedagogic aspirations of the Bray studio tour remained an exception. Cartoons in the 1920s would rather use scenes in animation studios as stepping stones to develop rich combinations of live-action footage and animated drawings. While Carlson and his cartoon characters did not share the same screen space, nor the same plane of physical reality, 1920s cartoons derived considerable aesthetic allure from the amalgamation of ontologically distinct levels (Feyersinger, 2017: 19–32). Characters would magically come to life on a sheet of paper, interact with their creators, and sometimes drive the action into purely drawn worlds (Crafton, 2013: 80–81; Massuet, 2017: 94–96). Series such as Max and Dave Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell (1918–1929) were heavily based on these metaleptic intrusions; Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks started their Alice Comedies with yet another classic example. Alice’s Wonderland (1923) begins with Alice’s visit to a cartoon studio, eager to watch the artists ‘draw some funnies’, as the second intertitle reads. Unlike Bray’s studio tour, however, the short does not contain any scenes that show the creation, or even photography, of individual drawings (upon close inspection, there is no drawing happening in the film at all). Instead, the cartoon characters on white sheets of paper are already alive and bustling with energy, as they happily perform orchestral music and boxing matches for their cheering creators.

At Disney and Fleischer, the artificial spaces for the performance of cartoon characters, occasionally joined by human actors, did not (yet) conform to certain stylistic conventions of live-action cinema. Horizontal character movements predominated, as the visual depth of the shots remained largely undetermined. Many scenes did not invoke any offscreen spaces, at least not in the sense of an hors-champ (Massuet, 2017: 179–189). Silent cartoons would therefore linger on a representational logic similar to the one Jacques Aumont (2007: 38–44) observed in early films by the Lumière brothers. Their vues continuously hinted at the presence of the operator behind the camera, often fostering humorous interactions between people within the frame and the operator with his camera outside (an area which Aumont calls the avant-champ). In this logic, a proper making-of makes little sense, simply because the films themselves undermine a strict separation of real-world production spaces and fictional worlds.

Decidedly nonfiction accounts of the actual production of animated films would reappear roughly 10 years after Bray’s studio tour film – at a time when metaleptic encounters between animated characters and their creator slowly began to fade as a narrative trope (Massuet, 2017: 96). This decline, paralleled by the gradual adoption of stylistic codes more associated with live-action filmmaking (the evocation of pictorial depth, more complex virtual camera movements, continuity editing) can be understood as a necessary condition for other films to develop representations of these films’ production. The emergence of a proper hors-cadre of animated films is a direct consequence of this development. Views of that hors-cadre became the subject of film genres with factual, informative connotations – and which would exclusively resort to live-action to reconstruct actual production processes.

The Gaumont documentary Paris Cinéma ou Les Coulisses du Cinéma (1929), directed by Pierre Chenal (with assistance by Jean Mitry) precisely registers this epistemic transition, although it takes only the French film industry as an example. The 50-minute film contains an elaborate middle section about ‘animated drawings and puppets’, while the other parts feature the fabrication of camera equipment (part 1) and the construction of sets, live-action shooting and technical terms for camera angles and movements (part 3). The film’s midsection on animation is made up of three different studio visits. Much like the beginning of Bray’s film, the first one draws on the generic convention of the ‘surprise visit’: the filmmaker knocks demonstratively on cartoonist André Rigal’s studio door, who looks up from his drawing desk as if caught off guard. He jovially agrees to Chenal’s request (‘– dear master, we would like to show the public . . .’)⁸ and rapidly sketches various views of a simple scenery featuring a man and a dinosaur (probably a reference to McCay’s Gertie). Rigal uses black ink on white paper, does not pay attention to continuity, and does not compare any of the individual drawings at all. A second intertitle inquires ‘les dessins terminés, que fait-on?’ (‘once the drawings are finished, what do you do?’). Rigal, smirking, reaches for a coffee grinder, stuffs the crumpled drawings into the funnel, turns the crank and pulls out a finished film strip from the coffee compartment (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Animation by means of a coffee grinder. © GP ARCHIVES. Reproduced with permission.

A second, ‘more serious’ representative (according to another intertitle) of the pre-industrialized dessin animé is Alain Saint-Ogan. The cartoonist is shown working on his Zig et Puce series, together with his cameraman ‘Monsieur Bizot’, ‘the animator of his drawings’. Close-ups of Saint-Ogan’s drawings alternate with animated footage of his main characters (supposedly shot with inverted colours). It is only after Saint-Ogan and Bizot debated the convincingness of a new character’s walk – the penguin Alfred – that an intertitle gives a technical description of the frame-by-frame photography. The drawings themselves seem to be cardboard cutouts, not cels or sheets of paper, which Bizot places rather haphazardly under his camera. (Apparently, the makers of the documentary and the portrayed artists⁹ took certain liberties in simplifying technical processes.) The sequence concludes with a scene shot in Ladislas Starevich’s studio. Intertitles point to the time-consuming nature of his stop-motion technique, a series of shots show him manipulating and photographing his fragile figures.

Paris Cinéma is remarkable not only for suggesting that hand-drawn and puppet animation could actually belong to a joint subcategory of cinema – years before the umbrella term ‘animation’ would eventually replace the ‘animated cartoons’ or ‘dessins animés’ (Crafton, 2011; Joubert-Laurencin, 2014). The film, part of an evolving discourse on animation in France that vividly discussed US cartoons of the 1920s (Moen, 2013), also indicates a transition from the playful production imagery of the 1920s cartoons to the purposefully ‘objective’ documentary genres of the 1930s. The emergent making-ofs would convey the creation of an animated film with more comprehensive images of work processes (that had been omitted in Alice’s Wonderland a couple of years before), and thus tie in more closely with the ‘operational aesthetics’ of Bray’s studio tour and other making-of films (Steinhart, 2018: 110–111).

Several of these making-ofs about the production of animation appeared towards the end of the 1930s. A good example is an episode of Paramount’s Popular Science series The Max Fleischer Studio in Miami, Florida and the Art of Creating a Popeye Cartoon. The 6-minute short, shot in colour, adheres to the principles of the 1930s newsreel: continuous underscoring, no original sounds, high-speed narration, an overtly educational tone (Chambers et al., 2018: 4). The character of a tour guide, still used in films like Universal’s making-of Cartoonland Mysteries (1936),¹⁰ is abandoned in favour of an impersonal, omniscient voice-over narrator. The making-of retraces the creation of the Popeye cartoon Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (Dave Fleischer, 1939) in Fleischer’s new Florida studio, offering a step-by-step explanation of how state-of-the-art ‘popular sciences’ turns into ‘fantastic screen entertainment’ – and hereby rationalizes the studio’s expansion, pushed by Fleischer’s distributor Paramount (Maltin, 1987: 115–116).

The short film does not have a definite protagonist. Instead, it shows various departments within the studio, without introducing any of the employees by name: storymen surrounded by impressive storyboards, lead animators at their drawing desks, inkers and painters, background artists, cameramen (with a short appearance by Max Fleischer himself) and editors. What has been an individual artist’s studio now appears as a modern industry complex that applies the latest technological innovations to popular screen entertainment. Studio employees go about their specialized tasks with concentration and focus (without any chitchat or lunch breaks), and do not acknowledge the presence of the camera team filming them. Figure 2 indicates this changing representation of animation production: rows of uniform drawings desks fill a large studio space, resembling a modern open-plan office. All workstations are aligned in the same way, supervisors check that all tasks are performed properly. The camera captures the ongoing activities in high-angle long shots, occasional pans and tracking shots along individual desks or cubicles. The overall impression is one of precise planning, routine and efficiency, a work environment that differs significantly from that of Rigal’s or Saint-Ogan’s studio in Paris Cinéma.

Figure 2.

Streamlined cartoon production in the new Florida studio according to Paramount/Fleischer. DVD frame grab from Popeye the Sailor 1938–1949, Vol. 2, disc 2 (2019).

Yet, regarding the visual composition of other recurring shots, not much seems to have changed. The work of the animators is still captured in medium shots over their shoulders, permitting the viewers to catch a glimpse of the drawings on their desk. In a similar way, the shots of cameramen exposing a film frame by frame with the shutter release lever resemble each other. Certain aspects of the cartoon production in the Popular Science short appear more accurate than in Pierre Chenal’s film, as conspicuous attention is directed to technical details, such as the peg bars or the iron holders to keep the stacked cels in place. However, both the Popeye making-of and Paris Cinéma are similar in that they delineate animation as an optical phenomenon produced by a combination of a special technical apparatus and individual labour, characterized mainly in quantitative terms: the ratio of work days and runtime, the number of employees, etc.

Drawing, flipping: The function of the animator

Both films break down animating, as an artistic activity, into a series of distinct occupations, further individualized by separate shots for each step in the process. Rather than portraying artists in pursuit of a creative vision, the making-ofs foreground specialized craftsmanship.¹¹ Small details matter: the manipulation of a puppet with tiny tweezers (Starevich), the duration of each single exposure, the meticulous mixing of colours to paint the back sides of the cels (Fleischer). Technical inaccuracies or deliberate parodies of certain production stages do not necessarily contradict the overall rhetoric.¹² The making-ofs strive to make the production of animation comprehensible for non-professional viewers, by presenting ongoing production activities in a condensed, yet appealing way. The emphasis lies on how a particular film is created; the visual and verbal step by step explanations are arranged accordingly.

At this point, the over-the-shoulder shots of animators and shots of the frame-by-frame photography acquire a special function. Both serve as recurring leitmotifs to illustrate a particular stage in this Taylorized production model. Images of these subjects were not only used in shorts dedicated to the work of specific studios or the promotion of new releases, but also in educational films about the production and the optical principles of cinema in general.¹³ In particular, shots of flipping drawings constitute a noteworthy equivalent to certain shots in documentaries on the production of live-action films. This parallel concerns both their concrete visual layout and their function within the production discourse of the respective films.

In the 1930s, Hollywood studios standardized the production of (live-action) making-ofs in the form of ‘special trailers’ (Hediger, 2005: 58). These advertising films could build on solid conventions concerning the proper visual documentation of the shooting of a film, or the functioning of a film studio as a whole. Newsreels and films d’actualité helped establish these conventions throughout the 1910s and 1920s; sound film only brought about slight alterations (the elimination of intertitles, the addition of a continuous voice-over track and underscoring). A key set-up in this respect is the position and viewpoint of the making-of camera in relation to the actual crew and their equipment on a film set. The making-of camera was typically positioned laterally at some distance behind the camera crew, capturing crew members from the back. Film crew, camera equipment and lighting gear would appear as silhouettes in front of the brightly lit scene the crew was shooting. The making-of camera thus extends the viewpoint of the actual film camera, but has seemingly retreated from the set into an otherwise unspecific background. The resulting behind-the-scenes image still captures a portion of the space and the actors in front of the actual film camera in use, but equally registers parts of the film equipment and crew members (seen from behind) as a visible ‘surround’ of the prospective moving image. The making-of therefore reconnects a glimpse of another film’s hors-cadre, a real-life offscreen space as a compositional frame within the behind-the-scenes shot, to the visible field of this other film.

In making-ofs on animated films, the shot over the shoulder of an animator at his desk replicates this configuration. Here, the animator occupies the former position of the film camera and its operators. The drawings and sketches, the focal point of the making-of camera, constitute equivalents to the set in front of a live-action camera. Although the making-of camera occasionally films a film camera at work, i.e. the one photographing the cels, this camera is now a rather anonymous apparatus. It is not presented as the primary origin of the future moving images. The actual creators, the literal ‘first movers’, are the draughtsmen and animators, situated in the literal hors-cadre of the drawings they are producing.

The Terrytoon short Making ‘Em Move (1939),¹⁴ shot in Kodachrome without original sounds or a voice-over track, provides another good example. First, a group of storymen lays out the plot in a series of storyboards. Next, the cartoon’s director plans the action on exposure sheets with the help of a musical composer and a metronome. The following scene shows an animator drawing poses of a grasshopper. Over-the-shoulder shots depict the completion of one drawing after the other in great detail, without major omissions or cuts during the process. Throughout the entire scene (which makes up nearly a quarter of the whole film), the animator flips his drawings repeatedly to double-check the progressions between each pose. Once the poses are finished, the animator flips the drawings again. This time, the camera captures their quick succession in a close-up, so that the sheets fill out the entire frame. The grasshopper now really seems to dance: rudimentary animation in a nutshell.

Both Paramount’s Popeye making-of and Terrytoon’s Making ‘Em Move end with a short scene of the cartoon, whose production the films have covered up to this point. Excerpts of finished cartoons are also dispersed throughout the Saint-Ogan section of Paris Cinéma. Although it does not include any direct scene from Snow White, the Disney making-of exhibits at least test shots of Goofy and the animated dwarfs. This embedding of finished (or provisional) scenes produces rhetorical effects. The making-ofs advocate a production teleology in which a high-quality product is practically an inevitable result of a carefully organized division of labor.

Apart from these reminiscences of the industrial film, the insertions of finished animated scenes serve two other purposes. First, it reinforces the link between the individual animator as a moving-image maker and a piece from the final film. In the Disney/RKO short, the rough animation of Goofy is intercut right after two close-ups of Norm Ferguson, who uses his own face in a mirror above his table as a visual reference. The film neither shows nor comments on the fact that Ferguson’s drawings must have been photographed first, even for this in-house test footage. Photography as a necessary production stage is strategically bypassed. By juxtaposition, Goofy’s un-inked outlines and roughly hatched nose and ears are rendered as direct traces of Ferguson’s work. Moreover, Goofy frowns in a similar fashion to his animator in the mirror. Ferguson’s facial expressions seem to have been transferred to his characters without much detour. This combination of documentary footage and animated scenes asserts indexical evidence: there is a direct connection between human action and moving image; thus, the aesthetic properties of these moving images can be traced back to the work of individual artists.

Second, the juxtaposition of drawing animators and animated footage bridges a crucial problem. All films discussed in this article have to deal with the fact that the very act of animation, i.e. making something move and endowing something with life, escapes documentary capture. Animating seems to structurally exceed the representational capacities of live-action cinema. Activities like drawing or flipping can be filmed to approximate this practice (cf. the dancing grasshopper), but there is no suitable image to illustrate the act itself and the resulting aesthetic phenomenon. Ironically, it would take animation to really make the functioning of animation visible. The overabundant metaphors for animation in metaleptic cartoons can thus be interpreted as a metacommentary on this structural insufficiency. In these films, the moment when characters came to life onscreen was essentially a metaphysical one. In nonfiction making-ofs, a finished animated scene appears as a subsequent effect of a chain of causes that are localized in mechanical apparatuses as well as in practices such as sketching, drawing, inking, colouring and flipping sheets.

At this point, making-ofs about the production of animation differ significantly from the conventions of the industrial film. The fascinating heart of the production process cannot be translated into direct cinematic images, so it has to be mediated via visual substitutes. Similarly, the making-ofs cannot offer a precise image of the finished film at the end of the production chain, for the simple reason that a film is not (primarily) a tangible, ‘filmable’ object. While ordinary industrial films usually show the manufactured product in one piece in their final scenes – e.g. a new automobile (Loiperdinger, 2009: 69–70), making-ofs cannot represent the completed film in the same way. A new film only appears towards the end of the making-of by way of metonomy: a finished scene stands in as a result for all the production activities so far, even though it often remains unclear how exactly storyboards, individual drawings, or backgrounds come together to form specific scenes in the respective cartoon.¹⁵ In some cases, the making-of would even dissemble the film in the making and disperse animated bits and pieces across particular scenes, just like Goofy’s test shots are intercut with Ferguson at his drawing desk.

Production off-screen as sous-cadre

In sum, the production teleology at stake here needs to deal with several instances of un-representability: the final product can only hardly be exhibited as a finished industrial object. Crucial steps in the production process, i.e. the very act of animating drawings (or artificial objects), are outside the scope of conventional documentary capture by a film camera, although they are a centrepiece of the film’s operational aesthetics. In addition, the audience as the eventual consumers remains curiously absent, much like in other types of film advertising (Staiger, 1990: 22–23). At most, the animators themselves are shown reacting to their own cinematographic creation.

Contrariwise, what making-ofs on animated films extensively show time and again is a string of production artifacts. Objects like storyboards in the Paramount/Fleischer featurette, the exposure sheets in the Terrytoon making-of, or the test shoots in the Disney short turn the teleological making into an evolutionary line. The film in production is presented as a ‘potential moving image’, as Paolo Cherchi Usai (2001: 39) puts it, an image gradually coming into being through a series of conceptual drafts, outlines, tests and preliminary stages. Once the scheduled film is completed, these pre-stages can only be inferred from the moving images, yet the making-ofs continuously evoke such pre-stages as a virtual, evolving understructure. By including all kinds of provisional imagery, the making-ofs attribute a virtual pre-existence to the animated images, thus realizing Cherchi Usai’s idea of a gradually emerging ‘existence of a moving image as it goes through the process of being created’.

This constitutes yet another difference between documentary making-ofs on animation and the metaleptic cartoon of the 1920s. Although the cartoon studio plays a major part as a site of performative or technical spectacle in both genres, the metaleptic cartoon seldom breaks down the animated character – or the animated image as such – into a string of distinct evolutionary stages. The animated characters are either already there and capable of seemingly autonomous movement (Disney’s Alice’s Wonderland), or they start existing after an animator has drawn them (Out of the Inkwell). In contrast, making-ofs on animation refrain from any metaleptic intrusions and leave all reality levels epistemologically intact (the Rigal scenes in Paris Cinéma are still openly ironic, yet they are decidedly not metaleptic). The making-ofs ‘open up’ the animated images and disentangle their compressed pictorial layers – for example, by showing how a variety of people work independently on different aspects of planned scenes, and by demonstrating which audiovisual artifacts other than the future image are employed to this end.

These artifacts refer to specific production spaces that differ considerably from the studio sets and backlots in other making-of featurettes or newsreel films at that time. In making-ofs about animation, physical environments such as the story room or the drawing desk become competing loci of cinematographic creation. The ‘virtual’ spaces of the test shots, storyboards, model sheets, sketches, background art, etc. equally contribute to this multitude of spaces where visible production takes place – and fit well into the overall ‘before-after’ discourses on operational innovation (Hediger and Vonderau, 2009: 37) in films like the RKO/Disney or the Paramount/Fleischer featurettes. The storyboard in Figure 3, a key drawing with clean outlines placed over basic background scenery (in light red), is a prime example of these ‘virtual’ production spaces. The combined drawings of Olive Oyl as an Arabian princess (left) and Popeye as Aladdin (right) in the princess’s bedroom (background) do not just constitute a representation of a particular stage in the creation of an animated scene, but are themselves a pictorial space where production as an ongoing process can be made visible. With this shot, the making-of introduces a future cinematic image in the state of a fixed visual blueprint that other departments will potentially use for further animation work.

Figure 3.

Virtual spaces of an animated film’s genesis: a storyboard panel for a Popeye cartoon. DVD frame grab from Popeye the Sailor 1938–1949, Vol. 2, disc 2 (2019).

In the Fleischer making-of, and the Terrytoon and Disney examples alike, the individual steps in the creation of an animated moving image substitute the views of sound stages or backlot sets in their live-action counterparts. Much as the over-the-shoulder shot of the animator serves as an equivalent for standardized behind-the-scenes shots, they bring forth a different notion of cinematographic production, closely tied to a series of alternative sites and locales. These other spaces of production pose a challenge for established theoretical concepts, especially for those designed to account for the empirical reality of a film’s production, such as Étienne Souriau’s famous notion of a ‘profilmic’ reality of film (Souriau, 1951: 235). Souriau’s term for the total of everything placed in front of the camera (plus the camera itself) explicitly invokes a film set constructed on a sound stage. The Starevich section in Paris Cinéma still follows this model, as Starevich works with a three-dimensional miniature set in front of two film cameras.

Yet the notion of the profilmic proves futile to designate the spaces of production presented in making-ofs on animated cartoons. Souriau’s terminology does not offer any concept to address the ontological levels of a storyboard panel, in-between drawings, or background art. The spatial notion of the film set that underlies Souriau’s term cannot be easily transferred to animation, nor to its representation in a making-of documentary. In a similar fashion, the concept of the hors-cadre retains the logic of a live-action film set, even though proponents like Pascal Bonitzer or Aumont argue that the term comprises all possible forms of cinematographic production. The hors of the hors-cadre nevertheless upholds the idea of something offscreen which constitutes a spatial outside of the frame (and of the film as such).

As I hope to have shown, making-ofs on the creation of animation go beyond a mere illustration of technical offscreen spaces on the other side of the visible borders of a live-action shot. The drawing animator aside, several production aspects are not pictured as having a direct spatial relationship to a visible inside of the moving images being created. In these cases, it is not so much an hors of the frame that is brought into focus. Instead, the making-ofs dwell on the various pre-stages before the completion of a scene, the separate creation of different layers of imagery, the virtual understructures of the moving image envisaged. Making-ofs on animation therefore expand the notion of the hors-cadre: what lies on the outside of an animated image is not just the animators, the animation stands and the camera. Rather, this outside is also temporal and latent. When making-ofs direct their spotlight to the virtual layers underlying the prospective moving images, they unveil a sous-cadre of these images in the making. According to these making-ofs, cinematic production happens not just offscreen, but also in the virtual ‘depth’ of animated images. Ultimately, the presentation of the creation of an animated film, modelled after the structure of the educational newsreel and the industrial film, has shown how multifaceted cinematic production could actually be conceptualized.

Conclusion

The migration of behind-the-scenes imagery from metaleptic cartoons to factual genres happened in the context of a growing dissemination of film production knowledge for the non-professional public. Throughout the 1930s, fan magazines ran several behind-the-scenes stories on cartoon production in various studios, often with illustrations and photographs similar to making-of shots (How Porky the Pig became a star, 1936). Producers such as Paul Terry, Walter Lantz and Disney also put together exhibitions and didactic panels on the making of cartoons for science fairs, schools, or public libraries (Amateur movie day. . ., 1935; Animated cartoons have come to be regarded. . ., 1937).

Making-ofs were part of this emergent field of para- and extratextual information, with the difference that they tried to convey the production of animation cinematically, i.e. with the stylistic properties of nonfiction, live-action formats of the time. Animation posed special challenges for such an approach. Crucial steps in its production chain can hardly be captured on conventional live-action film; the whole process is constantly in danger of disintegrating into a rather confusing sequence of individual activities. Recurring motifs such as the flipping animators are used to build up coherence, but they also indicate at which points making-ofs and related genres such as the industrial film diverge, and how established theoretical terms would sometimes not suffice to describe the production activities depicted.

Even though the overarching objective of these films was to promote animation as a regular part of the film industry at large, the divergent representations of the making of animation do introduce visible distinctions between animation and live-action, yet without calling them out explicitly. Later examples would opt for sharper differences. Although British Pathé’s The Making of Animal Farm (1955), for instance, still recalls the trailer character of the Snow White making-of, the voice-over narrator and the mise-en-scène now present the film’s production as the realization of its director’s bold creative vision. John Halas can be seen drawing and flipping poses himself. Production steps usually associated with live-action (photography, editing) are deliberately omitted in favour of non-mechanical work like inking and background painting. In the domain of stop-motion, the short Tournage d’un Film de Marionnettes (1959) replaced individual artistry or streamlined work environments with long shots of the studio as a crowded and messy space (see Figure 4).¹⁶

Figure 4.

Studio space in Tournage d’un Film de Marionnettes. © GP ARCHIVES. Reproduced with permission.

The film neither explains the technical process of animating nor reveals how a particular shot was created. Yet it does continue the juxtaposition of behind-the-scenes footage and extracts from the film being made, increasing this dynamic to moments of indistinguishability. Quite seamlessly, the film jumps back and forth between the portrayal of a miniature set and extracts from a finished scene.

In this sense, making-ofs do not solely peek into areas ‘behind the scenes’ and retranslate production-related offscreen spaces back into filmic images. Rather, they simultaneously create new links between the documentary footage and the final scenes. Making-ofs ‘suture’ production and product, work and output, creative activities and film aesthetics. Although it may entrench production labour in yet another chain of commercial exploitation (Göttel, 2019: 141), it does open up a seemingly enclosed filmic text for a critical reflection on its creation. Ultimately, the transfer of representational conventions from making-ofs on live-action to making-ofs on animation brings production aspects to the fore that would otherwise go unnoticed. The making-of as a cinematic form may stimulate a rethinking and reconsideration of theoretical notions concerned with film production. This applies to present configurations as much as to their historical forerunners.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the guest editors and reviewers of this article for their helpful comments, as well as Louise Doumerc of the Gaumont-Pathé Archive and Steve Stanchfield of Thunderbean Animation for helping me navigate their exquisite collections. Julia Eckel, Andrea Polywka, Jannik Müller and Kelsea Bond provided additional suggestions and instructive remarks.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and publication of this article, and there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

Author biography

Felix Hasebrink is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Institute of Media Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, where he previously completed his MA in Media Studies and Comparative Literature with a thesis on the intersections of animation and image theory. His dissertation project examines the aesthetics of contemporary making-of documentaries and related audiovisual forms.

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