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"Jack Frost" (1934)
"Little Black Sambo" (1935)
"Sinbad the Sailor" (1935)
"Balloon Land" (1935)
Iwerks Studio was an animation studio headed by animator Ub Iwerks.
Iwerks was working for Walt Disney when he accepted a contract with Disney's former distributor, Pat Powers, to leave Disney and start an animation studio under his own name. The Iwerks Studio opened in 1930. Financial backers led by Pat Powers suspected that Iwerks was responsible for much of Disney's early success.
Newly hired animator Fred Kopietz recommended that Iwerks employ a friend from Chouinard Art School, Chuck Jones, who was hired and put to work as a cel washer.
Despite a contract with MGM to distribute the cartoons, the Iwerks Studio was never a major commercial success and failed to rival either Walt Disney Studio or Fleischer Studios. In 1936, backers withdrew financial support from the Iwerks Studio, and it folded soon after.
Iwerks created the characters Flip the Frog, and later Willie Whopper. Several short films was made with both characters.
The Flip the Frog series was the first series from the Iwerks Studio, produced 1930 to 1933.
As the series progressed, Flip became more of a down-and-out, Chaplin-esque character who always found himself in everyday conflicts surrounding the poverty-stricken atmosphere of the Great Depression. After the first two cartoons, the appearance of Flip the Frog gradually became less froglike.
The Willie Whopper series was the second from the Iwerks Studio. 14 shorts were produced 1933 to 1934.
Willie is a young lad who tells of his many outlandish adventures, which are then depicted on-screen. His fantastic accounts are, in fact, outright lies or "whoppers". His stories are usually preceded by his memorable catchphrase, "Say, did I ever tell ya this one?" The character's first film was "The Air Race" (1933).
From 1933 to 1936, the studio release a series of shorts (independently distributed, not part of the MGM deal) in Cinecolor, named ComiColor cartoons, which mostly focused on fairy tales with no continuing character or star. They are now in the public domain.
Iwerks also experimented with stop-motion animation in combination with the multiplane camera. Multiplane animation was Iwerks most prestigious invention. [1] It allowed for a three-dimensional look, separating layers of the background, resulting in a greater feeling of depth. [1] He made a short called "The Toy Parade", which was never released in public. The 1934 animated short "The Headless Horseman" was the first time Iwerks used the technique. [1]
Mickey Mouse is an American cartoon character co-created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. The longtime icon and mascot of The Walt Disney Company, Mickey is an anthropomorphic mouse who typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves. Inspired by such silent film personalities as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, Mickey is traditionally characterized as a sympathetic underdog who gets by on pluck and ingenuity in the face of challenges bigger than himself. The character's depiction as a small mouse is personified through his diminutive stature and falsetto voice, the latter of which was originally provided by Disney. Mickey is one of the world's most recognizable and universally acclaimed fictional characters of all time.
Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, known as Ub Iwerks, was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician, known for his work with Walt Disney Animation Studios in general, and for having worked on the development of the design of the character of Mickey Mouse, among others. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Iwerks grew up with a contentious relationship with his father, who abandoned him as a child. Iwerks met fellow artist Walt Disney while working at a Kansas City art studio in 1919. After briefly working as illustrators for a local newspaper company, Disney and Iwerks ventured into animation together. Iwerks joined Disney as chief animator on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts series beginning in 1922, but a studio bankruptcy would cause Disney to relocate to Los Angeles in 1923. In the new studio, Iwerks continued to work with Disney on the Alice Comedies as well as the creation of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit character. Following the first Oswald short, both Universal Pictures and the Winkler Pictures production company insisted that the Oswald character be redesigned. At the insistence of Disney, Iwerks designed a number of new characters for the studio, including designs that would be used for Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.
The Alice Comedies are a series of animated/live-action shorts created by Walt Disney in the 1920s, in which a live action little girl named Alice and an animated cat named Julius have adventures in an animated landscape.
Silly Symphony is an American animated series of 75 musical short films produced by Walt Disney Productions from 1929 to 1939. As the series name implies, the Silly Symphonies were originally intended as whimsical accompaniments to pieces of music. As such, the films usually did not feature continuing characters, unlike the Mickey Mouse shorts produced by Disney at the same time. The series is notable for its innovation with Technicolor and the multiplane motion picture camera, as well as its introduction of the character Donald Duck making his first appearance in the Silly Symphony cartoon The Wise Little Hen in 1934. Seven shorts won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
The golden age of American animation was a period in the history of U.S. animation that began with the popularization of sound cartoons in 1928 and gradually ended from 1957 to 1969, where theatrical animated shorts began losing popularity to the newer medium of television animation since in 1957, produced on cheaper budgets and in a more limited animation style by companies such as Terrytoons, UPA, Paramount Cartoon Studios, Jay Ward Productions, Hanna-Barbera, DePatie-Freleng, Rankin/Bass and Filmation. In artefact, the history of animation became very important in the United States.
Hugh Harman was an American animator. He was known for creating the Warner Bros. Cartoons and MGM Cartoons studios and his collaboration with Rudolf Ising during the Golden Age of American animation.
Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were an American animation team and company known for founding the Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation studios. In 1929, the studio was founded under the name "Harman-Ising Productions", producing Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Leon Schlesinger from 1930 to 1933. From 1934 to 1938, Harman-Ising produced the Happy Harmonies series, with William Hanna as their employee.
Flip the Frog is an animated cartoon character created by American animator Ub Iwerks. He starred in a series of cartoons produced by Celebrity Pictures and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1930 to 1933. The series had many recurring characters besides Flip, including Flip's dog, the mule Orace, and a dizzy neighborhood spinster.
While the history of animation began much earlier, this article is concerned with the development of the medium after the emergence of celluloid film in 1888, as produced for theatrical screenings, television and (non-interactive) home entertainment.
The Van Beuren Corporation was a New York City-based animation studio that produced theatrical cartoons as well as live-action short-subjects from the 1920s to 1936.
Burton F. Gillett was a director of animated films. He is noted for his Silly Symphonies work for Disney, particularly the 1932 short film Flowers and Trees and the 1933 short film Three Little Pigs, both of which were awarded the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and both of which were selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry.
The multiplane camera is a motion-picture camera that was used in the traditional animation process that moves a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another. This creates a sense of parallax or depth.
ComiColor Cartoons are a series of 25 animated short subjects produced by Ub Iwerks from 1933 to 1936. The series was the last produced by Iwerks Studio; after losing distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1934, the Iwerks studio's senior company Celebrity Pictures had to distribute the films itself. The series was shot exclusively in Cinecolor.
Patrick Anthony Powers was an Irish-American businessman who was involved in the movie and animation industry of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s as a distributor and producer. His firm, Celebrity Productions, was the first distributor of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse cartoons (1928–1929). After one year, Disney split with Powers, who started another animation studio with Disney's lead animator, Ub Iwerks.
Willie Whopper is an animated cartoon character created by American animator Ub Iwerks. The Whopper series was the second from the Iwerks Studio to be produced by Pat Powers and distributed through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 14 shorts were produced in 1933 to 1934.
Myron "Grim" Natwick was an American artist, animator, and film director. Natwick is best known for drawing the Fleischer Studios' most popular character, Betty Boop.
Charles Bear Mintz was an American film producer and distributor who assumed control over Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures after marrying her in 1924. The couple had two children, Katherine and William. Between 1925 and 1939, Mintz produced over 370 cartoon shorts.
The Opry House is a 1929 Mickey Mouse short animated film released by Celebrity Pictures, as part of the Mickey Mouse film series. It was the fifth Mickey Mouse short to be released, the second of that year. It cast Mickey as the owner of a small theater. Mickey performs a vaudeville show all by himself. Acts include his impersonation of a snake charmer, his dressing in drag and performing a belly dance, his caricature of a Hasidic Jew and, for the finale, a piano performance of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt.
The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio was an American animation studio operated by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) during the Golden Age of American animation. Active from 1937 until 1957, the studio was responsible for producing animated shorts to accompany MGM feature films in Loew's Theaters, which included popular cartoon characters Tom, Jerry, Droopy, Butch, Spike, Tyke, and Barney Bear.
Fiddlesticks is a 1930 Celebrity Pictures theatrical cartoon short directed and animated by Ub Iwerks, in his first cartoon since he departed from Walt Disney's studio. The short features Iwerks' character Flip the Frog. It is the first complete sound cartoon to be photographed in color. The film went into the public domain after the copyright owner failed to renew the copyright after the film's 28 year term.