The American Animation Critique - Essay Example

Winsor McCay propelled the American animation industry with the release of ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’. Blackton was widely esteemed for his stop-motion technique while McCay is renowned for employing much more modern techniques referred to as key-framing and the in-between techniques (Lewis 221). ‘Felix the Cat’ is one of the characters that were created by Pat Sullivan in the era of silent films.

‘Felix the cat’ is one of the most recognizable characters because of its huge wide eyes and grin, black body, and squat. ‘Felix the Cat’ is a good animation considered an iconic character in the historical making of the animation film production. The artistic expertise employed in Felix the Cat made it an outstanding piece of work in that era. For example, the use of a text box or bubbles denotes communication between characters. In addition, the use of question marks to express emotions and dotted lines denote the direction he is facing presents complete communication.

The possession of such qualities rendered the audience the ability to grasp the flow of the silent films. I liked the character of Felix the Cat because he was a fast decision-maker. Felix the Cat does not use simple camera work, it is played with the aspect of a film. The level of technology then was poor and the quality of production was unsatisfying (Pike 43). In addition, the emergence of modern studios, for example, Disney suppressed Felix’s native studio. Fantasmagorie was the first fully animated film that was made by Emile Cohl.

This animation was made up of drawings flowing fluently into one another. In this film, the audience is only able to see the smooth blending of the illustrations and drawings. Moreover, I find this film a complex piece as well as an impressive narrative. The above reason is inferred from the ability of the film to incorporate intricate elements to create an animation film. The techniques used by Cohl were not easy as they involved placing objects on a lightbox, photographing them, and then changing their position and photographing it again, thereby producing a consistent movement (Ivakhiv 333).

This is a good film because of the impressiveness and the artistic elements used. The styles used in this film have greatly influenced the development of cartoon development even to date. Although it lacks a coherent storyline, the intriguing capacity of this film makes the audience to be creative, and thus, it has been a success.