Frame by Frame
3 Pars Pro Toto Character Animation and the Work of the Anonymous Artist Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality. —Siegfried Kracauer1 The single frame is the basic unit of film just as bricks are the basic unit of brick houses. —Robert Breer2 DELIBERATE MISTAKES In late March 1937, in order to meet the booming demand for Popeye cartoons, the management at Fleischer Studios called for the production process to be sped up. In-betweeners, the animators tasked with drawing the stages of movement that come in between key poses, were expected to double their daily output, from twenty sketches per day to forty.3 But tensions between management and labor at the studio were running high, and the in-betweeners did not comply. Instead, they countered with a “slowdown” strike, which meant, effectively, continuing to produce drawings at the regular rate.4 In the month that followed, fifteen anima- tors were fired for participating in the slowdown, and on May 6 the Commercial Artists and Designers Union authorized a full walkout of the studio. The story of what happened next has already been told, as have the stories of other labor conflicts in the US animation industry—most notably, the 1941 strike at Walt Disney Studios.5 But I want to focus on what didn’t happen. By this I do not mean a counterfactual history, at least not in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, I wish to imagine what is left unsaid in these narratives, which tell us only what went on behind the scenes.
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