PERFORMANCE

BUG VAUDEVILLE, OR, THE CURTAIN RISES AND FALLS ON WINSOR MCCAY

Early animators were not artists as much as they were entertainers.

— Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life (1981)

In their epic review of animation technique à la Disney, The Illusion of Life, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Walt Disney Productions' "Nine Old Men," offer a historical snapshot that hints at common assumptions about the relationship between popular art and entertainment, and between high art and animation, in the early twentieth century. The notion that an animator was an artist (or draughtsman) first and an entertainer second (if at all) speaks of a division of labor that was increasingly common when the two men began working for Disney in the early 1930s. It had not been the order of things during animation's beginnings twenty years earlier. Thomas and Johnston were skilled craftsmen, animators who could draw Disney's trademark characters on spec and could faithfully contribute to the company's evolving and distinctive style of "full" animation. Yet they were not entertainers: as workers in a rapidly changing industry, they were aware of American commercial animation's origins on the vaudeville stage and its profound debt to that stage's traditions and conventions, which were based in, borrowed from, and shared the spotlight with vaudeville's antecedent forms: burlesque, variety, and blackface minstrelsy. In the 1930s, Disney was the premier animation house in the United States; in the two decades prior to its rise, though, American commercial animation went from an art form that sometimes incorporated film into live performances to an industrial content supplier for both major and minor Hollywood film studios. In the process of that transformation, the visual and performative tropes of vaudeville and blackface minstrelsy — well known to audiences of the day — gave rise to the basic template for trademark continuing characters such as Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, and Bugs Bunny, with many other versions in between. That audiences today do not immediately recognize Mickey as a blackface minstrel is in part an effect of a widely shared belief that blackface minstrelsy no longer seems to be performed on a regular basis (though it is) and of the social and material changes that gradually remade the figure of the performing animator — the interlocutor to those cartoon minstrels — into that of an animation worker. Understanding the rapid transition from animation as performance to animation as industry requires setting aside a standard depiction of the history of early animation as a succession of favorite and famous texts (i.e., cartoons) and instead thinking of it as the development of a performative tradition into a commodity-based one. Thinking of animation first as performance, and later as industry, opens up a genealogy that traces the movement of animation's central conventions and tropes from the stage to the screen, a movement whose counterpoint is the organization of its creative workforce into increasingly rationalized and systematic divisions of labor — the products of which, strangely, regularly performed the labor that went into their creation.

The career of Winsor "Silas" McCay spanned the rise of the movies, the birth of American animation, and its rationalization as an industry. McCay was the most famous of those early performing animators, and the story of his conception of animation (both the process and its products) as a vaudeville act, his departure from vaudeville, and the relationship between the two is illustrative of those changes. A talented artist, gifted performer, and tireless self-promoter, McCay began working in the 1880s, designing posters for the Barnumesque Sackett & Wiggins Wonderland and Eden Musée. After a few years designing posters and programs for dime museums, circuses, and traveling shows, McCay became a newspaper sketch artist — in part because of his skill at drawing the unusual and grotesque and in part because he could draw incredibly quickly and accurately. By the dawn of the twentieth century he had established himself as a newspaper cartoonist, first through editorial cartoons and then through Sunday cartoon series such as Little Sammy Sneeze (1904–1906), Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904–1911, 1913), and Little Nemo in Slumberland(1905–1914). Of these, Dreams and Nemo were particularly popular, and with them McCay gained acclaim as a master of perspective and of a sort of vernacular proto-surrealism, and this work led him to begin experimenting with the sequential art of animation. Dreams was so popular that it became a stage show and then was interpreted on film in 1906 by Edwin S. Porter. In that same year, McCay began an extremely successful vaudeville career, working as a lightning-sketch artist and developing stage acts that would eventually make use of his animated films Little Nemo (1911), How a Mosquito Operates (1912), and Gertie (1914). In 1914, McCay's new contract with newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, for whom he worked as a cartoonist, forbade him from performing on vaudeville stages outside New York City. Although McCay's films continued to circulate, this effectively signaled the beginning of the end of a very lucrative and satisfying performing career. McCay returned to the stage briefly in 1927, but by then vaudeville was in sharp decline — in part because of its replacement by movie/performance combination shows and by short-subject films, including cartoons (see chapter 3).

Winsor McCay died in 1934 at the relatively young age of sixty-seven, of heart disease probably hastened by alcohol. Yet he had already stopped producing cartoons in the early 1920s, a few years after he stopped performing animation for live vaudeville audiences. Of his final works, Bug Vaudeville (1921) clearly delineates McCay's sense of his importance to animation, while nodding to the rapid changes to moviegoing and cartooning that, during the late teens and early twenties, made him marginal in an industry he had helped to create. More than a visual epitaph for a fading showman, Bug Vaudeville offers a schematic of that marginalization, a means of reading changes to animation as an art, a craft, and an industry. In its self-reflexivity the cartoon performs a struggle to reconcile the contradictions between those three modes of production: art, craft, industry. Like many of the best cartoons of its age, the film tells a story that is as much about the social and material relations that obtained around its making as it is about the acrobatic Junebugs or butterflies on horseback it features. Like its maker, the cartoon is caught between celebrating an onrushing and tranformative technological modernity and recognizing in that transformation a pending obsolescence.

Even though McCay was only fifty-two when he made it, Bug Vaudeville...