Time for action – watching Felix Turns the Tide

Now, what you need to do next is find the animation and watch it. Next, you will think about certain aspects of what you have seen. There are no wrong answers. The important thing is to think about these concepts. Through these, you will understand more about animation principles and how they apply to Blender. Now, put yourself in the mind of someone living in 1922. World War I was just a few years ago. The first commercial radio stations were new. A person named Otto Mesmer did most of the animation work on Felix Turns the Tide. So put yourself in his place. You have a month to make it, and that is not enough time. How are you going to tell the story? Watch the animation, but go back and watch it again to see how he did it.

1. Search on the Web for the terms Felix Turns the Tide + 1922. YouTube, archive.org, or some other site should have the video. Archive.org may have a higher quality version. The Felix Turns the Tide movie was made in 1922 and stars Felix the Cat, who was the hottest animation star of the time.
2. Watch Felix Turns the Tide.
3. As you watch, look at Felix's movement. Does it look realistic or are we given a series of poses and a moment to see each one?
4. Look at the background. How did they stage the scenes? Think of the scene where he goes to say goodbye to his girlfriend, or when he hijacks the balloon. How is the camera used? Would you have used the camera in the same way?
5. Look at how they designed the animation to meet the audience's expectations. Audiences were used to the comic strips of newspapers, which used symbols such as speech balloons and musical notes to convey action. Do you see other places where the animation looks like a comic strip? Do modern animations use material from other genres that you are used to these days?
6. Look at how the sausages get to the battle by wireless. Do you think that modern audiences would accept this? Imagine you are remaking this animation in 3D using Blender for a modern audience. How would you handle getting the sausages to the battlefront?

What just happened?

Felix Turns the Tide sure isn't as complex as Big Hero 6, but it's surprising how well they used their limited tools and told a story. This was only six years after cel animation had been invented. Cel animation revolutionized early animation because it allowed you to put different parts of an animated frame on different transparent layers of plastic cellulose, so you didn't have to redraw the entire scene every frame. However, the animation was pretty stiff, and the motion went straight from pose to pose. Their use of the camera reflected the use of films at that time, plenty of long shots and long takes. They also borrowed the visual grammar from comics with things such as speech bubbles and dotted lines to indicate where they were looking.

Moving ahead a few years in time, to 1928

Animators are learning that their craft and technology is advancing. Walt Disney had lost its main character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to Universal Studios. Universal also hired all of Disney's animators except Ub Iwerks, Disney's star animator. This was a serious blow to Disney. Therefore, Disney was desperate and they needed something to stay in business. In 1928, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created their first Mickey Mouse animation, Plane Crazy. It introduced both Mickey and Minnie. However, Disney could not find a distributor for it, so it did not get released. Their next Mickey Mouse movie, Steamboat Willie, was the first American animation with sound, and that opened up the market for Mickey. For us, since Plane Crazy was made as a silent film and retrofitted with sound, it showed how animators had perfected their skills in the period between 1922 and 1928 before the use of sound.