Sunday, February 4, 2018

Oskar Fischinger and the animation revolution that never was



Oskar Fischinger's short film, "An Optical Poem," was released by MGM in February of 1938, and that was that. Or not.

By Lars Trodson

There was no studio with more prestige or box office power in the late 1930s than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but it was lagging in two crucial lucrative markets: short films and cartoons. Stung by the continuing success, and innovations, coming out of the Walt Disney Studios, MGM wanted to get in those spaces.

In the busy year of 1937, MGM launched an in-house magazine called "MGM Short Stories" to promote its renewed commitment to these genres. This glossy was distributed to Loews theater owners and theater managers each month in order to provide background on the short films and cartoons MGM would be releasing, as well as recommendations on how these films could be promoted to boost their box office potential.

The studio had also hired two men, Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, to lead a reinvigorated short film department. Fred Quimby was overseeing the animation unit.

The October/November 1938 issue of “MGM Short Story” included a profile of Harman and Ising titled “Harman and Ising Is Their Name.” The unsigned piece announced the studio’s intentions and aspirations.

Cartoons... offer a medium which has infinite opportunity for expressing things to vast film audiences which heretofore could never have been told. The gift of the human characteristics of thought, speech and action, to birds, animals and imaginative beings is only one of the possibilities of this plastic medium, which permits movement and rhythm of form and line with sound and color. It is a form of graphic and audible art, such an art as the Michelangelos and Chopins of the past might have envisioned,” the article states. 

“Continuing in this vein, Harman and Ising express the conviction that animated drawings offer, in many cases, the same superiority that the painting or illustration has over the photograph, delineating truer and more expressive illusion. It offers a freedom and flexibility that can achieve almost miraculous results in the hands of those sufficiently adept in its technique. It furnishes the means of creating character and apparent life where before no life existed; the means of exaggerating beyond the wildest reality. It is an instrument to play upon all the emotions from the humble funny-bone to the ecstasy aroused by an immortal symphony.”