Animation: A World History by Giannalberto Bendazzi

Author:Giannalberto Bendazzi [Giannalberto Bendazzi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Focal Press
Published: 2015-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

Van Beuren

Tom and Jerry (not to be confused with the much more famous cat and mouse by Hanna-Barbera for MGM) were the first characters created at the studio of Amadée J. Van Beuren (1879–1938). After 1929, when Paul Terry left with a good number of animators to open his new company, Van Beuren remained with a reduced staff and with the rights to Aesop’s Fables. As an entrepreneur, he had made his fortune dealing with peep-show machines (individual viewers for short, sometimes spicy, films mainly destined for amusement parks). Like Mintz, and unlike the typical bosses of American animation, he was a businessman turned filmmaker. An ambitious man, Van Beuren made every effort to develop his company, abandoning the updated Fables (which, by 1930 and under the direction of John Foster and Harry Bailey, had turned into a shameless, bad-taste copy of Disney’s shorts, with two leading characters who looked exactly like Mickey and Minnie Mouse) and hiring Vernon George Stallings and George Rufle (1901–1974).

In 1931, Stallings and Rufle helped to create the youngsters named Tom and Jerry, the former tall and dark, the latter short and blond. The debut film, credited to John Foster (1906–1971) and George Stallings, Wot a Night (1931), was a playful, creative mixture of the comical and the horrific, in the best tradition of American cinema, be it live action or animation. The episodes that followed were less successful, and the series was stopped in 1933. Van Beuren turned to Otto Soglow’s Little King, a well-known character from comic strips, and even to the famous radio serial Amos ‘n’ Andy. This, however, did not produce much better results since the animators of the studio were only capable of utilizing outdated, ten-year-old styles and techniques. The use of talented but young and inexperienced artists such as Frank Tashlin, Joe Barbera, Pete Burness, Bill Littlejohn, Shamus Culhane, and Jack Zander did not help matters, and the films remained substantially poor in spite of a few good ideas. Still undaunted, Van Beuren attracted Burt Gillett, director of Three Little Pigs at Disney, evidently a key player in animation at that time. Gillett’s changes and improvements included a rapid conversion to colour, a much more refined animation, and the release of Rainbow Parade, a new successful series from 1934.

Two major problems, however, weighed heavily on the studio: Gillett’s mercurial behaviour, which estranged many employees (much later, Shamus Culhane described Gillett as a man just one step away from the madhouse) and the inability to create a character that could effectively appeal to the public. An attempt to revive Felix the Cat, in 1936, failed. Additionally, in 1935, Van Beuren, who was in poor health, suffered a stroke, which confined him to a wheelchair. When the RKO Distribution Company withdrew its support from Van Beuren’s studio and gave it to Disney in 1936, the studio closed. Van Beuren died in 1938 of a heart attack.

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