The other morning TCM was showing an animated film (the second ever made) from 1939 called Gulliver’s Travels. I’m looking at this thing and I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Each frame is an artistic masterpiece. The poor quality prints on this page give you a hint, but don’t begin to convey the beauty of the original film. I’m looking at the images that litter the internet and I can’t figure out what’s going on. A little digging and I find out that Fleischer Productions didn’t renew the copyright and the film’s copyright lapsed, it fell into the public domain!

Hollywood being the cheats they are, never considered working out a deal to make copies from the high quality originals. They made these cheap bootlegs! All these copies of Gulliver’s Travels appeared on VHS looking worse than anything Rankin-Bass ever turned out. Flat, washed out crap. Which is kind of ironic. Max Fleischer produced it in Florida where he wouldn’t have to pay unionized artists. He made Gulliver in 1/3 the time and 1/2 the budget of the first animated, Disney’s Snow White. He was trying to cheat the artists who made this masterpiece, and he ends up getting cheated because he forgot to renew the copyright!

The other thing I noticed besides the quality of the artwork, was the incredible way they reproduced the motions of Gulliver as if he was a live person. It turns out he was, in a way. The crew for Fleischer Productions came up with a technique they called “rotoscope“. They filmed a live actor and traced over him! No wonder it looked so real, it was. Nowadays they put a man in an expensive suit with sensors that feeds information to a computer called “motion capture“. These guys did it better in 1939! (A comparative stone age.)

But what tied it all together was what I saw on the CNBC business channel later that same morning. They were talking about the earnings report released that morning touting how well Disney was doing. The only way Disney survives is because people are so ignorant of what quality is. Its 50 years since Disney turned out anything worth a damn animation wise, and almost that long for live action. Walt Disney at the time dismissed Gulliver as second-rate. I’ve seen parts of Snow White, and it certainly didn’t knock my socks off. Gulliver did though.

My point isn’t to insult Walt, but it is to suggest he’d be rolling over in his grave if he could see what his company had turned into. Like so many things, the “old school” was a good school. Young kids have no way of knowing how things could be. How things were done 80 years ago. I think its part of how they get fooled today in many other areas. All they are left with is a vague feeling they’re getting the shaft.

This image only gives a hint of the attention to detail. The richness of color, shadows, subtlety.