Rubber hose animation

Short description: Early American Animation Style

File:Trolley Troubles (Walt Disney, 1927).webm

Rubber hose animation was the first animation style that became standardized in the American animation industry field. The defining feature of the style is "rubber hose limbs" — arms, and sometimes legs, that are typically drawn as flowing curves, without articulation (no hinged wrists or elbows). this style is a curving motion that most animated objects possess, resembling the motion and physical properties of a rubber hose. The famous iconic popular successful examples of the Rubber hose animation art style is Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Betty Boop, and Felix The Cat. While the art style fell out of fashion by the late-1930s, it has seen a renewed interest since in the early 2010s.

History

Beginnings and rise

In the early days of hand drawn animation in the 1920s, the studios' main areas were not in Hollywood in United States of America, but New York City in United States of America. Back then, animation was a new phenomenon and there were no experienced animators around; yet there were skilled artists working on newspapers, creating comic strips in a time when even the comic strips themselves were relatively new where the earliest animated cartoons were originally drawn by comic strip artists. Many of them became fascinated with the introduction of moving drawings, and saw them as new possibilities and challenges to use their skills on something they found more exciting than the newspaper strips, the early cartoons are even simpler in the designs than the comic strips that originally spawned them fortunately. the studios that utilized this animated style as a way of dealing with early animation technical limitations. There is an very good expensive only reason for this, A comic strip artist has to draw 4 and 8 panels a day, An animator in those days had to do drawings with 12, 24, and 48 frames for every second of film. Apart from that, this art style was inexpensive. The early animators produced even much more frames while operating on limited animated film budgets. The surreal quality of the style captivated the audience with its unique charm.

For this reason, many of the first cartoons had similarities with moving comic strips, they didn't have color, lines of action, construction, everyone tended to move the same, not much characterization. The artists experimented with what worked and what did not, and what they could and could not do. In the strips, they had no need to think of their work in three dimensions or how they moved, but at the same time this extra aspect gave them the opportunity to introduce gags and elements not possible in comic stills. Moreover, because the drawings had to be mass-produced to create the illusion of movement, they had to come up with a compromise where characters were less detailed and time-consuming, but at the same time alive and complex enough because many animators have strong individual styles and encouraged to showcase them can add a lot of fun and entertainment to the cartoons. As animators gained experience through trial, error and collaborations, cartoons became more professional and dominated by specific rules of how to make them. The early animated style originates from the comic strips and vaudeville performances, which caricatured in line and gesture. The simple designs and exaggerated movements from such performances were adapted by the early animators to create visually engaging characters. The animators needed something that would give them smoother movement with less effort, and this animation style served that purpose.

Although nobody invented the rubber hose animation on their own, they were created by early animation studios. The studios had to be sensitive to any new business trend to survive the competition. A consequence of this was that the style and design of the most successful and popular cartoons had a great impact on the rest of the animation business. One of the earliest examples was Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat, who quickly spawned copy imitators at various different studios. Combined with the natural evolution of the early american animation, this resulted in a dominating design that would be now known as the rubber hose style in the modern present today now days, despite individual differences between the studios. Bill Nolan is credited with the introduction of this animation style.

Decline

Rubber hose animation gradually faded away as cartoons were made much more sophisticated and lifelike, with advanced animation and the fame of realism causing the downfall of the era. The appearance of realistic anatomy and natural movement in characters and more advanced animation techniques like Technicolor led to further decline, especially in works created by Walt Disney, which influenced remaining producers of cartoons through demands from their Hollywood distributors and artists.

Rubber-hose trademarks eventually appeared in some later cartoons, such as The Warner Siblings from Animaniacs by Warner Bros. Animation, but the original animated art style and its influence had become a part of animation history by the start of the 1930s, and went out of favor by the late 1930s, including at Fleischer Studios. Rubber hose influence continues into to the modern day, as in the video game Cuphead (2017).

Influence in modern media

Theatrical animated shorts

In 2013, Walt Disney Animation Studios produced a 3D animated slapstick comedy short film using the style. Get a Horse! combines black-and-white hand-drawn animation and color CGI animation; the short features the characters of the late 1920s Mickey Mouse cartoons and features archival recordings of Walt Disney in a posthumous role as Mickey Mouse. It is the first original Mickey Mouse theatrical animated short since Runaway Brain (1995) and the first appearance of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in a Disney animated production in 85 years.

Film and television

• Disney Television's Mickey Mouse uses rubber hose animation. The series has the zany comedy slapstick feel of the original Mickey Mouse shorts, while providing a modern update with the extensive use of Toon Boom and Flash animation, and "presents Mickey in a comedic broad range of humorous situations that showcase his pluck and rascality, along with his long-beloved charm and good-heartedness.
• In the episode "Truth or Square" from the Nickelodeon's animated television children cartoon show series SpongeBob SquarePants, Patchy the Pirate presents a film of how the cartoon would have been like if it was made in the 1930s. In the film, the animation is done in rubber hose animation and the song used is called Rubber Hose Rag.

See also

• Golden age of American animation