In the early days of animation, many companies were competing for movie theater bookings as a box-office draw, just as comic strips sold newspapers. Both were aimed at an adult audience.

The Calico Dragon is not spectacular until you consider that early film animation was a brute-force endeavor. At 12-16 frames per second, a five minute short could require 4,800 cells, sketched, inked and painted by hand, sandwiched under glass one at a time over the adjusted moving background, and each cell photographed by a motion picture camera capable of shooting one frame at a time. Then they had to develop and edit the film, add an etched soundtrack AND make duplicates of the master to distribute. Talk about labor-intensive artistry. Were it not profitable, no sane human would have bothered with it.

Harman-Ising figured out a way to animate fabric patterns, not just for the backgrounds, but for the moving figures.

I don’t blame you if you don’t watch the whole thing – the cloying sappiness of it all was tiring for me, too – so jump to The Dragon Song at about 04:20. I’ll wait.
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Did you spot it? Happens at about 05:25. It wasn’t blatant but the song and the subtle innuendo had to have been an inside joke to the animators.

[Cell image via Tralfaz.]

So with that out of the way, it’s PPPL Night on The Overnight Open Thread.