The thirties is by far the most important decade in animation. So many things happened and it finally became an art form of it's own. This can be credited in a large part to Walt Disney whose personal ability made art and industry work together. He was not an animator though...
Born in 1901 he started working with animation 1920 in Kansas City with animated commercials. Here he met Ub Iwerks and they teamed up forever. Walt was a driving character who always wanted to go further and Ub was a better animator. After a couple of commercial and artistic failures, such as Laugh-O-Gram Studio....

 

.....Walt was on the brink of bankruptcy and decided to go to Hollywood to become a live action film director. But that was even harder and in desperation he turned towards animation once again and was lucky to have "Alice in Cartoonland" accepted for distribution in 1923. He called Ub Iwerks to come and help him and upon Ub's arrival Walt stopped forever to animate himself. He had other plans...

 

Walt constantly wanted to raise the quality of the Alice films which made them more and more expensive to produce so after about fifty films the distributor decided to let it go in favor of another project - Oswald the Lucky Rabbit....

 

...And almost instantly troubles started with the distributor. Walt didn't have copyright to the figure, so once again the company was in trouble. He asked Ub Iwerks to design a new one - Mickey Mouse (which is very similar to Oswald) - and changed distributor. Mickey made his first appearance in "Plane Crazy"...

 

...and as Walt always wanted to go forward and try new inventions he introduced synchronized sound in the third Mickey Mouse film - Steamboat Willie 1929. This was a huge success and paved the way for his company to turn into an industry. They had the Silly Symphonies series going and by 1932 the visionary Walt started doing full color films.He had the Technicolor license for three years and introduced Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto and a lot of side kicks....

 

So with business in full swing and 200 employees Walt felt it was time to move on once again, and this time into feature film. Budgeted as ten silly symphonies they soon ran into troubles and the work stalled for experiments and tedious remakes.Three times over budget the film premiered December 1937 and was a huge success. From then on feature films were became their signum and the shorts were gradually abandoned.

 

The last innovative strike from Walt was Fantasia. It was meant to be a programme with classical music pieces visualized. With stereophonic sound and changes in the setup every now and then, Walt believed in the project. However world war 2 got in the way for export and that was not good for business. So they had to do war propaganda.

 

The feature production went on after the war and still is with various success. Walt got interested in other things like Disneyland and other interesting projects.He kept on working until he died 1966.

 

 

 

Speaking of Walt Disney, his lifelong friend got an opportunity to run a studio of his own. With a good feeling for movement but low performing on storytelling his films are nowadays referred to as "Cartoons that time forgot". His characters were Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper among others. There are some good films though, the ones that lean on old tales. Like this on, for instance...

 

 

 

The Fleischers also had a very interesting decade. They has a really smash hit with Betty Boop, at least in pre-Hayes time. That was the period when movies were connected to low moral and there was a threat to install censorship in America. But until 1935 Betty could be sexually challenging(as of the thirties).

 

 

When the Hayes code was introduced she slowly vanished and the Fleischers had to look for something else which they found in Popeye.

 

 

As Disney had managed so well in the feature field, the Fleischers wanted to try that too. And since Disney had used their invention, the Rotoscope, they used it too for the main character - Gulliver in Gullivers Travels. The film was beautifully done but lacked good storytelling. Furthermore the war made it hard to export, so it was not the success of Snow White. The made one more attempt in feature, "Mr Hoppety goes to town", but that didn't make it either.

 

 

 

In France Alexandre Alexeieff worked with a technique called Pin Board, which is a million pins in a million holes on a hard board. The longer the pins are pushed out, the darker the image. Here is "Night on a Bald Mountain" from 1933

 

 

 

A spectacular use of animation was in the 1933 version of King Kong. Willis O'Brien created and animated the creatures of a lost world. The film was an outstanding hit. Almost magic, but the success was probably more due to the inventive sound track and the musical score. The animation requires a lot of forgiveness from the audience...

 

In Germany Oscar Fischinger worked in the field of abstract animation. Carefully synchronized to classical music. After fleeing to US he got a job at Disney with Fantasia, but never really adjusted to their way of thinking.