Assistants and Inbetweeners - Text 1
Inbetweeners did not appear overnight; they were the culmination of a certain conception of industrial animation which arose in the 1910s and whose source lies in the optimisation of production time. Since the founding of animated drawing studios around 1915, those behind them had set to work solving the problems presented by this kind of production. John Randolph Bray summed these up as follows:
in addition to the colossal toil of the art work it takes a week to photograph the drawings one at a time. Great speed united with unvarying accuracy is essential. Every stroke of the pen must count.[1]
This led to the recruitment of assistants who, beginning in the early 1910s, devoted themselves to repetitive tasks with no inherent interest artistically speaking, because they consisted in redrawing the decor from one image to the next, in inking the animators’ doodles, and in erasing the pencil traces left on the drawings.
Outside the industrial sphere, already in 1913 Winsor McCay had recruited a certain John Fitzsimmons, who would participate in the production of McCay’s famous Gertie the Dinosaur: for him it was thus not a matter of creating in-between drawings between different phases of a movement, but simply of reproducing the static decor from one drawing to the next, with McCay having the privilege of animating his creature entirely on his own.[2] These positions began to spread in the latter half of the 1910s in particular. The job of the “tracer,” for example, was to trace the immobile parts of the characters drawn by the animators.[3] An article from 1916 describes the employees of the Bray studio in this fashion: “at present there are nine cartoonists, thirty assistant artists and four cameramen constantly at work at the Bray Studios.”[4] Whereas the draughtspersons and those in charge of filming the pictures were clearly named, the haziness around the notion “assistant” points to a desire to keep the nature of these trades vague in order to give greater visibility to the work of the animators and camera operators.
The matter is even trickier in that the same article points out that “there are thirty-four different processes to be undergone by each cartoon,”[5] without, however, describing these processes, the majority of which, one imagines, fell to these diverse and not clearly described assistants. Naturally, some of these processes were connected with the head animator, such as those stages related to creating characters (sketches of the character from the front, the back, in three-quarter view and in profile), to the lay-out (planning the action and the decor elements to come) or to the original drawing with a drawing pencil (decor and characters). Afterwards, however, the concrete creation of the drawing to be photographed required a number of quick and repetitive actions. Given that this mention of thirty-four procedures dates from 1916, we can suppose that they involve the new use of celluloid. These actions were necessarily divided up differently, because there was no longer any need to “reproduce” the decor for each photographed drawing. Among these thirty-four procedures, apart from those falling to the head animator, we can name perforating the paper and celluloid sheets for use with the peg bar, tracing the animation (transferring the inked design onto tracing paper; reproducing any characters which do not move), erasing pencil lines, inking dark areas of the image, positioning drawings below the animation stand camera, placing the glass plate over the drawings to hold them together, taking the picture, etc. It is difficult if not impossible, given the present state of our sources, to know more about this division of labour, but we have a sense of its level of refinement, as it reserved for each assistant an extremely precise action and avoided any superfluous procedure. We might imagine, for example, that several assistants were responsible for transferring the drawings from the animator’s table to that of the tracers and inkers, and that another assistant would take them to the camera department.
Hence the parallel which appears to take shape at the time, between the organisation of the work in these studios and the mechanical and automated operation of the camera. The assistants were seen as the invisible cogs of this latter device, underpinning that automatisation of the animation process, one tied to repetitiveness and the division of labour. Although what lies at the heart of the creation of these new positions was always greater efficiency and the rationalisation of production, they implicitly outlined a new way of thinking about animated drawings. In this view, the animated drawing should be produced impersonally, quickly and mechanically as the camera automatically and objectively records the reality before it. The interchangeability of styles which arose out of this, which was of vital importance at the time, can be seen in a new trade which emerged in the early 1920s, that of the “inbetweener,” whose job was to draw the in-between phases of a movement between two positions decided on by the head animator. Around 1923, the animator Max Fleischer recruited a certain Arthur Davis, who was the first to be assigned this task of creating these in-between drawings. This assistant’s work proved to be significant, for Fleischer effectively tasked him with imitating the style of the animator Richard Huemer – the question, then, was one of the uniformity of style. More precisely, this assistant was asked to set aside his own creative stylistic imagination and adopt someone else’s: to play the role of a machine which would coldly fill in the in-between moments between the two extreme positions of a pose. These anonymous phases of movement replicated a kind of automatisation of the production of movement – that of the photographic camera – and thereby downplayed the role of the artist’s personality in the depiction of movement.
In this sense, an article by Carl Fallberg published in several parts in 1942 in the journal American Cinematographer describes what was at stake in this singular trade. As Fallberg explains, “the inbetweener is the humblest in the long string of artists on the production line. But even the inbetweener must have a better-than-average facility with a pencil and possess a good sense of action”[6]. In fact, Fallberg continues, “every inbetween is a complete drawing, just as finished as the extremes, but it can be seen with a little analytical examining of the illustrations that these inbetweens don’t represent any important phase in the course of the action, but simply carry one extreme to the next.”[7]
