CARTOON FILM COMPANY Ltd

(1914-1918)

Founded at the end of 1914 by producer J A Clozenberg, the Cartoon Film Company, office at 76/78 Wardour Street, was, according to Gifford, the first British film company set up solely for the production of animated cartoons. Clozenberg saw the popularity of the animated War Cartoons being made by Lancelot Speed and Dudley Buxton, and when the company Buxton was working for, Tressograph, stopped production at the end of 1914 (presumably due to cashflow problems) Clozenberg hired him to make a series of cartoons under the title John Bull's Animated Sketchbook.

These continued to use the framework of the lightning artist film (showing the image being inked in helped add to the footage) but more emphasis was given to animated story-telling. Several times Buxton would include a skit featuring a caricature of Charlie Chaplin, using Chaplin's gestures and comic timing to good effect. A favourite trick of Buxton's, particularly with titles, was to film a sequence in reverse. Hence individual cutout letters would be lined up to form the finished title, then animated out of line progressively to flow around and finally disappear into John Bull's hat on the ground. When screened, the letters flow out of the hat to form the title. (It is not known if Buxton's camera was geared for reverse shooting: the standard method of reverse action, discovered by the early filmmakers, was to film upside-down - when the film was turned so that the image was right-way up the action was reversed, the last frame becoming the first.)

In 1916, after making 7 films in the series, Buxton was joined by Anson Dyer, who had been making Dickie Dee's Cartoons for the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company. Each working on their own films, which were released alternately, Buxton and Dyer made a further 15 entries in the John Bull's Animated Sketchbook series.

At the end of 1916 Buxton and Dyer left the Cartoon Film Company to join producer Frank Zeitlin's Kine Komedy Kartoons. It is not known whether Zeitlin made a better offer or the Cartoon Film Company was in financial trouble.

In order to maintain an output of films, Clozenberg made a deal with The Bystander, publishers of Bruce Bairnsfather's popular cartoons of life in the trenches. The magazine had published the cartoons weekly since March 1915 and were now reprinting them in collections. Clozenberg bought the right to use them them as the basis of a series of 'lightning skstches'. About a hundred cartoons were selected, to be reproduced under the camera by artist Jack Dodsworth. A series of 12 films was planned, to be released at fortnightly intervals. Eight cartoons were featured in each episode, which totalled 1000 ft (approximately 17 minutes). Apparently, Dodsworth's hand was seen building up the sketches and adding the captions; no animation of the image was involved.

Shortly after the release of the first of the Bairnsfather Cartoons at the end of May 1917, Clozenberg and Dodsworth started work om a similar series featuring the cartoons of the Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers. They used the same formula, but while the Bairnsfather cartoons were of a humorous nature Raemaekers' intent was to warn against the horrors of German invasion and his work was dramatic and emotive propaganda. It is likely that Clozenberg was encouraged to present the Raemaekers' cartoons by the British War Propaganda Bureau, formed in response to the German Propaganda Agency. The first of the series was released on 10 July 1917, and was predumably alternated weekly with the releases of the Bairnsfather Cartoons

By 1918 the Cartoon Film Company appears to have ceased production, but The Moving Picture World, a weekly New York trade paper, carried items in the issue for 4 May 1918 in which The Cartoon Film Company promoted the Bairnsfather and Raemaekers series with the aim of selling the US rights.

Filmography

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