KINE KOMEDY KARTOONS

(1916-1920)

Kine Komedy Kartoons was started in the late summer of 1916 with Frank Zeitlin as producer. The company was a partnership, the other partner being Leslie Demainbray Sewell, who presumably provided the finance. The name suggests the intention to compete with the animated cartoons now flowing in from the US, by producing films similar to those being animated for the Cartoon Film Company by Dudley Buxton and Anson Dyer. And indeed Zeitlin had done a deal with Buxton and Dyer, who would join Kine Komedy Kartoons when their contracts with the Cartoon Film Company expired at the end of the year.

But the company's first productions were a series of propaganda films created by photographer, cartoonist and 'lightning artist' stage performer Ernest H Mills and probably financed by the Ministry of Information. Accordinhg to Denis Gifford these were released under the series banner Britannia's Budget. (Although I have seen the name Britannia's Budget in some cinema listings, it does not seem to appear in any of the trade journals.)

It seems likely that Zeitlin knew Mills through his stage act and that the idea of making propaganda cartoons was the company's starting point. The first, The Battle of Jutland, a serious portrayal of the British naval victory, was released by Davison's Film Sales Agency on 21 September 1916. It was followed by Supremacy, about Britain's sea and air superiority, which included a depiction of the shooting down of a Zeppelin on a bombing raid, which Mills had seen happening. It seems the rights to distribute this film were bought by the London office of Triangle Plays who retitled it as What London Saw at 2.18 a.m. on September 3rd, 1916 to exploit the eye-witness depiction which made the film of greater interest. Well promoted, it was released on 30 October.

For 1917 Zeitlin secured a distribution deal with the Broadwest Film Company who took an ad in the trade magazine The Bioscope (December 28 1916) to announce the signing of Buxton and Dyer and promote the forthcoming series:

     Broadwest Films have acquired the world's rights for the cartoon works of Messrs. Dudley Buxton and Anson Dyer. These two artists are well known as cinematographic cartoonists. Broadwest are ready to effect immediately foreign and colonial sales. The first of the cartoon films is nearing completion, and should be ready for showing early in the New Year.

Broadwest promoted each of the first three releases with small display ads in the trade magazines, and in February gave The Bioscope a success story:

     Broadwest Films are experiencing a large and increasing demand for their Broadwest Cartoons. "The Romance of David Lloyd George" is everywhere meeting with a great reception, and there are now left only a few bookings for early dates. "The Devil's Little Joke" is now released for the provinces, and the latest, "The Entente Cordiale," which includes a picture of the late King Edward from sittings given specially to the artist, Mr E. H. Mills, is certain of equal success. "The Entente Cordiale" is to be shown to the trade at the West End Cinema, along with "The Ware Case," on the 28th inst.
[The Bioscope 22 February 1917]

But by May Broadwest were still promoting the first three films, with no mention of future releases. Somehow the contract had been discontinued. Perhaps Anson Dyer's contribution had not been delivered on time, although given the popularity of the first three films one might have expected Broadwest to be more accommodating. Perhaps in the light of their success Zeitlin was demanding more money. Whatever the reason, Broadwest ceased to distribute further Kine Komedy Kartoons and the series was picked up by Jury's Imperial Pictures.

Mills continued making serious animated depictions while Buxton and Dyer made humorous cartoons, sometimes only loosely connected to the War. Distribution for 1918 was secured by Walturdaw, who promoted the deal by getting the following review published in the Bioscope on 15 November 1917:

The Kine Komedy Kartoons
Walturdaw.     1 reel

     The animated cartoon has so firmly established itself in popular favour that no programme can be considered complete which cannot find occasional space for one of these highly ingenious forms of artistic entertainment. The comic serial has been a feature of illustrated papers for many years, and its value has been fully appreciated by the American Press, in which the adventures of Buster Brown or the Newlyweds have for years been looked forward to with eager anticipation from week to week.
     This has led to the animated cartoon as a humorous commentary on events of topical interest, and in this respect nothing has been done better than the political skits by such well-known and talented black and white artists as Dudley Buxton, Anson Dyer, and Ernest Mills.
     The Walturdaw Co. has secured all the rights of these clever cartoons for the year 1918, and the first two subjects to be released, "Admiral Beatty" and "Old King Coal," which are now being shown at the company's offices, will well repay the attention of the exhibitor.
     The ingenuity is remarkable, as in the scene where a lump of coal breaks into minute fragments which resolve themselves into quite remarkable likenesses of various personages of supreme interest at the present time.
     The cartoons are not only clever and amusing, but of such sound patriotism that there can never be any doubt as to their hearty reception by the audience, and form ideal subjects as a contrast to any feature whether grave or gay. No one should fail to secure these pictures as a bright addition to a programme.

In March 1918 Zeitlin contracted with the ambitious young designer Victor Hicks to make a series of cartoons for Kine Komedy Kartoons. Perhaps as part of the deal Zeitlin helped Hicks put on an updated version of his 1916 musical stage sketch Something Simple, in which a young lady interacts with the backdop of doodles on a slate, retitled Make-Believe. (Although this act involved the animation of drawn figures it should be noted that this was by physical manipulation rather than any film effect.) In interviews Hicks frequently refers to cartoon films he is making, but his contribution to the output of Kine Komedy Kartoons seems small. An item in The Bioscope on 20 June 1918 announced:

     Mr Frank Zeitlin, of the Kine Komedy Kartoons, informs us that Victor Hick's latest cartoon, "Twice Nightly," a burlesque of a music hall show, has been purchased by Walturdaw, and will be released by them during the week.

Unfortunately there is no record of any review or actual release date.

Since the arrival of Bray's Colonel Heeza Liar in late 1915 and Barré's Animated Grouch Chasers in 1916, Britain had enjoyed a steadily increasing stream of American cartoons. To satisfy distributors in the US a length of half a reel (500-600 ft, 8½-10 mins) and a new release every two weeks had become the standard. In January 1917 Pathé began releasing Mutt and Jeff cartoons in the UK. The series had been in production in the US since 1915 and it soon became very popular in Britain. When the War ended in 1918 Kine Komedy Kartoons, the nearest the UK had to a factory studio, aimed to compete with the US imports. They were clearly making films that appealed to audiences, but by the end of 1918 Zeitlin had failed to get a distribution deal for the following year. With the patriotic appeal of British propaganda films no longer a major factor, renters were weighing up the demand for the expensive Kine Komedy Kartoons compared to the much cheaper and equally popular American imports. On 19 December 1918 The Kinematograph Weekly carried a full page advertisement that read:

An article in the same issue expanded on the "Splendid New Series":

     Cartoons on the Screen.—Kine Komedy Kartoons are about to issue three new series of animated cartoons. By arrangement with the Strand Magazine a new series of "Zig Zags at the Zoo," drawn by the famous animal artist J. A. Shepherd, and animated by Ernest H. Mills, will be presented. In addition there will be the humorous adventures of the "Cheerio Chums," by Dudley Buxton, and the stories of "Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit," by Anson Dyer. Everyone who has seen the cartoons by these famous artists will agree that for their life-like representation they have no rivals.

Zeitlin was facing a problem that would beset producers of British entertainment cartoon shorts for the rest of the century: he was producing successful films but distributors were not willing to pay enough for them to keep the company afloat. It seems that Leslie Sewell considered it was time to quit — on 7 February 1919 The London Gazette recorded the dissolution of the partnership:

NOTICE is hereby given, that the Partnership which has for some time past been carried on by Frank Isadore Zeitlin and Leslie Demainbray Sewell, at Number 66, Shaftesbury-avenue, in the county of London, in the trade or business of Cinematograph Film Producers, under the style or firm of KINE KOMEDY KARTOONS, was this day dissolved by mutual consent.—As witness our hands this 23rd day of January, one thousand nine hundred and nineteen.
FRANK I. ZEITLIN.
LESLIE D. SEWELL.

But Zeitlin was determined to keep Kine Komedy Kartoons going. He struck a deal with the Phillips Film Company and on 6 March 1919 The Kinematograph Weekly reported:

     A New Series of Screen Cartoons.—The Phillips Film Co., Ltd., has acquired the sole U.K.rights in a new series of film cartoons, of an average length of 500 feet, and reproducing the work of a number of the best-known black-and-white humorists of the day, and we understand that an example of these "Phillips Philm Phables," as they have been titled, will be shown at the Trade show of "The Lackey and the Lady" tomorrow. The subjects are offered in a first set of twelve films, and must be booked as a whole, but a three-day or weekly change may be had as desired.

As well as coining the name for the series, Phillips were also requiring exhibitors to sign up for a complete set of twelve films, to be released at regular intervals, rather than book them individually. The three-day or weekly option reflects the fact that many cinemas ran two programmes a week, showing one set of films from Monday to Wednesday, then switching to a completely new set from Thursday to Saturday.

The set of twelve films was to consist of three films from four "black-and-white humorists". Dudley Buxton would provide a series entitled The Cheerio Chums, featuring the adventures of two ex-servicemen, Jerry and Nobbler. Anson Dyer would animate Noel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories featuring Brer Rabbit. The other two artists were new recruits Poy (Percy Fearon) and J A Shepherd, although their involvement was not so much in actual production but rather the acquisition of the rights to their published cartoons. Shepherd's popular Zig Zags at the Zoo illustrations from the series in The Strand Magazine would be animated by E H Mills, and the Poy cartoons from the Evening News would be redrawn for the screen, lightning artist fashion, possibly by Fearon himself.

Victor Hicks had already severed his connection with the Kine Komedy Kartoons and was now embarked on a series of cartoons for the film exporter Lionel Phillips, who had left the Phillips Film Co a year earlier to form the Lionel Phillips Company.

The films were being made using the cutout method, but Zeitlin seized an opportunity to study the American sequential drawing animation. The American animator J S "Vet" Anderson, having been too old to enlist in the US Army when they entered the War, had claimed to have been born in Canada and was eventually accepted by the British Army. He was assigned to the Tank Corps as a camouflager, but was still in training camp when the war ended. He was demobbed in March 1919 and moved to London looking for work. Zeitlin hired him to demonstrate the American method to the staff of Kine Komedy Kartoons. Anson Dyer was happy with the cutout method, but Dudley Buxton showed interest in the sequential method, and a title card designer called Joe Noble who worked in the same building became intrigued and joined Kine Komedy Kartoons to learn animation from Anderson.

Dyer was keen to continue animating but realised that the days of Kine Komedy Kartoons were numbered. In early summer, as soon as he had completed the last of the Uncle Remus trio, he left to go and make cartoon films for Hepworth Picture Plays in Walton-on-Thames.

Because the films credited to Poy and J A Shepherd were based on already published works it was not essential for them to become deeply involved, but Shepherd in particular was interested in the animation process and Zeitlin appears to have encouraged him to take on the role of producer, perhaps with the hope of his drawing in other magazine cartoonists. In an interview for the Weekly Dispatch published 31 August 1919 Shepherd speaks of his association with Kine Komedy Kartoons, his disatsfaction with Mills' cut-out animation on the first two Zig Zags films and the improvement in the third, The New Keeper's Dream, and the adoption of the sequential drawings method, with which he hopes for better results in the future:

     "My next film will deal with performing animals. After that will come 'Alice in Wonderland' which I am doing in conjunction with G. L. Stampa. He is doing the figures and I am doing the animals. We have got permission from Macmillan's to base this on Tenniel's illustrations. I have also in mind a fish film.

     "But the one I'm really pleased with is one which H. M. Bateman has just done for me. It is a boxing subject, and is really great. Bateman is as much a genius at this sort of work as he is in his other illustration work. To get really good artists, I find, makes a great difference. I hope to have the help of soon of H. R. Millar, whose fairy-tale drawings in the Strand Magazines are so well known.

Shepherd then cites the great success of the Mutt and Jeff films at creating hilarity, and concludes:

     "The work becomes a bit tedious at times, naturally. You can imagine what it means when I tell you that eight drawings are flashed in a second, that a foot of film passes in the same time, and that there may be 500 feet of film. Four thousand drawings! But it is captivating work."

Winsor McCay, whose 1912 How a Mosquito Operates demonstrated that comic strip artwork could be animated, and set a template for the American cartoon film, drew a separate drawing for each exposure of action — economising only with holds and by reversing and repeating actions using the same drawings. The studios that sprang up to capitalise on McCay's successes looked for further ways to save labour, and quickly discovered that they could get away with shooting action on twos — that is, exposing the same drawing for two frames of film. The result, a projection rate of eight drawings a second, was not so smooth but still visually acceptable as motion (it is the same rate used by many Japanese Anime films shot on threes at the sound speed of twentyfour frames per second) and became the standard practice. Clearly Anderson had passed it on. Shepherd is exaggerating (as did most articles on animation) by claiming that this meant four thousand drawings for a fiim of five hundred feet — holds, title cards and repeated actions all reduce the number of drawings actually needed.

Stampa and Millar were primarily black-and-white illustrators, and as far as I know their proposed involvement with animation did not come to fruition. H M Bateman is of greater interest. Inspired by the freedoms of the comics artists of his youth, he broke out from the illustrative conventions of the traditional cartoon and drew in a looser, more expressive style. He also enjoyed depicting unfolding events in lengthy sequences of drawings, upto thirty, often published over several pages. He would have been a natural for animation. There seems to be no record of the boxing film referred to. It may be that Bateman had merely drawn the key points of the story, in the manner of his strips, with the intention that someone else would complete the actions.

The article suggests Zeitlin's desparate attempt to rebuild Kine Komedy Kartoons with well-known artists using the American system in order to remain compeditive. But he needed to raise the necessary capital to continue.

Ernest Mills made one more film for KKK, The Tiger, Clemanceau, about the French Premier and Minister of War. Perhaps this was a way of both profitting from his return to the studio and compensating for his lack of success with the Zig Zags. The film was released by Ashley Exclusive Films in July 1919.

It seems that Phillips Film Co were not prepared to contract for a second series of Philm Phables. On 29 July 1920 the Kinematograph Weekly reports:

Kine Komedy Kartoons
     That well-known cartoonist, Dudley Buxton, is excelling himself on a series of twelve cartoons which he is making under the control of Kine Komedy Kartoons for the General Film Renting Co. The series is to be taken as "Bucky's Burlesques" and Mr. Buxton is just finishing the fourth of the series, "By the Sad Waves."

The first of this series, In the Spring a Young Man's Fancy, appears to have been shown to the trade in June; the second, Clutching Eyebrows, was reviewed in the Kinematograph Weekly 22 July with the release note "Released one a month." After number four of the Bucky's Burlesques a new series takes over, still released by General Film Renting, entitled The Memoirs of Miffy, featuring a comic middle-aged man, which ran for two episodes.

Two films by J S Anderson were also released in the latter part of 1920. But Zeitlin could not raise the necessary funding to continue, and Kine Komedy Kartoons ceased trading.

Miscellanea

Researching the films of Kine Komedy Kartoons has thrown up a few queries.

The BFI holds an extract from an Anson Dyer film bearing the title Peter's Picture Poems which features wordplay with the letters of "RUSSIA" — the Kaiser aims to take the country "to add the letter 'P'" but the "USA" turns up in the shape of Uncle Sam to punch him on the nose. I've found no mention of this title in the press of the period, so it is either the title of a segment from another film, or it was never released — perhaps because it had ceased to be topical. The Kaiser's attempt to secure Russia and the appearance of the USA would seem to date it at either Spring 1917, when Germany made successful inroads into Russia and America declared war, or Spring 1918, when Russia signed a treaty with Germany to halt further incursion and US troops had their first individual victory. I am inclined to think 1917 the more likely date.

In the Spring of 1919 Sherwood Exclusive Film Agency re-issued six Kine Komedy Kartoons that had originally been released by Jury two years earlier. In its advertising one of these is given as The Kaiser's Dream. While this could be a new film, or a renaming of the earlier The Devil's Little Joke, it seems most likely that it is a clerical error for The Kaiser's Record.

In his Filmography Denis Gifford cites a Dudley Buxton film entitled Blood and Iron but I have not been able to find any mention of such a film in the press of the period.

The first Cheerio Chums film was released as Well I'll be Blowed!, but it had been shown to the trade under the more mundane title A Two-Man Show: I have included this working title in the Filmography section below.

The Wellington, New Zealand, Evening Post for 19 April 1921 has a cinema advertisement that among the supporting programme includes: "No. 1 KINE KOMEDY KARTOON ('Nobbler Flies the Pacific'), an English Movie Cartoon with a Laugh". As Nobbler was the name of one of the Cheerio Chums I have taken this to be the title of Cheerio Chums No. 3.

The Era, 1 September 1920, lists a cartoon by Dudley Buxton, released by General Renting, titled Going Away: this might be Bucky's Burlesques No. 3.

The item from Kinematography Weekly quoted above gives the title of the fourth Bucky's Burlesque as By the Sad Waves. This is a reference to By the Sad Sea Waves, a popular Victorian ballad, originally from the opera "The Brides of Venice" by Jules Benedict, words by Alfred Bunn, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Monday, April 29, 1844. The phrase was still in popular usage during the first quarter of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic, and was used as the title of a British comedy short in 1914, an American comedy short in 1916 and a Harold Lloyd comedy short in 1917. A Katzenjammer Kids cartoon was titled "By the Sand Sea Waves" (USA 1917). Gifford includes the word "Sea" in the title of Buxton's film, which the article does not. He also dates it as 1917, perhaps confusing it with the Harold Lloyd film.

A Recollection

On 25 May 1935 the New Zealand newspaper The Gisborne Times printed a curious "History of the Film Cartoon" article on its cinema page. It concludes with a description of Disney's black and white cartoons, ignoring the fact that Disney had been making colour cartoons for the previous three years, so it is evident that this was a rehash of an older article but I have not been able to track down the original. The curiosity is that it claims, quite unwarrentedly, not only that Kine Komedy Kartoons produced the first entertainment cartoon films in the UK but that they were the influence for the birth of the American cartoon industry! The source of this part of the article must have been someone associated with KKK, which makes the following extracts of interest (allowing for the element of hyperbole):

     Thus the screen cartoon made its bow as an item of popular entertainment, emerging from a small room in London, which housed the office of Kine Komedy Kartoons. "K.K.K." was the inspiration of Frank Zeitlin, pioneer of the film cartoon, who gathered in his cramped quarters a small coterie of artists. Anson Dyer, Dudley Buxton, and A. J. Shepherd used pen and ink. They were called "black and white cartoonists." Ernest H. Mills alone used the crayon, and produced serious work. His cartoon of Mr Lloyd George was sold to the proprietor of a cinema theatre in London for £800, and afterward it was disposed of to the Broadwest Film Company, which rented it to provincial and overseas exhibitors for £12 a week.
     Exhibitors grumbled. Twelve pounds a week for an item lasting only 10 minutes! But the public had ceased to jeer. It was looking forward to further cartoons, crude and jerky though they were. The demand for film cartoons grew. The serious cartoon, such as the "romance" of Mr Lloyd George, had a brief life. [....] It was the antics of comic characters that gripped the public's imagination and inspired its laughter.

     For nearly two years "K.K.K." held the premier place as the producer of film cartoons. From the back room came Shepherd's "Zig Zags at the Zoo," in which the famous animal artist let the animals loose, and put the Fellows of the Zoological Society into the cages. There also came "Old King Cole" and his court, and several other characters. Each artist was his own producer. Not one of them had a single assistant. Thousands of cardboard models were made—first having to be drawn, then tinted, then cut out and assembled, legs and arms being fastened to bodies with knotted cotton. After every camera exposure the figures had to be moved the tiniest fraction of an inch, so that the finished sequence suggested motion. A short film of 750ft. frequently necessitated 20,000 movements of limbs and figures.

     Then came the American activities. Late in 1917 and early 1918 Hollywood produced "Mut and Jeff," and flooded the market with a new style, clever, well-drawn, laughable cartoon, at a renting fee of £2 a week, one-sixth of the fee charged by Kine Komedy Kartoons! "K.K.K." was put out of business. From that time onward there has been no British-made cartoon film "star," and Hollywood still holds the world market.

£12 in 1919 was the equivalent of about £646 in 2021, £2 the equivalent of just under £108. The American cartoons, inspired by the films of Winsor McCay, used sequential drawings to create movement, rather than cut-outs. They had already paid for themselves in the home market, so could be offered to the rest of the world at a lower price. They were not yet actually made in Hollywood: although live-action film studios had been moving to Hollywood since 1911, New York was still the centre for cartoon films. While it was true that when using cut-outs each animator worked alone on his film, it seems likely that when Dudley Buxton adopted the "American method" of sequential drawings he was able to pass some of the work to an assistant, probably Joe Noble.

Filmography

Links to Other Sites

BFIPlayer - Peter's Picture Poems: video of extract from a 1917 Anson Dyer cartoon in which the Kaiser's desire to annex Russia is beset with word-play..

BFIPlayer - Agitated Adverts: video of Anson Dyer's 1917 cartoon.

BFIPlayer - Ever Been Had?: video of Dudley Buxton's 1917 apocalyptic comic fantasy.

BFIPlayer - Running a Cinema: video of Dudley Buxton's first Memoirs of Miffy cartoon, 1920.

BFIPlayer - The Smoke from Gran-Pa's Pipe: video of Vet Anderson's 1920 film

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