Artists are commonly supposed to work by inspiration rather than by the conscious use of their intelligence. It is not always profitable to refute this insulting assumption, for the subtleties of a creative process are hard to communicate; and the tendency of the ignorant to surround the arts with the dignity of mystery has its advantages. But if it were necessary to prove that occasionally artists use their brains one could always produce Leonardo da Vinci and Walt Disney. The man Leonardo was an adventurous mind, fond of wheels, an engineer. As an artist he was an innovator constantly experimenting to widen the domain of art. He was (so far as I can make out) the first to go after painting round instead of flat, so that he produced an effect, new in his time, of the figures standing out from the background. Before that artists, judging color and outline more important than light and shade, had been satisfied with figures that seemed merely to be superimposed. Leonardo added to the capacity of expression the power to give depth of atmosphere. (La Giaconda, by the way, is not a good example of the point, for it has been tinkered with too often. Perhaps the Virgin and Child in the Louvre is a better one.)







Leonardo’s philosophy was that will was the energy of life. He was all for energy. Muscular movement and the dynamics of anatomy were favorite studies of his. The sketches for his famous equestrian bronze of Francisco Sforza show that he worked out that horse in a whole range of movement, galloping, rearing up, and still. Just like the drafts for what we call a “film cartoon.” Incidentally, though Leonardo, by an unaccountable oversight, neglected to invent the cinema for himself and therefore had not its possibilities to play with, he was more than a bit of a cartoonist in our modern sense. Ordinary shapes bored him. He liked strange blobs and angles and burlesque outlines; he often drew allegorical sketches, moral and social satires and fables.



As to the other one. Disney, I think, has the grave disadvantage of not having been dead 500 years. His generation appreciates his works, of course, but not, I fear, in the right way. Cinema audiences can hardly be expected to perceive his true significance. They are too preoccupied with sound accompaniment and idea content. Put on one side, please, the music and noise. Throw out Donald Duck. Forget “film cartoons.” Consider moving drawings.

The first moving drawings made for screen projection by that old Frenchman (whose name I forget) in 1877 (or was it 1885?) were elementary. The drawing was poor. They moved. That was as much as you could say. There followed a procession, mostly of Americans, including Winsor McKay, with his delightful but crudely moving “Trained Dinosaur, Gertie”; J. R. Bray and the magnificent “Colonel Heeza Liar”; Earl Hurd and “Bobby Bump”; Bud Fisher, who animated his newspaper comic-strip “Mutt and Jeff”; Sidney Smith; Wallace Carlson and “Dreamy Dud”; Paul Terry and “Farmer Al Falfa”; and Paul Felton and “Hodge Podge.” Not all of these black-and-white comics crossed the Atlantic for British inspection.

About fifteen years ago, so far as Britain was concerned, film-cartooning was topped by Max Fleischer’s “Koko, the Clown” and Pat Sullivan’s “Felix the Cat,” both of which had regular runs in our cinemas. With Fleischer the animation was too conventional to be artistically interesting, obviously just a trick of drawing over photographs. With Sullivan, it was evident that collective fertility in original tricks of draftsmanship and novel mechanical devices had enabled the whole art-form to be advanced a couple of miles or so. The movement, improving slowly, had up till then been confined to the simplest actions from the easiest angles, in profile mostly, tiresome in repetition. Sullivan’s animation was not yet subtle, but it was “all-round.” His figures moved from all angles, sometimes a bit painfully, and they had the beginnings of perspective and individual character. Then along comes Disney.