Animation and Advertising

Malcolm Cook, Kirsten Moana Thompson, Malcolm Cook, Kirsten Moana Thompson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030279387
• eBook ISBN: 9783030279394
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Throughout its history, animation has been fundamentally shaped by its application to promotion and marketing, with animation playing a vital role in advertising history. In individual case study chapters this book addresses, among others, the role of promotion and advertising for anime, Disney, MTV, Lotte Reiniger, Pixar and George Pal, and highlights American, Indian, Japanese, and European examples. This collection reviews the history of famous animation studios and artists, and rediscovers overlooked ones. It situates animated advertising within the context of a diverse intermedial and multi-platform media environment, influenced by print, radio and digital practices, and expanding beyond cinema and television screens into the workplace, theme park, trade expo and urban environment. It reveals the part that animation has played in shaping our consumption of particular brands and commodities, and assesses the ways in which animated advertising has both changed and been changed by the technologies and media that supported it, including digital production and distribution in the present day. Challenging the traditional privileging of art or entertainment over commercial animation, Animation and Advertising establishes a new and rich field of research, and raises many new questions concerning particular animation and media histories, and our methods for researching them.

© The Author(s) 2019

M. Cook, K. M. Thompson (eds.)Animation and AdvertisingPalgrave Animationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27939-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction to Animation and Advertising

Malcolm Cook¹ and Kirsten Moana Thompson²

(1)

University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

(2)

Seattle University, Seattle, WA, USA

Malcolm Cook (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Kirsten Moana Thompson

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

AnimationAdvertisingAnimation theoryAnimation historyAnimation historiography

End Abstract

From dancing hotdogs that announced the arrival of intermission at the movie theatre, to today’s pharmaceutical ads that affectively signal the powerful effects of mood-altering drugs, animated advertising engages our attention, invites our affection and nostalgia, and persists in our memory. From the earliest silent movies to illuminated billboards in Times Square and Piccadilly Circus, studio idents and bugs on TV channels, social media and the web, advertising and animation have a shared history and a common social and economic role in modernity. Advertising has been central to the work of famous animation studios and celebrated artists, who have relied upon income from the advertising industry and seized the creative and technical challenges of this form of filmmaking. Corporations and advertising agencies have embraced animation as a way to distinctively embody products, brands and values, and engage consumers in emotive or rational ways. Large volumes of animated advertisements have been produced and seen, yet these are accorded limited or marginalised places in archival practices and histories of cinema.

This book argues that throughout its history animation has been fundamentally shaped by its application to promotion and selling, and that animation has played a vital role in advertising history. It revises the existing history of famous animation studios and artists and rediscovers ignored ones, to reveal the extent to which their work was not simply supported by advertising, but entwined with it. It situates animated advertising within the context of a diverse media environment, influenced by print, radio and digital practices, and expanding beyond cinema and television screens into the workplace, theme park, trade expo and urban environment. It uncovers the role animation has played in shaping our consumption of particular brands and commodity categories. It assesses the way animated advertising shaped the technologies and media that supported it, such as television and the computer, and has been shaped by new technologies, including digital production and distribution in the present day. In doing so, this book establishes a rich new field of research, opening new questions about particular histories and our methods for researching them.

The Importance of Advertising to Animation

Advertising has always been a part of animation history. In his 1898 book, Animated Pictures C. Francis Jenkins stated ‘one can scarcely visit a large city anywhere in America without finding an advertising stand employing moving pictures wholly or in part as their attraction’.¹ Jenkins’ title here reflects the usage of ‘animated’ as a synonym for the motion picture at the time and does not carry the more specialised meaning animation has since acquired. At this time all moving pictures were ‘animated’, and as Jenkins indicates, advertising was ever-present. As the techniques of trick films and what would later be called animation emerged, advertising was already a prominent part of film culture.

The canonical pioneers of animation all have notable connections with advertising. The first lightning sketch film by James Stuart Blackton, credited by some as the ‘father of animation’, is instructive here.² Blackton Sketches, No. 1 (1896) conspicuously displays his employer’s name, the New York World newspaper, as well as his own name, publicising both through their prominence.³ Blackton’s first film company Commercial Advertising Bureau was founded in 1897 with his business partner Albert E. Smith to produce advertising.⁴ Emile Cohl is thought to have created several réclames (adverts) in 1912, only a few years after his celebrated film Fantasmagorie (1908).⁵ Donald Crafton also indicates that Cohl produced at least fifty advertising films between 1921 and 1923.⁶ Winsor McCay, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks began their careers producing advertising of some kind.⁷ By 1937 the sponsored cartoons created by Felix the Cat animator Otto Messmer for advertising pioneer Douglas Leigh played continuously on large EPOK billboards in Times Square, Piccadilly Circus and elsewhere, drawing huge crowds of appreciative viewers (see Fig. 1.1).⁸ Douglas Leigh’s EPOK ads led to his company being hired to produce the first American animated ads on television. Just two months after the first advertisement appeared on American television in 1941, Otto Messmer’s animation unit for Douglas Leigh produced fourteen eighty-second spots for tie manufacturer Botany Mills, featuring Lambie the animated spokescharacter who promoted Botany ’s washable wool ties while also announcing the following day’s weather.⁹

Fig. 1.1

An example of an early EPOK advertisement for Schaefer Beer animated by Otto Messmer, Times Square, 1940s (Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999, Archives of American History [Smithsonian])

Around the world, American dominance of film distribution meant local advertising was often a vital stimulus and outlet for animated films. The Wan Brothers’ Su Zhendong de zhongwen daziji / Su Zhendong’s Chinese Typewriter (1922) is credited as the first Chinese animation,¹⁰ while in Germany advertising pioneer Julius Pinschewer collaborated with a number of celebrated animation artists, including Walter Ruttmann and Lotte Reiniger.¹¹ Advertising was crucial to the growth of animation in Turkey between 1939 and 1950, according to Başak Ürkmez, and a situation shared with many other Middle Eastern countries.¹² Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay indicate that ‘commercials composed a large proportion of all early Soviet animated film’, including work by Dziga Vertov.¹³

As commercial animation moved to television in the postwar period, it would become closely aligned with the promotion of the consumer products of American affluence, from food and drink to household goods and appliances including, most importantly, the television set on which these ads played. American animated advertising was initially a novel strategy adopted to counter the celebrity spokespersons of the late forties and early fifties, and animation was often interspersed between live-action footage.¹⁴ The use of animated spokescharacters and simple line drawings and diagrams reached a peak in the fifties on American television, and was exemplified by characters like Gillette Blue Blades ’ animated parrot of 1946 with his famous catchphrase ‘How are you fixed for blades?’ (1946); the Friskies dog (1957), Hamm’s beer Bears (1956); Mr. Clean (1958) and the battling military insects of Captain Raid .¹⁵ One of the most commercially successful uses of animation was Rosser Reeve’s famous campaign for Anacin (1956, Ted Bates Agency), which featured three images that each illustrated a pounding headache: a hammer banging repeatedly, a bolt of electricity zapping and a metal spring coiling.¹⁶ A diagram of the human head showed animated white bubbles coming from the text ‘ANACIN’ to illustrate relief. A subsequent sales leap from $18 million to $54 million was credited to the ad being so memorable.¹⁷ By the 1960s and 1970s, cereal and toy advertisements were specifically targeting the children’s market with Saturday morning cartoon channels showing animated advertising.¹⁸ In the 1980s toys also started to precede and provide motivation for the production of animated television shows like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983–1985) and She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985–1986), which provided product placement for Mattel’s action figures.¹⁹

The importance of television for the production of animated adverts was equally evident around the world. In Britain commercial television, launched in 1955, challenged the BBC’s dominance and provided a vital stimulus to animation production, such as the hugely popular Murray mints advert (1955, S. G. Benson) featuring animated Queen’s Guards singing the catchphrase ‘too-good-to-hurry-mints’ .²⁰ Television commercials were a central part of the work of most British animators and studios in the 1960s and 1970s, including Halas & Batchelor, Bob Godfrey, Richard Williams, George Dunning, Alison de Vere and joined by Aardman in the 1980s.²¹ In New Zealand when television began broadcasting in 1961, the first ad was the animated NZ Apples ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction to Animation and Advertising
• Part I. Revisionist Histories
• Part II. Intermediality
• Part III. Brands
• Part IV. Television
• Part V. Digital and Contemporary
• Back Matter