Degenerate Artistry

On animation in Germany.

A still from Circles (1933)

Welcome! It’s another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And, this Thursday, our topic is early German animation.

Modern art was mainstream in the ‘20s. Germany was one of its hubs. There, you found the Bauhaus art school, and painters like Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Artists took fresh approaches to the human form — and some worked in totally abstract images.

This new art seeped into the new medium: movies. That included animation.

Animators in Germany had their own methods. Many weren’t cartoonists. We’ve talked before about The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) — a gorgeous, hour-long classic that’s full of rich design. It was part of a scene. In Germany, people tested animation’s limits as a graphic art form. There, too, some worked in totally abstract images.

Within that last group was an animator named Oskar Fischinger, whose obsession with abstract art was hard to overstate. “Oskar was deadly against anything that was not abstraction. I mean, just deadly set against it,” said a friend who knew him later in life. Fischinger wanted to create moving abstracts. Born in 1900, he spent a chunk of his early 20s swirling colors and chemicals in his family’s bathtub, watching the patterns play.¹

One of Fischinger’s inventions (the “wax-slicing machine”) got used by another animator for effects in Prince Achmed. But, visually, that film didn’t go as far as Fischinger intended to go. Neither did Disney’s Fantasia — on which Fischinger would do important work in the late ‘30s, after leaving Germany.

To him, a film needed to be pure expression. “Cinema was first created as graphic art in motion,” he argued. He wrote of “motion paintings” and “sentence after sentence of moving, developing visual images.”²

He was an idealist about it. Abstract films could be universal, he felt — and their power could improve the world. He dreamed of animating a movie “comprehensible to all the people on Earth.”