Ever hear of Paul Terry’s Terrytoon studios? Or Fleischer Studios? Unless you’re a student of the history of animation, you probably haven’t heard of either. But in the early 1930s these were the two biggest rivals to an ambitious outfit located out on Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles: the Walt Disney Studios.
Terrytoon and Fleischer did some good work, each creating characters we’re familiar with. But neither one could compete with Disney. Paul Terry himself admitted that his work wasn’t up to the Disney standard: “Disney is the Tiffany of animation. I’m the Woolworth.”
What was the difference between Disney and its competitors?
According to Disney biographer Neal Gabler, it came down to Walt Disney’s intuitive understanding that audiences wanted two things from his cartoons: (1) compelling stories, not just gags loosely strung together; and (2) characters with real personalities.
“Walt,” writes Gabler, “who was always trying to nudge animation closer to the live-action films of Chaplin or Keaton, understood that the audience needed involvement. They needed to care about the characters on the screen, not just to laugh at them, and he began stressing to his animators the importance of creating characters who could elicit emotional reactions from the viewers.”
Our eyes and our sensibilities are by now well used to the “personality animation” that we find, for example, in 1934’s Playful Pluto. But that’s only because the Disney Studios invented it.
The desires of a business audience are not so different from those of an audience sitting in a movie theater. It wants two things: compelling stories and characters it can emotionally connect with.
The Terry’s and Fleischer’s of the business world want to satisfy us with quick gags, gimmicks, hooks, characters with only two dimensions. To stand out from them, you’re going to have to learn something from Disney.
