Felix the Cat was pretty stiff. In the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, you can see that things had improved a lot in a short time and that they had discovered what made animation work. What differences do you see between the style of the Felix cartoons and those of Mickey? The following steps will guide you in understanding how revolutionary this animation is:
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Plane Crazy + 1928. YouTube, archive.org, or some other site should have the video. This is a good example of silent animation at the dawn of sound. As you watch it, keep Felix Turns the Tide in mind and see how the two are different. In addition, look at the driver at 3:51; is that Felix?Watch it now. Don't be afraid to stop the action or look at some parts more than once.
Look at Mickey's movement. What differences do you see in how the characters move and look that allowed Iwerks to do a more subtle characterization with Mickey than the animators had done for Felix?
Look at the background. They are softer and lusher in Plane Crazy than they were in Felix Turns the Tide. Does this accomplish the purpose of highlighting the characters by contrast? How would you decide how much detail to put into a given background?
Look at how the camera is used. In what ways is Plane Crazy visually richer than Felix Turns the Tide and how does this help tell the story?
Look at how the things are squashed and stretched in Plane Crazy. How did Ub Iwerks distort things to make Plane Crazy more dramatic?
Look at how your expectations of what will happen are misdirected. How did Ub Iwerks manage to redirect your expectations so you were fooled, or does it allow him to add or remove something without you noticing?
Animation has improved quite a bit in these six years. Now, the basic principles of animation are codified and used with good results. Instead of a static, stage-like establishing shot, we enter the scene following a cow, from blackness into a farmyard filled with activity. Objects are contorted surrealistically. There is no way to foretell where the story is going and the camera is used to immerse you into what is happening. When Mickey is flying along the road, Disney puts you into the action, giving you a view from the plane's cockpit instead of showing you what the airplane is flying through, heightening the action, but also saving work by using just a few lines and some colored background to achieve a hair-raising ride.
By 1938, the animation industry is mature. Felix ceased production in 1936. Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in December of 1937 and was beginning production on Fantasia. With the popularity of Popeye, Fleischer Studios had become the number two animation company and was working on Gulliver's Travels.