Early British animation and cartoonal ‘co-conspiracy’: the case of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke (1925–1927)

ABSTRACT

This article examines the self-reflexive discourses of deconstruction at work in the Jerry the Troublesome Tyke (1925–1927) series of cartoons created by Cardiff-based animator Sid Griffiths. Across the Pathé Pictorial series of forty animated shorts, Jerry’s screen persona was typically defined and developed through his routine battle with the artist’s working hands from which he was repeatedly conjured. This article contends that Griffiths’ Jerry series offered a more consistent and extreme mobilisation of early animation’s ‘hand of the artist’ trope than was present in Hollywood cartoons of this period, exemplified in the work Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat and the Fleischer Brothers’ Out of the Inkwell (1918–1929). By suggesting how the rhetoric of ‘self-figuration’ across the Jerry shorts achieved its impact not via the collision between visual registers but rather through a formal and narrative co-conspiracy that privileged intersection, overlap, and collusion, this article argues that Jerry the Troublesome Tyke’s mixed (and mixing) media aesthetic brought an enduring deconstructive mode of address to maturity within the early years of British animation.

KEYWORDS:

• Animation
• reflexivity
• labour
• deconstruction
• performance
• style

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See ‘Welsh cartoon dog rediscovers global fame’, Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales), 12 October 2002, and ‘Look out, Felix – dog star Jerry is out to conquer US, 75 years late; Silent screen cartoon is reanimated’, Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales), 7 June 2003.

2. Beyond the aesthetic influence of modern art and avant-garde practices on individual artists, filmmakers, and studios (that works to frame animation as a vehicle for modernist expression), many animation scholars have spoken of the medium’s fundamental ‘modernist’ spirit. Esther Leslie has examined the technological and industrial modernity of animation as a medium of graphic representation (2004, 141), while Wells also discusses the ontology of animation according to its ‘intrinsically modern form’. He argues that ‘in all its incarnations and progressions it has sought to “modernise” its own process, outcome and cultural import’ (2002, 30).

3. The reflexivity of Jerry might be viewed in relation to other filmmaking traditions that likewise considered their specificity of form, including Soviet and other European film traditions of the 1920s that directly called attention to their ontology and construction as films through an anti-illusionist visual style. These traditions are embodied in reflexive documentaries (Man with a Movie Camera [Dziga Vertov, 1929]), surrealist cinema (Un Chien Andalou [Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929]), exemplars of Soviet montage (Battleship Potemkin [Sergei Eisenstein, 1925]), Hollywood silent comedy (Sherlock Jr. [Buster Keaton, 1924]), and even British drama (Shooting Stars [Anthony Asquith, 1927]), which each include audiovisual clues that foreground the very process of construction.

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Notes on contributors

Christopher Holliday

Christopher Holliday is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London, specializing in Hollywood cinema, animation history, and contemporary digital media. He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (EUP, 2018), and co-editor of the collections Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2021). Christopher is currently researching the relationship between identity politics and digital technologies in popular cinema, and can also be found as the co-curator of the website, blog, and podcast www.fantasy-animation.org.