Historical and Contemporary Animation 6 - The Alice Comedies

The Alice Comedies were a series of Cartoons in the 1920s made by the bankrupted Laugh-O-Gram Studios. The story involves a young girl, Alice, who goes to watch his father draw animations. She then gets transported into a cartoon world, where antics ensue with her and an animated cat named Julius. The reason I chose to write about this is because I believe this is the first kind of animation that successfully composites a human being into an animation where they interact with the characters and their surroundings. The first kind of animation to interact with a real person was Gertie the Dinosaur, but Alice actually transfers a human being into an animation, when Gertie has a man interacting with her off screen.

Since then, Compositing has been used with different techniques like chroma key. Films like Roger Rabbit has done the reverse of this, where they animate a live action film with cartoon characters. There are so many instances of animation interacting with live action film, all of them done with different types of techniques that suit the specific needs of each animation.