Iwerks Studio was an animation studio headed by animator

Ub Iwerks Ubbe Ert Iwwerks (March 24, 1901 – July 7, 1971), known as Ub Iwerks ( ), was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Iwerks grew up with a contentio ...

Financing

Iwerks was working for

Walt Disney Walter Elias Disney (; December 5, 1901December 15, 1966) was an American animator, film producer and entrepreneur. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons. As a film p ...

when he accepted a contract with Disney's former distributor, Pat Powers, to leave Disney and start an animation studio under his own name. The Iwerks Studio opened in 1930. Financial backers led by Pat Powers suspected that Iwerks was responsible for much of Disney's early success. Newly hired animator Fred Kopietz recommended that Iwerks employ a friend from Chouinard Art School,

Chuck Jones Charles Martin Jones (September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002) was an American animator, director, and painter, best known for his work with Warner Bros. Cartoons on the '' Looney Tunes'' and '' Merrie Melodies'' series of shorts. He wrote, pro ...

, who was hired and put to work as a

cel washer A cel, short for celluloid, is a transparent sheet on which objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn animation. Actual celluloid (consisting of cellulose nitrate and camphor) was used during the first half of the 20th century, b ...

. Despite a contract with

MGM Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded on April 17, 1924 ...

to distribute the cartoons, the Iwerks Studio was never a major commercial success and failed to rival either Walt Disney Studio or

Fleischer Studios Fleischer Studios () is an American animation studio founded in 1929 by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, who ran the pioneering company from its inception until its acquisition by Paramount Pictures, the parent company and the distributor of i ...

. In 1936, backers withdrew financial support from the Iwerks Studio, and it folded soon after.

Characters

Iwerks created the characters Flip the Frog, and later Willie Whopper. Several short films was made with both characters.

Flip the Frog

The Flip the Frog series was the first series from the Iwerks Studio, produced 1930 to 1933. As the series progressed, Flip became more of a down-and-out, Chaplin-esque character who always found himself in everyday conflicts surrounding the poverty-stricken atmosphere of the Great Depression. After the first two cartoons, the appearance of Flip the Frog gradually became less froglike.

Willie Whopper

The Willie Whopper series was the second from the Iwerks Studio. 14 shorts were produced 1933 to 1934. Willie is a young lad who tells of his many outlandish adventures, which are then depicted on-screen. His fantastic accounts are, in fact, outright lies or "whoppers". His stories are usually preceded by his memorable catchphrase, "Say, did I ever tell ya this one?" The character's first film was " The Air Race" (1933).

''ComiColor'' cartoon series

From 1933 to 1936, the studio release a series of shorts (independently distributed, not part of the MGM deal) in

Cinecolor Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two-color motion picture process that was based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and the 1930s. It was developed by William T. Crispinel an ...

, named '' ComiColor'' cartoons, which mostly focused on fairy tales with no continuing character or star. They are now in the public domain. Iwerks also experimented with

stop-motion animation Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames i ...

in combination with the

multiplane camera The multiplane camera is a motion-picture camera that was used in the traditional animation process that moves a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another. This creates a sense of pa ...

. Multiplane animation was Iwerks most prestigious invention. It allowed for a three-dimensional look, separating layers of the background, resulting in a greater feeling of depth. He made a short called "The Toy Parade", which was never released in public. The 1934 animated short " The Headless Horseman" was the first time Iwerks used the technique.

Image gallery

File:Jack_Frost_poster_1934.jpg, "

Jack Frost Jack Frost is a personification of frost, ice, snow, sleet, winter, and freezing cold. He is a variant of Old Man Winter who is held responsible for frosty weather, nipping the fingers and toes in such weather, coloring the foliage in autumn, an ...

" (1934) File:Little Black Sambo poster 1935.jpg, "

Little Black Sambo ''The Story of Little Black Sambo'' is a children's book written and illustrated by Scottish author Helen Bannerman and published by Grant Richards in October 1899. As one in a series of small-format books called The Dumpy Books for Children ...

" (1935) File:Sinbadthesailor01.jpg, "

Sinbad the Sailor Sinbad the Sailor (; ar, سندباد البحري, Sindibādu al-Bahriyy; fa, سُنباد بحری, Sonbād-e Bahri or Sindbad) is a fictional mariner and the hero of a story-cycle of Persian origin. He is described as hailing from Baghda ...

" (1935) File:Balloonland lobby card 1935.jpg, "

Balloon Land ''Balloon Land'', also known as ''The Pincushion Man'', is a 1935 animated short film produced by Ub Iwerks as part of the ComiColor Cartoons series. The cartoon is about a place called Balloon Land, whose residents (including caricatures of popul ...

" (1935)

References

{{cite book , last1=Lenburg , first1=Jeff , title=The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons , date=1999 , publisher=Checkmark Books , isbn=0-8160-3831-7 , access-date=31 July 2022 , url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780816038312/page/68/mode/2up , pages=68 Animation studios