Gulliver's Travels (1939 film)
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| Gulliver's Travels | |
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| Directed by | Dave Fleischer |
| Produced by | Max Fleischer |
| Written by | Dan Gordon Cal Howard Tedd Pierce Edmond Seward Isadore Sparber Jonathan Swift (novel Gulliver's Travels) |
| Starring | Pinto Colvig (unc, voice) Jack Mercer (unc, voice) Sam Parker (unc, voice) Jessica Dragonette (voice) Lanny Ross (voice) |
| Music by | Victor Young Ralph Rainger Al Neiburg (songs) Winston Sharples (songs) Sammy Timberg (songs) |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
| Release date(s) | December 20, 1939 (USA) |
| Running time | 75 min |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Gulliver's Travels is a 1939 cel-animated Technicolor feature film, directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Max Fleischer for Fleischer Studios. The film was released during the holiday season of 1939 by Paramount Pictures, who had the feature produced as an answer to the success of Walt Disney's box-office success Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Gulliver was the tenth animated feature film ever released, and the first produced by an American studio other than Walt Disney Productions. The story is based upon the Lilliputian adventures of Gulliver depicted in Jonathan Swift's 18th century novel Gulliver's Travels.
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[edit] History
Max and Dave Fleischer had no intentions of producing a full-length feature film until Paramount, who distributed Fleischer's Popeye, Betty Boop, and Screen Songs cartoon shorts, approached him with the idea. Paramount offered to build the New York City-based Fleischers a new state-of-the-art animation studio in Miami Beach, Florida, away from the union influence which had polarized the Fleischer Studio after a bitter 1937 labor strike. The Fleischers agreed, and began development on Gulliver's Travels in spring 1938 as construction began on the Miami studio. The Miami Fleischer Studio opened in fall 1938, and the Fleischer staff moved their production headquarters there. A few individuals, including voice actor Mae Questel, opted to remain in New York and did not follow the Fleischers to Miami.
Paramount wanted Gulliver ready for a Christmas 1939 release, meaning that the film would have to be produced on a timetable that was one-third of that for the production of Disney's Snow White. To meet this deadline, the Fleischer staff was greatly expanded, to the point that the once-spacious new building was overcrowded with employees. Local Miami art schools provided graduates to be trained as ink-and-paint artists and inbetweeners. Animators were lured from the Hollywood animation studios, including Cal Howard and Tedd Pierce from the Schlesinger studio, and former Fleischer employees Grim Natwick, Al Eugster, and James Culhane, who had all mirgated over to the Disney studio. Factions developed between the East and West Coast animators, who were unaccustomed to each-others' habits. The two sides grew further apart after Howard, Pierce, and the other Hollywood storymen decided to discard the New York regime's storyboards, crafting the film's plot over again from scratch.
Rotoscoping, an animation technique originally developed by the Fleischer Studios, was used throughout Gulliver's Travels to animate Gulliver. The process involves tracing live-action footage frame-by-frame; Sam Parker, the actor who performed the voice of Gulliver, also modeled as the character's live-action reference. Popeye the Sailor had originally been planned to "portray" Gulliver, but these plans were scrapped during pre-production.
Songs in the film include "All's Well", "It's a Hap-Hap-Happy Day", and "Faithful Forever", all of which later became standards of Fleischer cartoon scores. The film was spun off into two short-lived Fleischer cartoon short series: the Gabby cartoons starring the Pinto Colvig-voiced Lilliputian sidekick of the film, and the Sneak, Snoop and Snitch cartoons starring the three villains from the film.
Like Snow White before it, Gulliver was a box-office success, and led to the production of another Fleischer/Paramount feature, Mister Bug Goes to Town. However, business-related problems which arose during the production of Mister Bug would result in Paramount's absorption of the Fleischer Studio in 1941. Gulliver's Travels is now in the public domain, and is widely available on home video and DVD.
[edit] See also
- List of animated feature films
- The New Gulliver (a 1935 Soviet puppet-animated film based on a communist retelling of the Gulliver story)
[edit] References
- Barrier, Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.
- Maltin, Leonard (1980, updated 1987). Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-452-25993-2.
