Paramount Pictures

Gulliver's Travels 1939 - Fleischer Studios

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• published: 15 Jul 2015
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Gulliver's Travels is a 1939 American cel-animated Technicolor feature film, directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Max Fleischer for Fleischer Studios. The film was released on December 22, 1939 by Paramount Pictures, who had the feature produced as an answer to the success of Walt Disney's box-office hit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The sequences for the film were directed by Seymour Kneitel, Willard Bowsky, Tom Palmer, Grim Natwick, William Henning, Roland Crandall, Thomas Johnson, Robert Leffingwell, Frank Kelling, Winfield Hoskins, and Orestes Calpini. This is Paramount's first feature-length animated film. Gulliver was the second cel-animated feature film ever released, and the first produced by an American studio other than Walt Disney Productions. The story is based very loosely upon the Lilliputian adventures of Gulliver depicted in Jonathan Swift's 18th century novel Gulliver's Travels. Max and Dave Fleischer had wanted to produce a feature as early as 1934 (shortly after Disney announced it was to produce a feature film), but Paramount, who distributed Fleischer's Popeye, Betty Boop, Screen Songs, and Color Classics cartoon shorts, vetoed the idea. However, after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Paramount agreed to allow the Fleischers to make a feature. 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 in-betweeners. Animators were lured from the Hollywood animation studios, including Cal Howard, Nelson Demorest, Joe D'Igalo and Tedd Pierce from Leon Schlesinger Productions, and former Fleischer employees Grim Natwick, Al Eugster, Frank Smith and James Culhane, who had all migrated over to the Disney studio. Factions developed between the East and West Coast animators, who were unaccustomed to each other's 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. This was in an attempt to differentiate the animation style of Gulliver from the more comical Lilliputians. Popeye the Sailor had originally been planned to "portray" Gulliver, but these plans were scrapped during pre-production.