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

Introduction

The unexpected intrusion of the otherwise unseen animator into the space of the film frame defined the visual repertoire of early animated cinema across both European and Hollywood cartoon traditions. Yet if the artist’s interrupting hands, pen, and ink that visibly created the first two-dimensional drawings served to firmly entwine animation’s genealogy with that of British music hall and stage entertainment forms (see Crafton 1979; Cook 2013), then perhaps Jerry the Troublesome Tyke (1925–1927) stands as the stylistic tendency’s most repeat offender. Created by Cardiff-based animator Sid Griffiths and the first animated series to be produced in Wales, the eponymous Jerry was an anthropomorphic canine who featured in forty cartoons first screened in the late-1920s. Across this Pathé Pictorial series of 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. Indeed, almost every episode in the Jerry serial since its debut on 27 July 1925 both began with – and frequently returned to – the actions and activities of the animator’s dextrous hands. These were hands that cut Jerry out from a blank sheet of paper and cruelly pulled at his tail (Never Say Die [1925]); chased the elusive canine across all corners of the white space of the screen (He Gets ‘Fired’ [1926]); pricked the sole of a blackened Jerry’s foot so that the black ink used to colour him drains away (Jerry Done Again [1926]); and even swiped across the screen to impossibly materialise the cartoon’s landscape backdrop for Jerry to traverse (Weight and See (1926]).

The interventionist animator in the Jerry shorts (in fact, Griffiths himself) served to position the Pathé series as exemplary of how early animation was regularly torn apart at the seams to show spectators elements and techniques of its production. The Jerry shorts therefore emerged as increasingly important cartoonal spaces that, in their foregrounding of the humour of animated labour, extended, exploited, and perhaps even fully defined the stylistic traditions of early animation’s ‘hand of the artist’ iconography (Crafton 1979). This was an artistic device in which the animator’s largely occluded presence was made suddenly visible through expressive and performative gestures into the frame. Donald Crafton states the ‘hand of the artist’ trope ‘serves an important narrative function’ (1979, 413), identifying how the device of the animator’s hand ‘is analogous to the first person narrator in literature who, instead of saying, “Here is my story”, says “Here are my drawings”’ (1979, 414). This article argues that Griffiths’ Jerry cartoons offered a consistent and extreme mobilisation of this reflexive strategy, doing so in a more concentrated fashion than in cartoons featuring other stars of the period, such as Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan’s successful U.S. cartoon creation Felix the Cat and the Rotoscoped figure of Koko the Clown starring in the Fleischer Brothers’ Out of the Inkwell (1918–1929) series. The ‘hand of the artist’ motif as it appeared in Jerry the Troublesome Tyke and the interjection of Griffiths into the action quickly evolved into a requisite narrative component of the series. Reduced to a cipher (hand), the animator (Griffiths) was nonetheless firmly implicated in the tribulations of the animated image, maintaining a degree of control over their crafted illusion at the same time as ‘viewers [would] pretend that the action on the screen is happening by itself’ (Crafton 2011, 99). The pervasive and playful revelation of process in Griffiths’ cartoons therefore provide the ideal context to revisit how such a central element of early animation’s comedic register became a ritualised practice of early cartoons.

This article further contends that the Jerry shorts achieved their sustained deconstructive mode of ‘self-figuration’ not only through the ontological difference between live-action and animation that relied on discourses of intrusion and a collision of visual registers, but rather through a formal and narrative co-conspiracy that privileged intersection, overlap, and collusion rooted in the coexistence of character and animator within the same ontological plane. This crucially ‘co-conspiratorial’ relationship between the creator and character, which was achieved largely through the playfulness of the intermedial encounter and shifting ocular perspectives between Jerry and his creator, remained fundamental to Jerry’s own acquisition of personality and his formation as agile, effortless, and cunning. Brian McFarlane and Anthony Slide argue that the Jerry series obtained its particular comedic impact through the ‘humorously abrasive interaction between Jerry and his long-suffering creator in episodes melding live-action and animation’ (2013, 313). The ‘hand of the artist’ trope that quickly became central to Jerry’s visual language and mixed media formal operations – if not early animation’s heightened reflexivity more broadly – was rooted in images of co-conspiracy that ultimately allowed the labouring hands (as metonymic of the invisible animator) to assume other revelatory roles and performative functions. It is through this notion of ‘co-conspiracy’ that these early British cartoons can be woven decisively back into what Caroline Frick calls the critical ‘histories and canons’ of British animation, as well as flexible ‘national film histories and canons’ that remain susceptible to revision and ‘complication’ (2011, 134). The deconstructive rhetoric of this popular British cartoon series that regularly turned on the unmaking and de-animation of its images is therefore matched to the discursive tension between erasure/disavowal and recuperation/recovery that often underwrites histories of cinema. With Griffiths’ Jerry, then, this was an animator’s hand always complicit with its creation, extending a finger to trace the outline of a new national history as part of its ‘co-conspiratorial’ spectacle and stagecraft.

Jerry’s critical frame

The default historical narrative that has framed the critical understanding of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke and the series’ contribution to the formal style of British animation is certainly one rooted in a discourse of renewal and resurgence. Frick argues that the ‘impish cartoon character’ Jerry was ‘nearly forgotten until very recently’ (2011, 134), but has undergone a form of welcome cultural recovery. As she puts it, Jerry the Troublesome Tyke is ‘an excellent example of the many “regional” films rediscovered and resurrected’ thanks to more formal and collaborative archival networks (Fricks 2011, 135). In 2002, for example, the original Jerry films were found locked in the vaults of British Pathé by the National Screen and Sound Archive in Wales, which prompted a joint restoration project undertaken between the archive and Pathé. A year later in June 2003, three newly digitised cartoons were screened at The Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of the museum’s ‘Festival of Restoration’, and were also broadcast on BBC2 Wales with musicians from the BBC National Orchestra. In 2005, ten Jerry cartoons screened at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Sacile, Italy, and at the 49^th London Film Festival, while in 2010, several of the animated shorts premiered at the British Film Institute in London. By 2011, the restored Jerry films had been ‘screened in theaters from New York City to Sicily’, while ‘finding an entire new life’ thanks to their broadcast on BBC Wales (Frick 2011, 134). Finally, in 2012 a handful of Jerry cartoons were screened at the ‘Opening Doors’ Performing Arts Festival for Young Audiences at the National Library of Wales. The rediscovery, return, and reanimation of ‘lost’ Jerry cartoons reflects the increased interest around this animated cartoon character, and the series’ newfound place within critical histories of British animation. Accompanied by new musical scores composed by John Rea, many of the Jerry cartoons are now readily available online, both free and via media player subscription services (including at the British Film Institute), as well as enjoying more cultural exposure within Cardiff and other local communities.¹

One of the most significant critical avenues through which these returning Jerry shorts have been examined is that of their British national identity, and the qualities of the series that allow for a critical understanding of Jerry’s pervasive ‘Britishness’. Beyond the draughtsmanship of creators Griffiths and Brian White, the initial popularity of Jerry during the 1920s was rooted in an irreverent ‘British’ humour (episode title cards identify Jerry as an ‘entirely British Production’). The wit of the series was, for example, often allied to several ‘sports-related narratives’ (Wells 2012, 139) in which the playful Jerry would take part in a variety of national past-times and activities. Paul Wells notes that ‘As in most sports-related narratives in early animation, these cartoons play on visual and verbal puns’ (2012, 139), with animation’s creative potential well-served by Jerry’s anarchic sporting tribulations. In Golf (1925), Jerry goes golfing only for his golf bag to suddenly sprout legs and run off the fairway. In the later short Jerry’s Test Trial (1926), it is a game of cricket that defies the laws of physics as the ball repeatedly comes to a mid-air standstill, held in comic inertia. Released the same year, Football (1926) similarly depicts Jerry chasing after a stray ball (drawn onscreen by Griffiths and cut out from the paper), albeit one that begins to bounce and ricochet in all directions. These engagements with typical British sporting pastimes site Jerry within a familiar visual ‘Englandography’, and its ‘talismanic catalogue of images, individuals, places, sounds, qualities, events, moments and texts that conjure up and exemplify the version of Englishness’ (Medhurst 2007, 40). Yet Jerry’s sporting life – matched to his disobedience and surrealist sense of humour – were vital in establishing the character’s unequivocal national identity, particularly given the comparable emergence of Hollywood animation (and its exhibition in Britain) throughout the twenties that, at the time, quickly became Jerry’s critical frame.

The broader U.K.-U.S. trade pattern for cinema during the 1920s was certainly marshalled by a degree of competitiveness between the two countries, rooted in growing concerns from the British perspective around the monopoly of U.S. films and the emergence of Britain as a place where Hollywood (as virtually a closed market for imports) could garner substantial overseas revenue. Despite the public taste for Hollywood features in the U.K. (including animation), their cost-effectiveness for British exhibitors markedly undermined the strength of domestic production and distribution. Even the arrival of the British National Film League initiative in November 1921, whose stated aims were ‘to encourage the production and exhibition of British-made films’ and to foster ‘a more sympathetic understanding between the film industry, the press, and the public’, failed to eradicate industry difficulties, even prompting debates in the House of Lords in May 1925 on possible new legislation that would counter the fall of British films exhibited in Britain (Low 1997, 89). Geoffrey Macnab explains that ‘before the 1927 Cinematograph Films (Quota) Act afforded a measure of protection to the industry, more than 90% of pictures shown in British cinemas were American’ (1993, 53–54). These cultural (and industrial) anxieties around the declining British film industry – and with it, the cessation of distinctly British products – perhaps explains the re-assertion of national culture across several Jerry the Troublesome Tyke shorts, which secured the character as a much-needed ‘British’ equivalent to popular Hollywood animation.

In the eyes of the popular trade press during the 1920s, it was certainly the very ‘British’ Jerry the Tyke that remained the closest corollary to Messmer and Sullivan’s Felix the Cat series. Felix was an anthropomorphic feline character and the ‘quintessential star persona of the silent era, whose fame significantly eclipsed that of his contemporaries’ (McGowan 2018, 47). Debuting in the six-minute short Feline Follies (Otto Messmer, 1919) on 9 November 1919, Felix (though this first cartoon named him ‘Master Tom’) was evidence of the ‘massive growth’ (Cook 2018, 161) in U.S. cartoon imports that were regularly exhibited in Britain throughout the 1920s. As North American animation began to solidify into a viable economic industry, many of the period’s cartoons and its animated stars – from The Katzenjammer Kids (1916–1918) and Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff (1916–1926) to the Krazy Kat (1916–1925) series and the Alice Comedies (1923–1927) produced at the Walt Disney studio – made their way onto British cinema screens, revealing once more Britain as an important (if, at times, resistant or ambivalent) international market for incoming Hollywood shorts. Despite this influx of numerous cartoon stars from across the Atlantic, as Malcolm Cook explains, ‘By far the most popular and successful American import was Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer’s “Felix the Cat” series’, which premiered as part of the Paramount Screen Magazine and ‘by 1922 was a weekly feature as part of Pathé’s “Eve Film Review”’ (2018, 161). Following the arrival of domestic series and newsreel characters in Britain, Jerry and his cartoon contemporaries were often brought into alignment with the growing Hollywood animation industry, and in particular with Messmer and Sullivan’s creation, which quickly came to bear on the production and reception of homegrown cartoons in Britain.

Elements of this Anglophone overlap were markedly industrial and a consequence of certain exhibition practices, particularly in the case of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke. Having lost the rights to Felix the Cat to Ideal in March 1925, Pathé launched the Jerry series later that same year, showing Griffiths’ creation fortnightly (starting with its Pictorial number 382) in the position previously occupied by Messmer’s Felix cartoons. Just two days before the first Jerry cartoon premiered in cinemas during the summer of 1925, The Bioscope announced. ‘A new series of cartoons of British origin describing the adventures of Jerry, a puppy. Jerry’s character appears to be influenced partly by the antics of Felix the Cat […] but he will no doubt acquire a personality of his own’ (Anon 1925a). Another reviewer in Kinematograph Weekly made explicit the British trade press’ attitude towards Jerry as a welcome substitute for the departing Felix, and on 23 July 1925 the publication heralded Jerry as ‘Pathé’s latest cartoon to take the place of “Felix”’ (Anon 1925b, 59). However, it was not just Jerry the Tyke who would become imbricated in such transatlantic processes of animated exchange. International trade journals of the period regularly resuscitated the character of Felix the Cat as a yardstick against which to measure, examine, and reflect upon a host of British animated creations, alongside, but not exclusively, Griffiths’ Jerry series. A 9 October 1924 edition of Kinematograph Weekly noted, for example, that in the case of Dudley Buxton and Joe Noble’s series The Adventures of Pongo the Pup (1924) that had debuted at Pathé a year earlier, ‘This All British cartoon series will soon rival the popularity of the famous Felix the Cat, and in all probability the slogan, “Pongo keeps on running” will become as much a household name as the pedestrianism of Felix’ (Anon 1924a). Just one week later, however, the magazine had changed tack somewhat, yet did so by maintaining the Felix connection, reporting that the second Pongo the Pup cartoon would actually ‘suffer through their close likeness to the immortal Felix’ (Anon 1924b). A week after that on 23 October 1924, Kinematograph Weekly heralded another early British animated star, this time Bonzo the Dog created by George Studdy in 1922, not only as a ‘very doggy dog, whom it is a delight to watch’ but also a ‘cartoon subject which will rival Felix the Cat and provide excellent items for all programmes’ (Anon 1924c). Finally, a Gaumont Company advertisement published in a 1926 edition for the debut of Noble’s later cartoon series Dismal Desmond the Doleful Dalmatian (1926) championed dalmatian Dismal Desmond himself to be ‘the most popular mascot figure since Felix’ (Anon 1926a).

Felix’s pervasiveness as a critical reference point in these accounts says as much about the character’s star status in the 1920s as a ‘world-wide phenomenon’ thanks to ‘increasingly creative stories and superb draughtsmanship’ (Crafton 1997, 77), as it does about degrees of continuity between several characters’ design styles and a shared mischievousness to their personalities. Jerry’s development as a three-dimensional animated character can be usefully connected to the attributes of several British and U.S. cartoon stars of the silent era. Cook observes that ‘Characters like Jerry the Troublesome Tyke, Bonzo and Pongo share visual similarities with their American peers and engaging incomparable trickster behaviour’ (2018, 211). He identifies the terms of such resemblances, including a ‘shared iconography of white gloves, wide smiles and elastic bodies, as well as their performative conventions’ that stylistically aligned Hollywood silent stars such as Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown, and Flip the Frog together with their U.K. counterparts (2018, 211). Many of these recurring design elements can, in turn, be threaded through animation’s longstanding visual discourse of blackface minstrelsy, with the racist coding of troubling identity politics rooted in stereotypical depictions of non-White identities and ethnicities. The racial structures that functioned ideologically as an ‘integral part’ (Sammond 2015, 18) of commercial blackface animation in America at the time were fully supported and stabilised by regularized principles of the animated form. Such principles found their way into dominant images of the period, including the design of Jerry. In fact, Cook goes as far as to connect Jerry to racialised minstrel performance by using the cartoon Jerry Done Again, where the eponymous canine – appearing in silhouette having been filled in with black ink – troublingly remarks to the audience that ‘If I had a banjo now I’d look a real n****r minstrel’.

Despite certain formal and behavioural equivalents, several commentators have been altogether more reluctant in positioning Felix as an outright parallel or precursor to the Jerry cartoons, and have sought to dislocate Griffiths’ creation from the label of the ‘Welsh Felix’. In his chapter on Jerry published in 2002, Dave Berry argued the ‘wildly exasperating and drowning and dishonest’ Jerry was, in many ways, not like Messmer’s Felix cartoons at all (2002, 66). Rather, Jerry held greater currency with other successful U.S. cartoons released prior to the Golden Age of North American cartoons in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly due to the Jerry series’ pervasive degree of self-reflexivity and ritualised self-conscious impulse. Following on from cartoons such as The Enchanted Drawing (J. Stuart Blackton, 1900), Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (J. Stuart Blackton, 1906), Fantasmagorie (Émile Cohl, 1908) and Little Nemo (Winsor McCay, 1911), the Jerry shorts shared with Messmer’s Felix the Cat cartoons a heightened register of self-referentiality and exhibitionist presentation, including a regular turn to the ‘hand of the artist’ visual motif. Patricia Vettel Tom argues that ‘Messmer himself appeared in Felix the Cat in Comicalamities (1928), one of the most “modern” of the films in terms of artistic form’ (1996, 68). In this cartoon, ‘Messmer’s hand again reaches into the frame, this time to draw Felix’s missing appendage’ (Vettel Tom 1996, 168), thereby completing the animated image in ways that frame the animator of both the Felix and Jerry cartoons as reactive and responsive to their creations.

However, Berry suggests that the Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell series, which began in the U.S. during the 1920s and was another important North American import that received ‘significant press attention’ in Britain (Cook 2018, 161), offers a more appropriate lineage with which to consider the self-reflexive pleasures and practices contained across Griffiths’ cartoons. As Berry makes clear, ‘the interaction between artist and animation was the prime difference between the Jerry and Felix films and was often carried to parodic, tragicomic extremes’ (2002, 68). The Jerry shorts certainly marked an intensification of the deconstructive rhetoric found in Messmer and Sullivan’s Felix series. Fully supporting this formal and narrative split between U.S. (Felix) and U.K. (Jerry) was a discourse of ‘co-conspiracy’ that relied on the visual and narrative attraction of mixing media. In Jerry the Troublesome Tyke, the ontological difference between live-action footage of the animator and the resultant animated sequences is always preserved, rather than crafted to be inconsequential or irrelevant. The spectator never ceases to believe in the discrepancy between these two distinct diegetic worlds because such spaces are routinely highlighted and defined through ulterior properties (realism/artificiality, live-action/drawn). Yet the Jerry cartoons obtain their impact from a continual acknowledgement of Jerry’s existence on the verge between animated/non-animated constituent parts that are suddenly made coexistent and collusive but still (and always) ontologically discrete. This altogether more ‘interactive’ agreement or activity between animator and animated in Jerry the Troublesome Tyke played out through a series of repeating gag structures, including Griffiths’ sustained mobilisation of the ‘hand of the artist’ trope – central to animation’s modernity and anti-realist potential – that playfully explored the relationship between alternate types of image-making forms.²

Intermedial encounters

The Jerry cartoons mark a bold and highly imaginative treatment of self-reflexivity, helping to extend the vocabulary of the ‘deconstructive animation’ genre that ‘self-consciously deconstructs the artificial tenets of its making’ (Wells 2002, 67). Simply titled Jerry the Troublesome Tyke, the first instalment of the Pathé series immediately establishes a pervasive undermining of the animated illusion that would shape the narratives of subsequent cartoons and establish the significance of Jerry’s animated constitution. Spectators are told via an animated intertitle that in the case of Jerry, ‘His mother was a “nib” and his father was a “Big Pot”’. This proclamation draws attention to – rather than seeks to erase – the ontology of Jerry and his pen-and-ink base, inviting spectators to fully understand the character and his actions as a function of his created nature. But it is also a sequence that reinforces both a visual and thematic connection to the Out of the Inkwell series, rather than to Felix, which was similarly explicit in trading on such reflexive iconography. At the start of almost all the Inkwell episodes, for example, Koko the Clown would burst out of the pot of ink, a shorthand connoting the character’s disobedience and trickery that abruptly punctured the animated reality. As the first Jerry episode proceeds, a free-flowing pen draws out Jerry’s pen and ink ‘parents’ of its own volition, turning next to outline Jerry who suddenly begins to breathe, thereby confirming his sentience and autonomy. It is only then that the previously unseen artist’s hand enters the frame to take over and ‘re-author’ the images, scratching Jerry’s body to direct his creation to a newspaper clipping with the printed text ‘a cartoon dog wanted’. The animator’s offscreen presence is then further corroborated onscreen through comic book-style speech bubbles, which articulate the creator’s encouragement towards the drawn character to put himself forward in the hope of becoming an animated star.

More so than the irreverence of Felix the Cat, it is the ‘modernist reflexive territory’ (Telotte 2010, 10) of the Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell series that perhaps best aligns with the emphasis placed in the Jerry cartoons on the exhibition of form. Writing in 1926, one Kinematograph Weekly reviewer suggested such a connection, positing that Jerry the Troublesome Tyke embodied ‘the funniest footage seen lately’, whilst referring directly to the cartoons of Max Flesicher to which Griffiths’ British cartoon ‘can now rank in quality’ (Anon 1926b, 54). The visual similarities between the series support this comparison, with formal rhymes between the Jerry and Inkwell shorts that persistently restate the cartoon context from which these characters derive. Later Jerry cartoons continue their investment in staking a claim for the character’s animated nature through citations of his specific materiality. In Ten Little Jerry Boys (1926), Jerry appears bursting forth from a pot of ink, while the conclusion of A Splash and Dash (1926) has Jerry recoil from the sheet of paper to jump back into the ‘inkwell’ from which he came. In one scene from Ten Little Jerry Boys, Jerry is even joined by a clown who visually resembles the Fleischers’ signature Koko character.

By the end of Jerry’s cartoon debut, the character had responded to the newspaper advertisement and is successfully presented with a contract to star in his own pictures, a moment that seemingly acknowledges his full ascension to stardom. This narrative transformation of Jerry from animated drawing to autonomous three-dimensional star (capable of brokering his own film deal) mirrors what Crafton calls early theatrical animation’s ‘evolutionary change’ towards the animated cartoon in which ‘there was a noticeable shift of emphasis from the performer to the drawings’ (1990, 138). The ‘hand of the artist’ trope of early animation was a stylistic residue of the earlier ‘lightning sketch’ vaudeville tradition, which had itself originated as a Victorian parlour game before moving onto music hall bills. As stage acts involving an artist or caricaturist rapidly producing a drawing before the enthralled audience, such ‘lightning’ performances initially provided silent-era cartoons with its most enduring symbols (hand, pen, ink, easel) (Cook 2013). In films such as A Lightning Sketch (Georges Méliès, 1896) and Lightning Sketches (J. Stuart Blackton, 1907), however, animated ‘trick’ effects (achieved through superimpositions and stop-frame editing) would take charge to extend the spectacle of staged lightning sketches, able to award these inert drawings a kind of independence and agency unavailable on stage. Yet the progressive removal of the artist’s hands from early cartoons – as the animated medium became dominated by the full animation style and illusionism of Disney’s ‘hyper-realist’ aesthetic – shifted weight away from the presence of the animator towards independent, seemingly self-directing animated images. Maureen Furniss suggests that ‘By the 1920s, it had become relatively uncommon to see the artist (or even a hand) within commercial films’ (2012, 69), thereby pointing to something of Jerry’s exceptionalism given Griffiths’ dogged exploration of intermedial encounters upon which many of his episodes were founded. Colin Williamson nonetheless points out the later substitution, even veiling, of the artist’s predominant hand with the mechanics of illusionist automation ‘plays on the idea that the cinema intervenes between the animator’s hand and the trick of animation, that the illusion of movement is not really being performed by the animator’ (2015, 122–123). In fact, in two episodes following Jerry’s debut – Honesty is the Best Policy (1925) and Jerry’s Treasure Island Travel (1925) – he appears as an already drawn and fully rounded character, rather than visibly created before the spectators’ eyes, with no animator intrusion signalling Jerry’s constructed nature.

What defines the Jerry cartoons, however, is the sustained exchange between the mechanical process of animation hiding Jerry’s production and onscreen signifiers disclosing the effortful activity of the animator’s creative labour that Griffiths was unwilling to leave completely behind. Indeed, the Jerry cartoons often tease out the fundamental contradictions of animation’s ‘evolutionary change’ that otherwise marked out a teleological shift from the act of drawing to the performance of an autonomous animated character. Nicholas Sammond argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, the relationship between vaudeville stage entertainment and Hollywood animation was structured by coexistence, simultaneity and ‘vectors of influence’ (2015, 114). He continues that the ‘borrowing and reworking [of] material was part of the creative process of popular performance […], and in this way conventions circulated and metamorphosed between media over time’ (Sammond 2015, 57). The more chaotic circulation of visual tropes and stylistic motifs between entertainment forms is reflected in the Jerry shorts that regularly stage this very collision. The image of pen-and-ink etched onto each Jerry title card (that maintained consistency across the weekly episodes) was often combined with the raising of a theatrical curtain that gestured to coexisting music hall and vaudeville traditions. The curtain motif would continue until the final Jerry short – Great Expectations (1927) – while in the Jerry cartoon The Deputy (1926), the diegetic action takes place entirely on a theatrical stage replete with footlights and offstage milieu as Jerry assumes the role of an impromptu concert pianist (deputising for the ‘famous pianist Ottstuffski’).

The matching together of disparate entertainment forms and creative practices (identified by Sammond and evoked in the Jerry cartoons) speaks of a cultural balance in the historical transition from (or cross-fertilisation between) ‘drawing’ to ‘performer’, rather than a fixed teleological narrative of origin, ascension, and descendant that leaves behind images of animation ‘in production’ in the pursuit of more classical coherency and illusionism. That is not to say Jerry does not represent a space to think about developments in character animation and his acquisition of believable and autonomous personality, but rather reminders of ‘animation’ typically emerge to footnote the action and act as a continual reminder of his cartoon materiality.³ In the case of Jerry, not only does the pen and inkpot presented on the title card always stage the importance of the animation as his ontological source, but the ‘hand of the artist’ device returned almost immediately in one of the very next shorts after Jerry’s Treasure Island Travel, titled There’s Many a Slip (1926), as Griffiths rejected Jerry’s complete liberation and self-sufficiency from the artistic processes that created him. It is this persistence of deconstruction that begins to separate Jerry from his cartoon contemporaries, and in particular Felix the Cat, despite the latter’s supposed ‘repeated interaction’ with the artist that transformed Messmer and Sullivan’s character into a ‘connecting element’ between disparate onscreen and offscreen spaces (Vettel Tom 1996, 70). For Vettel Tom, ‘Although Felix is clearly a drawing by Messmer, his independent persona is still affirmed’ (1996, 70). The metaphysical possibilities of Felix’s body and its potential for slapstick would often anchor such characterological autonomy. Yet the majority of Felix cartoons opened without any explicit recourse to deconstructive impulse at all. Unlike the Jerry shorts, Messmer and Sullivan’s series conventionally sidelined the visible presence of an animator who would create a set of practical conditions against which Felix could react, respond and counter. For example, Feline Follies frames Felix as a ‘debutante’ currently living in ‘Pussyville’, and by the release of Felix the Cat in Hollywood (1923) four years later, the eponymous feline is so established as an international animated star – replete with a producer/creator figure represented as an onscreen character – that he is subsequently accused by a caricatured Charlie Chaplin of ‘stealing his stuff’. It is also perhaps telling that audience identification with Felix as a cartoon was achieved not through the ‘hand of the artist’, but ‘primarily through the character’s repeated winking, laughing, and gesturing while gazing out at the audience’ (Vettel Tom 1996, 68). The presence of the animator’s hand in Comicalamities is therefore exceptional within the Felix series’ reflexive register, particularly given how any acknowledgement of the animator is absent from the shorts released before and after, Polly-Tics (1928) and Sure-Locked Homes (1928). By comparison, Jerry’s relationship to the animator and the animated medium that birthed him was always coded as strongly interdependent rather than independent. The Jerry series’ invitation to spectators to delight in the proximity of intermedial entanglement was largely as an outcome of its’ broader and ongoing reliance on ‘self-figuration’ that continued to frame Griffiths’ cartoons – if not his own visible presence within them – well into the late-1920s.

Within the pre-Golden Age context of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke, we can ultimately find the fullest realisation of Crafton’s original definition of the ‘hand of the artist’ motif. Crafton outlines the ‘hand of the artist’ as a highly performative gesture, as well as a convenient way of starting a film in animation’s early years. As Crafton puts it, ‘In his ability to literally animate his drawings [the animator] becomes god-like. He is the one who imparts the anima, the breath of life’ (qtd. in Williamson 2015, 98). A cross-section of exemplary Jerry cartoons reveals its presence and the central role it plays in driving the action as part of the series’ concentration of self-reflexive practices. The entire opening quarter of Weight and See, for example, is taken up with the magical properties of Griffiths’ hand. It not only draws in the animated detail on the blank paper but impossibly swipes across the screen to conjure up the cartoon’s landscape backdrop. In an earlier cartoon Never Say Die released in Pathé Pictorial No. 404 on 28th December 1925, Griffiths is actually able to handle Jerry, balancing the cartoon figure atop his thumb. Griffiths’ hand and artistic dexterity plays a dominant role in the way that the animated action unfolds – it is continually ‘on hand’ to redraft, redraw and reconfigure the mutating animated space. In Never Say Die especially, the ‘hand of the artist’ assumes ulterior kinds of narrative agency. As it moves across the screen in all directions, it becomes as volatile, as unpredictable, as changeable, and as animated as the exertions of Jerry himself.

Intermedial subjectivities

Discourses of self-figuration were, of course, central to early animation as Crafton’s typology of reflexive gestures makes clear. But they occurred with such regularity in the case of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke as to mark out British animation from cartoons produced in Hollywood, particularly given the lineage between the ‘hand of the artist’ and earlier forms of live stage entertainment. Crafton has suggested that the lightning cartoon act was around longer in England than it was in the U.S. He notes that ‘[T]he lightning sketch act, which seems to have originated in England, took much longer to metamorphose into the animated cartoon there – perhaps owing to the more tenacious traditions of the music hall’ (1993, 225). Or as Paul Ward puts it, ‘At a time when US animators were moving over to the advantages offered by cel techniques, animators in Britain were following a different route’ (2002, 63). The longevity of the live lightning cartoon theatre act in Britain is thus attributed to the indelible imprint of the musical hall tradition (as a cross-Atlantic corollary to the U.S. vaudeville), which ensured these lightning sketch-influenced films including Jerry persisted in British cinema longer than they did across North America. As a consequence, the dominance of the ‘hand of the artist’ in the Jerry cartoons until as late as 1927 bears out the immediacy of lightning cartoon performance traditions that held cultural sway in Britain well into the 1920s.

The persistence of the lightning sketch as a form of entertainment in Britain is strongly reflected in Jerry the Troublesome Tyke, which maintained a little longer than in Felix a volatile, self-reflexive impulse that more obviously relied on the ‘hand of the artist’ familiar from lightning cartoonists as a key dimension of its animated spectacle. Griffiths was, of course, a former projectionist at Cardiff’s Capitol cinema rather than a print cartoonist or commercial illustrator, and so did not make the same move from stage lightning cartoon performance to film as Walter Booth or J. Stuart Blackton. But his Jerry cartoons bear the traces of this kind of stage performance and the earliest spectacle mined from the drawing-as-performance and the sketcher-as-performer. Certainly, unlike his all-British cartoon contemporaries such as Bonzo and Pongo the Pup, the animated worlds of Jerry are perhaps less invested in creating hermetically sealed spaces. Jerry performs outwardly and beyond the film frame, coerced into action by, and engaging with, the artist’s hand. Berry even alludes to the ‘hand of the artist’ as elevating Jerry above his cartoon contemporaries, arguing its visual strategies are ‘more ambitious than the 1924–25 British films of G E Studdy’s dog Bonzo, who was a blander creation than Jerry and occasionally irritatingly ingratiating’ (2002, 69).

Part of the series’ ambition can be understood through its relationship with Jerry’s serial identity. Many of the Jerry cartoons involved repeating elements, and in some cases explicitly recalled or continued the narrative arc of previous instalments. Jerry Tracks the Treasure (1926), for example, opens with an intertitle that states ‘last week we left Jerry on Treasure Island. Looking for treasure (and finding trouble) Jerry is still at it’ as a way of connecting to the previous episode Jerry’s Treasure Island Travel. Examining the issue of repetition in Griffiths’ series, Berry argues that ‘although the Jerry films are to some extent derivative, they are impressive and hugely entertaining in their own right, demonstrating a high degree of animation skills and some inventive narrative and surrealistic flights of fancy’ (2002, 69). Such surrealist creativity in the Jerry cartoons manifests in a variety of ways, often rooted in an exploration by the visible artist of Jerry’s very properties as an animated cartoon. In the short Shown Up! (1925), Jerry’s material base is able to traverse the space between created and creator. The cartoon begins with Griffiths asked by the canine to draw spots on Jerry so that he can momentarily masquerade as a dalmatian at an upcoming dog show. The animator dutifully obliges, but Jerry is unhappy with the results (‘makes me look like a plum pudding!’), so contorts his body and shakes his new ink spots over the artist himself (a playful variation of shedding dog hair). As the black spots extend outwards from Jerry’s body they appear to cover Griffiths’ face, a moment that discloses how the worlds of live-action and animation in the Jerry cartoons exist in a self-reflexive and reciprocating acknowledgement of the animated form.

The outcome of Jerry’s multiple engagements with the animator and the dissolution of the boundary separating the two in films such as Shown Up! is that Jerry becomes a three-dimensional character replete with purposive activity. Discussing Comicalamities, Vettel Tom argues that the ‘co-conspiratorial’ relationship in the film between the largely hidden creator (presumed to be Messmer, but seen only via his inkpen) and character (Felix) was a ‘ploy’ central to the formation of the latter as a modern trickster capable of effortlessly adapting to new circumstances through his agile, animated form and equally cunning mind (1996, 70). Jerry was, like Felix, a disruptive, transgressive icon of modernity indebted to the possibilities of his own animated ontology. But the Jerry series regularly offered narratives anchored more readily to images of co-conspiracy, and the sudden fluency of moving images broken down into their medial workings. Whether it was Griffiths’ ability to draw multiple Jerrys prompting a verbal exchange between each incarnation over who is the real Jerry (A Bird in the Hand [1925]), or Jerry’s ability to take a photograph of Griffiths and then pass it to him over the threshold once it has developed (A Flash Affair [1926]), the animator/animated interrelationship was often foregrounded as reciprocal rather than unilateral. Through this intermedial and reflexive cross-pollination, both creator and created are implicated in the same discourse of ‘subversive trickery’, with the boundary between them simultaneously erased yet maintained in ways that emphasised ontological difference alongside (and across) spatial unity.

Best remembered in this spirit are two Jerry cartoons released in 1926 – A Wireless Whirl (1926) and He Breaks Out! (1926) – in which Jerry’s interactions with the animator further extend the vocabulary of the series’ deconstructive rhetoric through an emphasis on a subjective dimension to co-conspiracy. A Wireless Whirl begins in a familiar manner, with several seconds of live-action footage showing Griffiths simply seated at his desk drawing Jerry, before scolding his subsequent drawing (‘Stay there till you’re wanted!’). Perhaps expectedly, Jerry soon leaves the drawing paper and takes up residence within the interior of a wireless radio, where he proceeds to conduct conversations with his creator. Griffiths (playfully called ‘Mr. Artist’ by Jerry, thereby creating a hierarchical dimension to their professional relationship) then reaches into the wireless radio and pulls out Jerry by hand, offering to draw him a radio of his own by way of recompense. But when lightning strikes down onto the aerial as Jerry sits listening to music, A Wireless Whirl abruptly shifts visual registers, and Jerry’s sudden disorientation becomes visually connoted through white geometric shapes oscillating against a darker background. Cook describes the influence of ‘modernist aesthetics’ in this sequence, and particularly the abstract animations of European avant-garde filmmakers Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and Viking Eggeling, as a way of making sense of this ‘shift in representation’ as the film ‘becomes a succession of disorienting abstract shapes and stroboscopic alternations that resemble later abstract visual music animation’ (Cook 2018, 95). The transformations in animated style in A Wireless Whirl momentarily enforce Jerry’s ability to experience an ‘embodied sensation’ (Cook 2018, 95) and dramatic hallucinations despite his animated ontology.

Themes of perception also frame the narrative of He Breaks Out!, which marks a similar inventiveness of formal style that is rooted in the ‘co-conspiratorial’ interplay between animated character and animator. As in A Wireless Whirl, the cartoon opens with Griffiths taking his seat at his easel and attending to his pen and ink, before the shot cuts to a close-up of the blank paper as Jerry emerges (headfirst and, curiously, fully formed) from the end of the nib as it touches the page. As the animator pours himself a drink of whisky in celebration, he quickly decides to tease Jerry with his concoction, who responds indignantly ‘What about my thirst?’ The shot cuts again to a sheepish Griffiths, holding up the empty bottle (‘Sorry, Jerry, but we’ve run dry’). To compensate for this deficit, the hand of Griffiths again intrudes into the frame to draw a Saloon Bar and some currency to satisfy Jerry’s alcohol tastes (Jerry claims that there ‘won’t be any change!’). With Jerry soon inebriated, the spectator is provided with a radical spectatorial position: a point-of-view shot from Jerry, which is distorted and fuzzy to visually signify the character’s alcohol-induced blurred vision. Unlike Felix’s drunken escapades in the cartoon Woos Whoopee (1928) that causes the surrounding urban space to rock, distort, and stretch as a way of denoting his revelry and intoxication, in He Breaks Out! it is the film image that becomes subject to the animated character’s vivid drunken hallucinations. As the camera moves left and right, the shot hastily flickers from positive to negative, fixed on Griffiths whilst the rapid shifts in light and dark impede the clarity with which spectators can witness his inquisitive facial reaction.

Both A Wireless Whirl and He Breaks Out! are films that exploit the ‘co-conspiratorial’ interplay and exchange between animator and animated to craft creative moments of ‘embodied sensation’ that interrogate regimes of perception (Cook 2018, 97). Jerry’s bewildered and confused state – cued either by an electrical surge or extreme drunkenness – results in the reversal of conventional viewing perspectives, and the inversion of the spectators’ traditional position ‘outside’ the animation. The shift from representational to non-representational imagery in A Wireless Whirl provides not just a reflexive commentary on the transformative socio-cultural context of modernity, but on the animated medium as a modernist technology able to disrupt, contort and reimagine the world. These modes of ocular trickery are continued in He Breaks Out!, in which the spectator is positioned to look out at the live-action diegesis in ways that decentre the primacy of the artist, moving the action to within the animated image to create a narrative climax rooted in the drama of subjectivities in conflict. What these two Jerry cartoons share, then, as part of their deconstructive discourse is a co-conspiracy that plays out through vision. But it is in He Breaks Out! that Jerry’s new position as observer and ability to witness his creator is more evident, as his viewpoint becomes that of the spectator in ways that reverse subjectivity and implicate the artist into the short beyond glimpsing just his hand.

Conclusion

The impact and significance of Griffiths’ Jerry cartoons perhaps lies in their reflexive formal currencies and textual attributes, and in particular the ways that their mixed (and mixing) media aesthetic contributes to an enduring deconstructive mode of address. As McFarlane and Slide argue when discussing Jerry’s exposure at the Pordenone silent-film festival and ‘the post-2000 restoration of 40 of the long-forgotten Pathé shorts from Pinewood vaults’, the cartoons ‘impressed with their confident simplicity of line, sight gags and matte-work’ (2013, 313). Griffiths’ Jerry the Troublesome Tyke cartoons certainly normalized deconstructive practices and brought them to maturity within the context of British animation. These are cartoons that relied on several audacious tropes of self-figuration more so than one of its greatest proponents, Messmer’s Felix the Cat, despite several scholars returning to Felix as the overwhelming marker of such playful interactions. But as Berry points out, we simply do not find such contact between modalities and co-conspiracy as much in the Felix the Cat cartoons as we do elsewhere, and it is the Out of the Inkwell series where we might find greater corollaries with Griffiths’ series in terms of how the animator became so routinely folded into the narrative. Across the Jerry shorts, Griffiths and Jerry are more often co-conspirators and co-authors of the animated action than Messmer and Felix ever were, given the expansive role of the ‘hand of the artist’ in the Jerry shorts as a vital component of their stagecraft. Berry concludes his chapter on the cartoons with the hope that Jerry ‘can now have a continuing career with renewed exposure to his films which have languished in the vaults for far too long’ (2002, 70). A closer consideration of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke’s reflexive register and turn inwards to the conditions and processes of its creation suggests the ways in which this recovered series might be understood by animation historians. The series’ retention of symbols and icons of the lightning cartoon tradition, from the hand and easel to other signifiers of Jerry’s materiality, remained central to Jerry the Troublesome Tyke’s fantasy play, doing so for longer than its U.S. counterparts. The role of Griffiths as an animator was central to the series anti-illusionist agenda, firmly implicated into Jerry’s blank screen spaces and entirely complicit with his involuntary and disobedient actions.

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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.

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.