Gulliver's Travels (1939 film)

Gulliver's Travels
Directed by	Dave Fleischer
Written by	Dan Gordon Cal Howard Tedd Pierce Edmond Seward Isadore Sparber Jonathan Swift (novel Gulliver's Travels)
Produced by	Max Fleischer
Starring	Pinto Colvig Jack Mercer Sam Parker Jessica Dragonette Lanny Ross
Music by	Victor Young Ralph Rainger Al Neiburg (songs) Winston Sharples (songs) Sammy Timberg (songs)
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	December 22, 1939 (USA)
Running time	75 min
Country	United States
Language	English

Gulliver's Travels is a 1939 Academy Award nominated cel-animated Technicolor feature film, directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Max Fleischer for Fleischer Studios. The film was released on Friday 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.

Gulliver was the second 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.

Plot

The film opens with Gulliver washing up on a mysterious island after his ship sinks on a stormy night. It is revealed that the island, Lilliput, is inhabited by very small people. While scouting the forest, the town crier, Gabby, comes across Gulliver's unconscious body and takes him as a giant, so he rushes off to warn the ruler of Lilliput, King Little. At this time, Little and his friend, King Bombo of the neighboring and equally minuscule island of Blefuscu, are planning a wedding between their children: Princess Glory of Lilliput and Prince David of Blefuscu. Things turn sour between the kings, however, when they argue over which song to play at the wedding (Little wants to play the song Faithful while Bombo wants Forever), and Bombo soon declares war.

Gabby manages to tell King Little about the "giant" (i.e. Gulliver) on the beach and is sent to capture him. Gabby leads a mob to the beach but is surprised to find Gulliver is not there; the mob begins to scorn Gabby until they all realize that they are standing on Gulliver's belly. The Lilliputians tie Gulliver down to a wooden platform and wheel him into the village—a task that takes them until daybreak. Soon Gulliver awakens and frightens everyone away, but when they see that the invading Blefuscuians are also intimidated by his size, the Lilliputians decide to enlist his help to fight against their rival neighbor, treating him with hospitality and making him a new set of clothes.

King Bombo, who has sent three spies, Sneak, Snoop, and Snitch, into Lilliput, realizes the threat that Gulliver will pose to him, so he leaves them to find a way to kill Gulliver. The spies steal Gulliver's flintlock pistol, confiscated from the Lilliputians and dubbed "Gulliver's Thunder Machine", and prepare to use it against him. Meanwhile, Gulliver learns from Glory and David, who are still deeply in love with each other, that their people are fighting because of their disagreement over two songs, so he proposes they create a new song that combines the two.

The spies assure King Bombo that they will kill Gulliver, so Bombo sends a message that says he will attack at dawn. Gabby intercepts this message before it reaches the spies and rushes to warn the Lilliputians. As he tries to find Gulliver, however, he is captured by the spies by putting him in a bag, they prepare the pistol. As the Blefuscuian fleet of ships makes its way to Lilliput, Gulliver manages to reel all the ships in and pull them to shore. Gabby is still in the bag run from the house to try to warn Gulliver but unable to see because he is still in the bag. At this time, the spies prepare to fire at Gulliver from atop a cliff, but Prince David grabs onto the gun's barrel just in time, only to fall off the cliff to his apparent death.

Using David's body to illustrate a point, Gulliver rebukes both Lilliput and Blefuscu for fighting over the songs they wish to sing. However, it is revealed that David is alive and well, and he and Glory sing their combined song to the two peoples. The three spies decided to release Gabby by cut open the bag, when he got out the bag he started to attack them for missing the war. King Little and King Bombo reconcile and work together to build a new ship for Gulliver, which he uses to depart from the now unified islands.

History

A scene from Gulliver's Travels.

Max and Dave Fleischer had wanted to produce a feature as early as 1934, but Paramount, who distributed Fleischer's Popeye, Betty Boop, and Screen Songs cartoon shorts, vetoed the idea. However after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Paramount argeed 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 inbetweeners. Animators were lured from the Hollywood animation studios, including Cal Howard 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-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 (Animated Antics) cartoons starring the three villains from the film. The film's song I Hear a Dream was also very popular as well [1].

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, as the studio was in debt from unsuccessful cartoons and the simmering feud between Max and Dave reached new height, as Dave had wanted to write the score for the film[2]. Gulliver's Travels is now in the public domain, because its copyright was not renewed, and is widely available on home video and DVD. E1 Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray Disc March 10, 2009, but received strong criticism for presenting the movie in a stretched and cropped 1.78:1 format.

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)
• List of films in the public domain

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.

External links

• Gulliver's Travels at IMDb
• Gulliver's Travels is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive
• Gulliver's Travels at Guba.com