History of Iron Man

"Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear."—Alan Greenspan

It's not quite as catchy as Spider-Man's "With great power comes great responsibility," or Superman's "Truth, justice, and the American way," but in 1963, Stan Lee decided that the world needed a superhero for whom the tenets of capitalism would be a solemn vow, and thus was born Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. Partially based on Howard Hughes, Tony Stark was no self-doubting teenager dressing in spidery fetish gear, no family unit of four with fantastic powers, no hulking monster who just wanted to be left alone. Stark was a millionaire, an inventor, a ladies' man, a defense contractor, and a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex. "I'm gonna make him the kind of guy that normally young people hate," Lee gloated.

Further alienating his young-people demographic, Lee set Iron Man's creation story in Vietnam: 1963 saw the United States send 16,000 American military advisers to South Vietnam, and Tony Stark went with them. Hobnobbing with American soldiers while they tried out his new flashlight-size mortars on the Vietcong, Stark is captured by a warlord named Wong-Chu in an ambush that leaves a piece of shrapnel lodged near his heart. With only a week to live, Stark is forced to manufacture weapons for Wong-Chu but instead builds the Iron Man armor, basically a giant pacemaker that just happens to be super strong and can fly. Stark uses the suit to best Wong-Chu in a wrestling match (Wong-Chu fights back by throwing a filing cabinet full of rocks at him) and then escapes to civilization.

To the world, Tony Stark was the head of Stark Enterprises, a company that made high-tech weaponry, like rocket-powered roller skates, for the United States Army. Iron Man ostensibly served as his bodyguard and corporate mascot. But readers knew that Stark was secretly Iron Man and that in this identity he could take care of business—literally. Assuming that what was bad for Stark Enterprises was bad for America, Iron Man destroyed his competitors (who all turned out to be insane, anyway) and battled anyone who endangered his ability to land fat defense contracts. Lazy employees were fired and usually went on to become supervillains, retroactively validating Stark's human-resources acumen. Plus, he hated Commies.

Iron Man's early enemies were Communist evildoers such as the Red Barbarian, the Crimson Dynamo, the Black Widow, the Titanium Man, Boris Bullski, the Red Ghost and his Super Apes, and even Nikita Khrushchev himself. They were all a cowardly, weak, homicidal lot, defective and deviant products of the Communist state. Iron Man was also continually menaced by Asians. His nemesis is still the merciless Mandarin, constantly revived by tone-deaf writers who try, and fail, to drag him out of Fu Manchu's shadow—with his 10 fashionable power rings and his Chinese supremacist agenda, the Mandarin will always be an embarrassing Yellow Peril cliché. In one thrilling story, the anti-Asian and pro-business agendas of Iron Man collided when the Mandarin tried to destroy Stark Enterprises by unionizing its employees.

Throughout the series's history, Oriental enemies have reared their evil heads: the Yellow Claw, China's Radioactive Man, Fu Manchu himself. Japan fielded Samurai Steel, as well as the right-wing nationalist Monster Man, and even when the nation came up with its own superhero, Sunfire, he was really just a front to expand Japanese corporate interests in Vietnam. In a display of good taste, Marvel Comics published a very special Vietnam issue of Iron Man in 1975 dedicated to "peace" and featuring bright-yellow-skinned, bucktoothed Vietnamese soldiers.

If Iron Man sounds like your embarrassing uncle who drinks too much at Christmas and then rails against "Commies" and "coloreds," why is he still around? Perhaps because 1963 wasn't just the year we escalated our involvement in Vietnam but the year when Kennedy was assassinated. Comic-book readers found a father figure in Tony Stark. He was responsible but not stodgy. He could keep them safe, but he was hip to new technology. Also, within the Marvel comics universe, Iron Man has been treated with respect, unlike his peer Captain America. Over the past few years in the pages of Iron Man, the shielded hero has been appointed the secretary of defense and become the director of the comic-book-world version of the U.N. Captain America, on the other hand, has been arrested, shot, and, in a truly humiliating moment, forced to admit not only that he didn't know what MySpace was but that he didn't watch American Idol.

Even now, Iron Man represents Stan Lee's adolescent dog-eat-dog version of capitalism, the version that appeals to our "might makes right" monkey brains: Innovation is good; monopolies rock when we run them, suck when we don't; big corporations need CEOs rich enough to own space jets; and regulations should be a result of the CEOs' benevolence and wisdom, not imposed by outsiders. Tony Stark is a self-made man who believes that we can build ourselves out of trouble. He's one of America's romanticized lone inventors who, like Steve Jobs, solve problems by locking themselves away in secret workshops to emerge later with their paradigm-shifting inventions.

These days, the Iron Man comic book sells worse than not only the Hulk, Daredevil, Captain America, and Thor but the six different titles featuring Wolverine. So why an Iron Man movie? In a maneuver worthy of Tony Stark himself, Marvel Comics is producing Iron Man on its own after getting burned on licensing deals for the lucrative Spider-Man and X-Men franchises. Who's left in the stable? Captain America and Daredevil have already bombed on film, and the Hulk and Thor are in movies coming later this year, and so Iron Man it is. The Iron Man movie is a decision born of greed and pragmatism, a decision based on Marvel's best corporate interests. It's a purely capitalist decision, and according to Iron Man ethics, that makes it practically heroic.

Source : http://www.slate.com/id/2190373/

The Iron Man

Iron Man is a fictional character that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character first appeared in Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963), and was created by writer-editor Stan Lee, scripter Larry Lieber, and artists Don Heck and Jack Kirby.

Born Anthony Edward "Tony" Stark, he suffers a severe heart injury during a kidnapping and is forced to build a destructive weapon. He instead creates a power suit to save his life and help protect the world as the superhero Iron Man.^[1] He is a wealthy industrialist and genius inventor who created military weapons and whose metal suit is laden with technological devices that enable him to fight crime. Initially, Iron Man was a vehicle for Stan Lee to explore Cold War themes, particularly the role of American technology and business in the fight against communism. Subsequent re-imaginings of Iron Man have gradually removed the Cold War themes, replacing them with more contemporary concerns such as corporate crime and terrorism.

Throughout most of the comics history, Iron Man has been a member of the superhero team the Avengers and has been featured in several incarnations of his own various comic book series. The character has been adapted for several animated TV shows, as well as for the 2008 live action film Iron Man where he is played by Robert Downey, Jr.

Premiere

Iron Man's premiere was a collaboration among editor and story-plotter Stan Lee, scripter Larry Lieber, story-artist Don Heck, and Jack Kirby. In 1963, Lee had been toying with the idea of a businessman superhero.^[2] He set out to make the new character a rich, glamorous ladies' man, but one with a secret that would plague and torment him as well.^[3] Lee based this playboy's personality on Howard Hughes,^[4] explaining, "Howard Hughes was one of the most colorful men of our time. He was an inventor, an adventurer, a multi-billionaire, a ladies' man and finally a nutcase".^[5] While Lee intended to write the story himself, he eventually handed the premier issue over to Lieber, who fleshed out the story.^[3] The art, meanwhile, was split between Kirby and Heck. "He designed the costume", Heck said of Kirby, "because he was doing the cover. The covers were always done first. But I created the look of the characters, like Tony Stark and his secretary Pepper Potts".^[4][6]

Iron Man first appeared in 13- to 18-page stories in Tales of Suspense, which featured anthology science fiction and supernatural stories. The character's original costume was a bulky grey armor, which later turned golden in his second story (issue #40, April 1963), and then redesigned again as a sleeker red-and-golden armor starting in issue #48 (Dec. 1963), drawn by Steve Ditko. In his premiere, Iron Man was an anti-communist hero, defeating various Vietnamese agents; Lee later regretted this early focus.^[2][7] Throughout the character’s comic book series, technological advancement and national defense were constant themes for Iron Man, but later issues developed Stark into a more complex and vulnerable character as they depicted his battle with alcoholism and other personal difficulties.

From issue #59 (Nov. 1964) to its final issue #99 (March 1968), the anthological science-fiction backup stories in Tales of Suspense were replaced by a feature starring the superhero Captain America. After issue #99 (March 1968), the book's title was changed to Captain America. Iron Man stories moved to the title Iron Man and Sub-Mariner in April 1968, before the "Golden Avenger"^[8] made his solo debut with The Invincible Iron Man #1 (May 1968).

Writers have updated the war in which Stark is injured. In the original 1963 story, it was Vietnam. Later, in the 1990s, it was updated to be the first Gulf War,^[9] and then updated again to be Afghanistan. However, his time with the Asian Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ho Yinsen is consistent through nearly all incarnations of the Iron Man origin, depicting Stark and Yinsen building the original armor together. One exception is the direct-to-DVD animated feature film The Invincible Iron Man, in which the armor Stark uses to escape his captors is not the first Iron Man suit.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man

History of Fantastic Four

The Fantastic Four is a fictional superhero team appearing in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The group debuted in The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961), which helped to usher in a new naturalism in the medium. They were the first superhero team created by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist and co-plotter Jack Kirby.

There are four core individuals traditionally associated with the Fantastic Four, who gained superpowers after exposure to cosmic rays during a scientific mission to outer space. Mr. Fantastic (Reed Richards) is a scientific genius and the leader of the group who can stretch his body into incredible lengths and shapes. The Invisible Woman (Susan "Sue" Storm) is Reed's wife; she can render herself invisible and project powerful force fields. The Human Torch (Johnny Storm) is Sue's younger brother, who can generate flames, surround himself with them and fly. The final member is the monstrous Thing (Ben Grimm), their grumpy but benevolent friend, who possesses superhuman strength and endurance. Since the original four's 1961 introduction, the Fantastic Four have been portrayed as a somewhat dysfunctional yet loving family. Breaking convention with other comic-book archetypes of the time, they would squabble and hold grudges both deep and petty, and eschew anonymity or secret identities in favor of celebrity status.

The Fantastic Four have been adapted into other media, including four animated television series, an aborted 1990s low-budget film, the major motion picture Fantastic Four (2005), and its sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007).

Fictional biography

The Fantastic Four is formed when during an outer space test flight in an experimental rocket ship, the four protagonists are bombarded by a storm of cosmic rays. Upon crash landing back on Earth, the four astronauts find themselves transformed with bizarre new abilities. The four then decide to use their powers for good as superheroes. In a significant departure from preceding superhero conventions, the Fantastic Four make no effort to maintain secret identities as they maintain a high public profile, enjoying celebrity status for scientific and heroic contributions to society. At the same time they are often prone to arguing and even fighting with one another. Despite their bickering, the Fantastic Four consistently prove themselves to be "a cohesive and formidable team in times of crisis."^[1]

While there have been a number of lineup changes to the group, the four characters who debuted in Fantastic Four #1 remain the core and most frequent lineup.

• Mister Fantastic (Reed Richards), a scientific genius, can stretch, twist and re-shape his body to inhuman proportions. Mr. Fantastic serves as the father figure of the group, and is "appropriately pragmatic, authoritative, and dull".^[2] Richards blames himself for the failed space mission, particularly because of how the event transformed pilot Ben Grimm.^[3]

• Invisible Girl/Woman (Susan Storm), Reed Richards' girlfriend (and eventual wife) has the ability to bend and manipulate light to render herself and others invisible. She later develops the ability to generate force fields, which she uses for a variety of defensive and offensive effects

• The Human Torch (Johnny Storm), Sue Storm's younger brother, possesses the ability to control fire, project burning bolts of flame from his body, and fly. This character was loosely based on a Human Torch character published by Marvel's predecessor Timely Comics in the 1940s, an android that could ignite itself. Lee said that when he conceptualized the character, "I thought it was a shame that we didn't have The Human Torch anymore, and this was a good chance to bring him back".^[4] Unlike the teen sidekicks that preceded him, the Human Torch in the early stories was "a typical adolescent–brash, rebellious, and affectionately obnoxious".^[5]

• The Thing (Ben Grimm), Reed Richards' college roommate and best friend, has been transformed into a monstrous, craggy humanoid with orange, rock-like skin and super-strength. The Thing is often filled with anger, self-loathing and self-pity over his new existence. He serves as "an uncle figure, a longterm friend of the family with a gruff Brooklyn manner, short temper, and caustic sense of humor".^[5] In the original synopsis Lee gave to Kirby, The Thing was intended as "the heavy", but over the years the character has become "the most lovable group member: honest, direct and free of pretension".^[6]

The Fantastic Four has had several different headquarters, most notably the Baxter Building in New York City. The Baxter Building was replaced by Four Freedoms Plaza, built at the same location, after the Baxter Building's destruction at the hands of Kristoff Vernard, adopted son (and rumored half-brother of Mr. Fantastic) of the Fantastic Four's seminal villain Doctor Doom. Pier 4, a warehouse on the New York waterfront, served as a temporary headquarters for the group after Four Freedoms Plaza was condemned, due to the actions of another superhero team, the Thunderbolts.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Four

The Fantastic Four

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (20th Century Fox) is an off-brand superhero movie, the cinematic equivalent of one of those generic breakfast cereals with a badly drawn squirrel for a mascot. It's miscast, underwritten, muddily shot, and slackly paced, but there's something captivating about its unabashed shittiness. At the height of the trend toward moody, self-reflexive, slickly produced comic-book movies with A-list casts, Fox just cranks out this seeming refugee from Saturday-morning television (at moments, Silver Surfer feels like a worthy subject for commentary on MST:3000) and plonks it on the screen, as if to say, "Yo suckers, you like superheroes? Watch this!" And if the mystifying success of the first Fantastic Four is any indication, we will. The new film's PG rating and 92-minute running time make Silver Surfer highly marketable as a family movie, though small children might be disturbed by a few violent sequences and an apparent reference to the "ticking bomb" argument for military torture.

Silver Surfer has at least one advantage over the first installment: Now that the tepid quartet's origin myth has been established, the screenwriting team (which, incredibly, includes a former Simpsons writer, Don Payne) no longer has to spend the first hour drearily taxonomizing their various names, nicknames, and superpowers. But as the movie's reviewer, I guess I do: Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd), can stretch his body into any shape. Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba), can disappear and create force fields. Her brother Johnny, the Human Torch (Chris Evans), can turn his whole body into a flaming missile. And Ben Grimm, the Thing (Michael Chiklis), for some reason, doesn't turn into anything: He just is a superstrong rockpile-looking guy, all the time. Having come to terms with their fantastic-ness in the first episode, the Four now live together in the fabulous Baxter Building, where they're preparing for Reed and Sue's upcoming wedding.

The only thing worse than rain on your wedding day is when, just as you're about to exchange vows, the entire globe's existence is threatened by a planet-eating monster called Galactus. (Isn't it ironic?) This insatiable creature, which resembles a giant tapeworm made of space dust, is churning inexorably toward Earth, snacking on Saturn along the way. But it sends an envoy in advance: a melancholy naked guy on a surfboard who's made of the same liquid-mercury substance as the villain in Terminator 2. Exactly what the Silver Surfer must do to ready the Earth for consumption is unclear: season it? Marinate it in a red-wine reduction? The important thing is, the Four have eight days to figure out the source of the Surfer's power, neutralize it, and save the world from destruction.



Source : http://www.slate.com/id/2167989/

The Garfield : Why we hate the Mouse but not the cartoon copycat.

Aspiring cultural juggernauts could not have asked for a better how-to guide to world domination than Garfield: The Movie, out in theaters today. The film is an example of the kind of product that Garfield creator Jim Davis likes to attach his product's name to: Predictable, unfunny, and eminently forgettable. The movie won't take the nation by storm—in fact, it will probably vanish very quickly—but it will make a tidy sum in theaters and on DVD and then be remembered only by the small sample of tots in the viewing audience who turn into ironic hipsters during their college years.

And that's exactly how Davis wants it. Nothing scares the man more than the backlash that's created by white-hot success. He knows that the flip side to building almost any mass-market culture-industry icon—think Mickey Mouse or McDonald's—is intense loathing by the minority who will despise it. Davis's genius is that he's created the most widely syndicated comic strip in history—with the attendant profusion of plush toys, T-shirts, and themed Caribbean cruises—and yet, through careful brand management, he's largely managed to deflate the naturally occurring cultural counterattack.

Today, Garfield the comic strip appears in nearly 2,600 newspapers around the globe, and its readership is estimated at 260 million. If the readership number is right, then 4 percent of the world's population reads Garfield every single day. Garfield products—sold in 111 countries—rake in between $750 million and $1 billion each year. This was not accidental: Davis meticulously plotted Garfield's success. And part of his calculation was to make the strip so inoffensive that it's hard to hate it even for being anodyne.

Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation of Garfield. Davis has the soul of an adman—his first job after dropping out of Ball State, where he majored in business and art, was in advertising—and he carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was "a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character," Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in the Washington Post. "And primarily an animal. … Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not." So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn't a strip for the nation's 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.

The model for Garfield was Charles Schulz's Peanuts, but not the funny Peanuts of that strip's early years. Rather, Davis wanted to mimic the sunny, humorless monotony of Peanuts' twilight years. "After 50 years, Snoopy was still laying in that dog house, and rather than getting old, it actually has the opposite effect," Davis told the Chicago Sun-Times last year during the press blitz for Garfield's 25^th anniversary. "It says to all of us, some things in life can be counted on, they're consistent." In In Dog Years I'd Be Dead, a book to commemorate Garfield's 25^th anniversary, Davis calls the Peanuts licensing machine "a template that I could apply to Garfield." In his very first week, Garfield aped Snoopy by declaring, "Happiness is a warm television set."

From the beginning, Davis put as much energy into the marketing of the strip as he did into creating it. (It's telling that he's been inducted into the Licensing Merchandiser's Hall of Fame but not the hall of fame hosted by the International Museum of Cartoon Art.) In 1981, only three years after the strip's debut, he set up Paws, Inc., a privately held company to handle the licensing of Garfield products. Originally, Paws did only the creative work needed for product design, while Davis' syndicate managed the business side, but in 1994 Davis purchased the rights to license Garfield products from the syndicate for a reported $15 to $20 million. Even before that, Davis took an active role in the selling of his creation. Before agreeing to a deal with Alpo to put Garfield's face on a new line of cat food, Davis visited the company's plant, talked to its employees, and spoke with the grocery industry about the company's reputation. In his 1982 interview with Shapiro, Davis admitted to spending only 13 or 14 hours a week writing and drawing the strip, compared to 60 hours a week doing promotion and licensing.

Garfield's origins were so mercantile that it's fair to say he never sold out—he never had any integrity to put on the auction block to begin with. But today Davis spends even less time on the strip than he used to—between three days and a week each month. During that time, he collaborates with another cartoonist to generate ideas and rough sketches, then hands them over to Paws employees to be illustrated.

By comparison, Davis spends nearly every morning working on "concepts for new products," he writes in In Dog Years I'd Be Dead. Paws, Inc. has become a 60-employee licensing behemoth. There's a Garfield Stuff direct-mail catalog that began in 1997 and an online version at catalog.garfield.com. There's a "Garfield Pizza Café" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Nevada's gambling board just approved a slew of Garfield slot machines. Garfield was the frontman for a 24-nation promotion by a grower of apples, pears, and cherries that targeted countries from Thailand to Guatemala to France. The Chinese government uses Garfield to teach English to children.

What's kept Garfield in business for so long is Davis' canny understanding of how much is too much. Garfield had the most successful debut of any comic strip in history. The first strips were printed on June 19, 1978, in only 41 American newspapers. But by 1980, the first Garfield compilation was a runaway New York Times bestseller, and in 1982, Garfield was on the cover of People. In 1983, the strip was appearing in 1,400 newspapers in 22 countries. That year, Davis placed seven Garfield books simultaneously on the Times trade-paperback best-seller list, a feat that's never been repeated. The next year, Garfield got his own balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

But Davis feared overkill. Garfield was veering into the realm of faddishness. In the late 1980s, Garfield plush toys with suction-cup feet were so popular than criminals broke into cars to steal them and sell them on the black market. Davis, protective of his creation's unobjectionable blandness, knew he had to act fast before people began to hate Garfield. "We accepted the royalty checks, but my biggest fear was overexposure," he told Entertainment Weekly in 1998. "We pulled all plush dolls off the shelves for five years."

And that's what makes Garfield: The Movie a perfect addition to Davis' cartoon kingdom. It will be gone before anyone realizes it was there.

Source : http://www.slate.com/id/2102299/

The Spiderman 3

"Spider-Man 3" comes really close to being as difficult to follow as an "X-Men" movie. Well, maybe not that close since an "X-Men" movie requires the viewer to try to follow the lives of at least a dozen different characters. But I think it was a mistake for the makers to have Spidey contend with three different villains in one film. Unlike the two superior predecessors, it felt like they were trying to cram three movies into one with "Spider-Man 3".

I was most disappointed with the use, or misuse, of the Harry Osborne/Green Goblin character. We know that Harry must become the Green Goblin if he is going to have the ability to take on his super hero nemesis Peter Parker/Spider-Man. The makers of "Spider-Man 3" waste no time in picking up where "Spider-Man 2" left off. Not only does the movie not allow the viewer to observe Harry's transformation into the Green Goblin, but Harry doesn't even dress appropriately for his role. He wears a black uniform and never becomes the public menace his father did. I was looking forward to the Daily Bugle covers about the return of the menace of the Green Goblin. Instead Harry's campaign of revenge against Peter is quickly side tracked by a bout with amnesia after suffering a blow to the head in a fall during his first fight with Peter. After all, the film needs to introduce two more villains, Sandman and Venom, before it ends.

Whereas, in the first two films the viewer really gets to know the Norman Osborn and Otto Octavius characters, in "Spider-Man 3" the length of time devoted to the villains amounts to a movie short. Along the way Peter Parker must also contend with his dark side and his troubles in his relationship with his love Mary Jane Watson. Meanwhile, the landlord's daughter, Ursula, is back to amuse viewers once again with her adolescent crush on Pete. Add to all this the time needed to develop the Sandman and Venom villains, plus Gwen Stacy, and I was left wondering exactly what the movie is about.

"Spider-Man 3" is big budget extravaganza that is out of focus in the areas of character and plot development. While it has its laugh inducing comic moments and the best special effects sequences money can buy, it has little else to offer. While I really wanted to see the first two movies again, because I enjoyed the transformation of the main characters into super heroes and villains, it feels like the only reason to see "Spider-Man 3" is to check out the special effects again. If there are more Spider-Man films made, and there is no reason to believe there won't be given the money involved in releasing another film, then I would hope that the makers would simplify the story once again and do what made the first two films so enjoyable to watch.



Source : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413300/

Hulk : Green But With a Big Footprint

Ang Lee's 2003 "Hulk" failed to please the fanboys and most of the critics, who deemed the director's grave, angst-ridden Freudian approach too serious for its own good, and mocked the too-cartoonish big green ball of rage for its clumsy CGI artificiality. Was this any way to treat a potential franchise? (I know it flopped, but I liked it: the images had a pristine, awesome beauty that, for me, overrode its deficiencies as a slam-bang superhero movie.)

Marvel, having taken the Hollywood production of its comic book heroes in their own hands, was not about to let one of its perennial faves fall by the wayside, and so, five years later, we have "The Incredible Hulk," this time starring Edward Norton as the tormented scientist Bruce Banner, and with Louis Leterrier, director of both the Transformers movies and "Unleashed," at the helm. Since Lee got the origin story out of the way, Leterrier's version, written by Zak Penn, picks up the story several years down the road in a Rio favela, where the fugitive Banner is hiding out working in a bottling factory, desperately trying to find a cure for his accursed condition, and trying to keep off the radar of his malevolent Dr. Frankenstein, Gen. "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt), who wants to use his freakish strength as an ultimate military weapon.

Despite stories of fractious postproduction fights between Norton and Marvel (he wanted a more psychological, character-driven cut; Marvel wanted nonstop thrills, and won). "The Incredible Hulk" is not the mess the bloggers were eagerly predicting. Its easy-on-the-eyes slickness is apparent in the first shot, a stunning helicopter panorama of the mazelike Tavares Bastos favela, where Banner, with the help of a fitness guru, is trying to gain a Zen-like control over his temper, lest he turn into the most destructive green giant in the universe. Needless to say, he will fail repeatedly: there will indeed be blood.

Leterrier has style, he's good with action and he's eager to give the audience its money's worth of bone-crunching battles. Still, once the movie leaves the atmospheric Brazilian settings, nothing in this "Hulk" sinks in deeply: its familiar genre pleasures are all on the surface. For me, there's a problem with The Hulk, always has been, though it hasn't seemed to bother the tale's legions of fans. When the sensitive, physically unprepossessing Banner/Norton turns into the gargantuan, muscle-bound, growling Hulk, there's a total disconnect. They don't seem remotely related to each other, which makes it hard to have an emotional through-line. The actor is replaced by a special effect, and though you may develop feelings for this heroic beast they aren't the same feelings you have for Banner. (To put it another way, Peter Parkeris Spider-Man, but Bruce Banner isn't The Hulk--and doesn't want to be.) As good an actor as Norton can be, he thrives on ambivalent, shady roles, where you're not sure if he's to be trusted. But that's not what this role calls for: we should be instantly pulling for him, not slightly put off by him. Tim Roth is an equally odd choice to play his nemesis, the slightly over-the-hill special forces soldier, Emil Blonsky, famous for his combat skills. Tim Roth? (There's a moment when he's sauntering alongside Hurt's general, and the diminutive Roth's sashaying hipster gait is as unmilitary as body language can be.) The madly competitive Blonsky, brought onboard to capture Banner/Hulk, willingly subjects himself to the gamma rays that will transform him into a monster even more powerful than the Big Green One: he becomes The Abomination, just in time for the movie's knock-down-drag-out clash of the titans in the streets of Harlem. Liv Tyler replaces Jennifer Connelly as Banner's love interest, the general's daughter, Dr. Betty Ross. The lovers' chemistry is less than sizzling (she makes a more indelible impression in the spare horror film "The Strangers.") The movie's scene stealer is Tim Blake Nelson, making a comically welcome third act appearance as the unethical but madly enthusiastic scientist Samuel Stern.

"The Incredible Hulk" may well fulfill Marvel's hopes for another movie franchise--it hits its action marks squarely on the head. But it's telling that the audience's emitted its most audible approval in the movie's coda--a surprising in-joke I won't spoil, even though Universal is giving it away in their TV spots. Let's just say that in the end, the mammoth Hulk has to lean on even bigger movie shoulders to preserve and protect its Marvel-ous future.

Source : http://www.newsweek.com/id/141172

History of caracter Tom and Jerry

Tom and Jerry is a successful and long-running series of theatrical short subjects created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that centered on a never-ending rivalry between a housecat (Tom) and a brown mouse (Jerry) whose chases and battles often involved comic violence. Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote and directed one hundred and fourteen Tom and Jerry cartoons at the MGM cartoon studio in Hollywood, California between 1940 and 1957, when the animation unit was closed down. The original series is notable for having won the Academy Awards for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) seven times, tying it with Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies as the most-awarded theatrical animated series.

Beginning in 1960, in addition to the originals MGM had new shorts produced by Rembrandt Films, led by Gene Deitch in Eastern Europe. Production of Tom and Jerry shorts returned to Hollywood under Chuck Jones' Sib-Tower 12 Productions in 1963, this series lasted until 1967, making it a total of 161 shorts. The cat and mouse stars later resurfaced in television cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera and Filmation Studios during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and a feature film, Tom and Jerry: The Movie, in 1993. Today, Warner Bros. (via its Turner Entertainment division) owns the rights to Tom and Jerry, and produces the series Tom and Jerry Tales for The CW's Saturday morning "Kids WB" lineup, as well as the 2005 Tom and Jerry short, The KarateGuard and a string of Tom and Jerry direct-to-video films.

History and evolution

Hanna-Barbera era (1940 – 1958)

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were both part of the Rudolf Ising unit at the MGM cartoon studio in the late 1930s. Barbera, a storyman and character designer, was paired with Hanna, an experienced director, to start directing films for the Ising unit; the first of these was a cat-and-mouse cartoon called Puss Gets the Boot. Completed in late 1939, and released to theatres on February 10, 1940, Puss Gets The Boot centers on Jasper, a gray tabby cat trying to catch an unnamed rodent, but after accidentally breaking a houseplant and its stand, the African-American housemaid Mammy (Later Tom's owner) has threatened to throw Jasper out ("O-W-T, out!" [as Mammy spells it]) if he breaks one more thing in the house. Naturally, the mouse uses this to his advantage, and begins tossing wine glasses, ceramic plates, teapots, and any and everything fragile, so that Jasper will be thrown outside. Puss Gets The Boot was previewed and released without fanfare, and Hanna and Barbera went on to direct other (non-cat-and-mouse related) shorts. "After all," remarked many of the MGM staffers, "haven't there been enough cat-and-mouse cartoons already?

The pessimistic attitude towards the cat and mouse duo changed when the cartoon became a favorite with theatre owners and with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which nominated the film for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons of 1941. It lost to another MGM cartoon, Rudolph Ising's The Milky Way.

Producer Fred Quimby, who ran the MGM animation studio, quickly pulled Hanna and Barbera off the other one-shot cartoons they were working on, and commissioned a series featuring the cat and mouse. Hanna and Barbera held an intra-studio contest to give the pair a new name by drawing suggested names out of a hat; animator John Carr won $50 with his suggestion of Tom and Jerry.^[4] The Tom and Jerry series went into production with The Midnight Snack in 1941, and Hanna and Barbera rarely directed anything but the cat-and-mouse cartoons for the rest of their tenure at MGM.

Tom's physical appearance evolved significantly over the years. During the early 1940s, Tom had an excess of detail--shaggy fur, numerous facial wrinkles, and multiple eyebrow markings--all of which were streamlined into a more workable form by the end of the 1940s- and looked like a realistic cat; in addition from his quadrupedal beginnings Tom became increasingly, and eventually almost exclusively, bipedal. By contrast, Jerry's design remained essentially the same for the duration of the series. By the mid-1940s, the series had developed a quicker, more energetic (and violent) tone, due to the inspiration from the work of the colleague in the MGM cartoon studio, Tex Avery, who joined the studio in 1942.

Even though the theme of each short is virtually the same - cat chases mouse - Hanna and Barbera found endless variations on that theme. Barbera's storyboards and rough layouts and designs, combined with Hanna's timing, resulted in MGM's most popular and successful cartoon series. Thirteen entries in the Tom and Jerry series (including Puss Gets The Boot) were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons; seven of them went on to win the Academy Award, breaking the Disney studio's winning streak in that category. Tom and Jerry won more Academy Awards than any other character-based theatrical animated series.

Tom and Jerry remained popular throughout their original theatrical run, even when the budgets began to tighten somewhat in the 1950s and the pace of the shorts slowed slightly. However, after television became popular in the 1950s, box office revenues decreased for theatrical films, and short subjects. At first, MGM combated this by going to all-CinemaScope production on the series. After MGM realized that their re-releases of the older shorts brought in just as much revenue as the new films, the studio executives decided, much to the surprise of the staff, to close the animation studio. The MGM cartoon studio was shut down in 1957, and the final of the 114 Hanna and Barbera Tom and Jerry shorts, Tot Watchers, was released on August 1, 1958. Hanna and Barbera established their own television animation studio, Hanna-Barbera Productions, in 1957, which went on to produce famous television shows and motion pictures.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_and_Jerry

Doraemon is Famous of manga Caracters

Perhaps the most famous manga character in all of Japan is Doraemon. Almost the equivalent of Mickey Mouse in the U.S., Doraemon and his namesake series symbolize to many the foibles and adventures of childhood. Characters from DORAEMON are referenced in adult manga, Doraemon's face graces candy, and just about anyone you ask in Japan would recognize the name and the round face with the round button nose, long whiskers, big smiling mouth, and collar with a bell.
Penned by famous children's mangaka Abiko Motoo and the late Fujimoto Hiroshi, who for a long time co-authored the series and called themselves "Fujiko Fujio," DORAEMON was a big hit in the 1970s that continued through the 1980s, and even into the 1990s (though with only Fujimoto Hiroshi on the project, writing as "Fujiko F. Fujio"). The children who first grew up reading DORAEMON are now adults rising up through Japanese society.
What is DORAEMON? It is a humorous children's manga (later a TV-series) about a boy named Nobi Nobita who is so unlucky, weak and lazy that his descendants had to send the family robot back in time to help him out. That robot is Doraemon (where the "Dora" is presumably based on the word "dora-neko," or stray cat), and his four-dimensional pocket produces any number of futuristic gadgets and devices meant to help Nobita become something other than a complete failure in adulthood. Though smart and caring, Doraemon has his own foibles, and his partnership with Nobita produces both triumphs and disasters, hilarious situations and occasional poignant moments.
As a "gag" manga for children, the series has no real progression; our hero is always a fourth-grader, and rarely do changes carry over from story to story. As a glimpse into Japanese family life, though, DORAEMON is priceless. We see Nobita's parents as very typical for Japan of the 1970s, with the father a stocky and mellow salaryman, and the mother a hardworking housewife whose job it is to make sure Nobita studies hard and does his chores. Although ferocious when angry, she is also caring and smart; at heart she just wants her son to grow up to become a decent, hardworking adult with a bright future. Nobita's friends include the class bully nicknamed Gian (presumably based on the word "giant"), the class rich kid Suneo who usually acts as Gian's lieutenant, the gentle and smart girl Shizuka and the occasionally appearing super-brilliant Dekisugi (which can be read as "over done" or "overly perfect"). There's also their schoolteacher, a stern man who has no compunction against sending Nobita off to stand in the hallway for being late. In all this, Doraemon acts as the childhood friend or older sibling we all wish we could've had: caring, smarter than us, with a sense of justice, imperfect and fallible enough to not be irritating, and with a magic pocket that can produce the solution to any problem.
A typical DORAEMON story starts with Nobita suffering from the abuses of Gian and Suneo, or doing badly in school, coming home crying, and being comforted by a tried but true Doraemon. Doraemon patiently (or resignedly) digs into his four-dimensional pocket and produces a new gadget that (it seems) might offer the perfect cure for the problem...until Nobita or his friends get too greedy (and even Doraemon's been known to screw things up from time to time).
For example, after a day of forgetting his books at home and his pack at school, Doraemon produces a handbag that allows one to reach in and pick up something far away. Nobita retrieves his pack from school...and then promptly rushes out to show off the handbag to his friends. To prove its abilities, he grabs his mother's glasses from the handbag—which doesn't impress anyone—and then goes on to pull out Suneo's narcissistic diary and even Gian's suspiciously wet futon. But when he returns home, his mother is angry about her glasses—and she quickly finds the handbag very useful for retrieving her wayward son!
Doraemon also sometimes carelessly leaves devices lying around. Nobita once found a time vending machine, which allowed the user to buy products from other times with modern money: thanks to inflation, of course, things from the past cost much less in absolute yen terms. Nobita uses it to buy boxes of cheap 1933 cigarettes for his father and a mountain of jars of ink for his mother, and even fails to buy a camera from the year 745. But when Doraemon warns him not to use the machine for making a profit, Nobita naturally rushes off to do so. With his new earnings, he decides to buy something different—candy from 100 years in the future, indescribably delicious. Unfortunately, he forgot about cost inflation...and he finds himself 230,000 Yen in debt to the machine, which is now demanding its payment!
Almost every story brings a new gadget at play: a camera that turns objects into two-dimensional photos that need hot water to revert to normal (don't ask how Nobita returned to normal after he used it on himself!); a deluxe light that converts anything it shines on into a more deluxe model (which surprisingly makes some people unhappy); a cloud-shaping machine that alters the clouds in the sky (but don't let it overheat!); the flavor-sharing gum, which allows one to taste what someone else eats (great for rich friends, but very bad if a stray dog chews it); or the helping pill, which makes those who swallow it help out anyone they meet in need (and of course, Nobita winds up swallowing it instead of his friends). A few gadgets, though, return once in a while or are standard "staples" of the series. For example, the Dokodemo Doa ("Wherever Door"), which allows one to go anywhere; the Moshimo Box ("What If Phone Booth"), which allows one to go to an alternate world where a suggested proposition is true; the time machine in Nobita's desk drawer, which allows one to travel to any time; the take-copter, a tiny helicopter-style blade to wear on one's head, that allows one to fly; the time-cloth, which makes objects it is wrapped around younger or older; and of course, Doraemon's four dimentional pocket itself, which produces all these items. The stories, however, are not really about the gadgets; they are about Nobita and his decisions. The gadgets serve only as outlets for his character to shine through, whether in moments of greed, indignation, remorse or compassion. His mistakes, moments of weakness and occasional moments of bravery are what make the stories. And ultimately, the stories have a moral core. Nobita's misuse of the gadgets usually bring dire consequences back on his head, but when he champions justice and acts for worthy reasons, he usually manages to do lasting good. Thankfully, Nobita is at heart a good kid with a compassionate heart, if fraught with flaws.
A prime example of this is the story where a new transfer student turns out to be even worse off than Nobita: slower, weaker and with even poorer test scores. Nobita is overjoyed to find someone worse than himself, so he studies with, races against and plays games with the new kid; and in each case the new boy fares worse. At last, Nobita even gets him drafted into Gian's dreaded baseball games instead of himself. But Doraemon brings out a film viewer in which characters can be switched. He shows that Nobita's actions to the new kid were just like Suneo's usual behavior to Nobita: condescending, arrogant, mean and self-serving. Nobita sees the truth in this, and when he sees Gian and Suneo beating up the other kid over his poor baseball performance, exactly where Nobita would have been, Nobita jumps in and takes the beating instead.
Indeed, a number of DORAEMON stories depart from a simple gag routine and take a long, steady look at issues of moral and ethical importance. Stories have been told about environmental issues, caring for pets, self-sacrifice for another's sake, bravery in the face of danger, parental love and guidance, and the importance of reading. If not concerned with ethics, some stories are educational, touching on subjects ranging from biology, history, genetics, archaeology and geology (or even the notion of economic inflation, as mentioned above). When these elements are combined with comedy, familiar characters and a plethora of fun and fantastic gadgets, there is very little doubt about why DORAEMON became as popular as it did, or why so many Japanese can look back it with such fondness.
For anyone who has the chance to read DORAEMON, it offers an excellent look at child's eye view of Japanese home life of the 70s, and should not be missed.
Here's more about the main characters from the classic series:

	•	Nobi Nobita: The only child in his family, Nobita unfortunately inherited his dad's poor academic ability and his mother's poor athletic ability (along with her bad eyesight). His only two talents are cat's cradle and shooting, skills that are almost completely useless in modern Japanese society.
	•	Doraemon: A cat-based robot from the future, Doraemon has a four-dimensional pocket filled with useful gadgets. Doraemon loves dorayaki (a snack food made with sweet bean paste), hates being cold and he absolutely loathes rats and mice, to the point of digging out a nuclear bomb from his pocket when he thinks they're around.
	•	Nobita's Mother: A classic Japanese mother, good at lecturing Nobita, scary when angry and overall a sharp cookie. She also cares very much for her son, and is just as quick to bring him a snack when it looks like he's actually studying as she is to yell at him when he's goofing off.
	•	Nobita's Father: A laid back Japanese father and salaryman. Normally cheerful, he's ready to offer a lecture or two to his son about the hard times when he was a boy, during the war era. His nemesis appears to be learning to drive a car, though his inability to quit smoking has come up as a plotline as well.
	•	Gian: Gian (Takeshi) is the local bully, who forces everyone to do things his way, who takes other kids' toys, and who beats up those who oppose him. His dream is to become a singer, and he periodically forces other kids to come and listen to his mind-numbing, ear-warping "concerts." Once in a while he acts kindly towards others, but that's rare. His family is relatively poor. His mother slaps him when she finds him beating up other kids.
	•	Suneo: The local rich kid, Suneo finds his surest safety in obeying Gian and being his lieutenant, but Suneo secretly resents the stronger boy. His family often goes on expensive trips to which Suneo usually invites Shizuka and Gian, but not Nobita. Suneo has a narcissistic streak a mile wide and loves showing off what his wealth can buy him.
	•	Shizuka: The nicest girl in the neighborhood, Shizuka is also smart, pretty and gentle. Her hobby unfortunately is frequent bath-taking in the later books (yes, Japanese children's comics have nudity), but overall, she is one of Nobita's protectors and his favorite friend. In the future (as seen by time travel) it seems that she will become his wife, although Nobita was originally going to marry Gian's obnoxious younger sister. Doraemon, it appears, was at least partially successful in changing Nobita's fate.
	•	Dekisugi: A sometimes-appearing character, Dekisugi is Nobita's main rival for Shizuka. Handsome, athletic and smart, he appears to have no real flaws.
	•	Dorami: Doraemon's younger sister, who is apparently a somewhat better grade of robot. Her application of futuristic gadgets is usually more intelligent than her elder brother's, but she knows that Nobita and Doraemon are the best of friends. Dorami appears only occasionally, usually when Doraemon is in his periodic "off" state (necessary for robot health).
	•	The teacher ("Sensei"): The teacher is a fairly stern man who often sends Nobita off to stand in the hallway (a traditional Japanese school punishment). He doesn't hesitate to lecture poorly performing students if he runs into them on the street.
	•	Nobita's Grandmother (father's side): A small, gentle woman who died some years before, she makes a very rare appearance once in a while when Nobita goes time traveling. Remarkably, she accepts his story about coming from the future, and always treats him with kindness.

Even more information about DORAEMON can be found here.

Published by Shogakukan (Tentoumushi Comics)
50? vols out
approximately 180 black/white pages each
¥390 each
Available now in Japan
Where to buy

Source : http://www.ex.org/4.8/35-manga_doraemon.html

Nobita and Doraemon

Doraemon (ドラえもん, Doraemon^?) is a Japanese manga series created by Fujiko F. Fujio (the pen name of Hiroshi Fujimoto) which later became an anime series and Asian franchise. The series is about a robotic cat named Doraemon, who travels back in time from the 22nd century to aid a schoolboy, Nobita Nobi (野比 のび太, Nobi Nobita^?).

In March 2008, Japan's Foreign Ministry appointed Doraemon as the nation's first "anime ambassador."^[2] Ministry spokesman explained the novel decision as an attempt to help people in other countries to understand Japanese anime better and to deepen their interest in Japanese culture."^[3] The Foreign Ministry action confirms that Doraemon has come to be considered a Japanese cultural icon. In 2002, the anime character was acclaimed as an Asian Hero in a special feature survey conducted by Time Asia magazine^[4].

The series first appeared in December 1969, when it was published simultaneously in six different magazines. In total, 1,344 stories were created in the original series, which are published by Shogakukan under the Tentōmushi (てんとう虫, Tentōmushi^?) manga brand, extending to forty-five volumes. The volumes are collected in the Takaoka Central Library in Toyama, Japan, where Fujio was born.

A majority of Doraemon episodes are comedies with moral lessons regarding values such as integrity, perseverance, courage, family and respect for elders. Several noteworthy environmental issues are often visited, including homeless animals, endangered species, deforestation, and pollution. Topics such as dinosaurs, the flat earth theory, wormhole traveling, Gulliver's Travels, and the history of Japan are often covered.

Doraemon was awarded the first Shogakukan Manga Award for children's manga in 1982,^[5] and the first Osamu Tezuka Culture Award in 1997.

History

In December 1969, the Doraemon manga appeared simultaneously in six different children's monthly magazines. The magazines were titled by the year of children's studies, which included Yoiko (good children), Yōchien (nursery school), and Shogaku Ichinensei (first grade of primary school) to Shogaku Yonnensei (fourth grade of primary school). By 1973, the series began to appear in two more magazines, Shogaku Gonensei (fifth grade of primary school) and Shogaku Rokunensei (sixth grade of primary school). The stories featured in each of the magazines were different, meaning the author was originally creating more than six stories each month. In 1977, CoroCoro Comic was launched as a magazine of Doraemon. Original manga based on the Doraemon movies were also released in CoroCoro Comic. The stories which are preserved under the Tentōmushi brand are the stories found in these magazines.

Since the debut of Doraemon in 1969, the stories have been selectively collected into forty-five books published from 1974 to 1996, which had a circulation of over 80 million in 1992. In addition, Doraemon has appeared in a variety of manga series by Shōgakukan. In 2005, Shōgakukan published a series of five more manga volumes under the title Doraemon+ (Doraemon Plus), which were not found in the forty-five Tentōmushi volumes.∞

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doraemon

The Anime of Naruto

Naruto (NARUTO - ナルト -, Naruto^? romanized as NARUTO in Japan) is an ongoing Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Masashi Kishimoto with an anime adaptation. The plot tells the story of Naruto Uzumaki, a loud, hyperactive, unpredictable, adolescent ninja who constantly searches for recognition and aspires to become a Hokage, the ninja in his village that is acknowledged as the leader and the strongest of all. The series is based on a one-shot that Kishimoto first authored in the August 1997 issue of Akamaru Jump.

The manga was first published by Shueisha in 1999 in the 43rd issue of Japan's Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine and it is still being released with forty-four volumes. The manga would be later adapted into an anime produced by Studio Pierrot and Aniplex. It premiered across Japan on the terrestrial TV Tokyo network and the anime satellite television network Animax on October 3, 2002. The first series lasted nine seasons, while Naruto: Shippūden, a sequel of the series, began its first on February 15, 2007 and is still airing.

Viz Media has licensed the manga and anime for North American production. The Naruto anime debuted in the United States on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block on September 10, 2005, and in Canada on YTV's Bionix on September 16, 2005. Naruto began showing in the United Kingdom on Jetix on July 22, 2006. It began showing on Toasted TV on January 12, 2007, in Australia, which features the Manga Entertainment TV version and the German-language dub opening, although it could be watched on Cartoon Network in 2006.

Serialized in Viz's Shonen Jump magazine, Naruto has become the company's best-selling manga series. As of volume 36, the manga has sold over 71 million copies in Japan.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naruto

About Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although several other forms of presenting animation also exist.

Animation can sometimes refer to a way of activating a community, i.e. 'animating' the users. This means actions which encourages users to interact with a given service and is connected to moderation.

Early Examples

Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion drawing can be found in paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion. A 5,200 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta has five images if a goat painted along the sides. This has been claimed to be an example of early animation. ^[1][2]

The phenakistoscope, zoetrope and praxinoscope, as well as the common flip book, were early popular animation devices invented during the 1800s. These devices produced movement from sequential drawings using technological means, but animation did not really develop much further until the advent of motion picture film.

There is no single person who can be considered the "creator" of the art of film animation, as there were several people doing several projects which could be considered various types of animation all around the same time.

Georges Méliès was a creator of special-effect films; he was generally one of the first people to use animation with his technique. He discovered a technique by accident which was to stop the camera rolling to change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film. This idea was later known as stop-motion animation. Méliès discovered this technique accidentally when his camera broke down while shooting a bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be passing by just as Méliès restarted rolling the film, his end result was that he had managed to make a bus transform into a hearse. This was just one of the great contributors to animation in the early years.

The earliest surviving stop-motion advertising film was an English short by Arthur Melbourne-Cooper called Matches: An Appeal (1899). Developed for the Bryant and May Matchsticks company, it involved stop-motion animation of wired-together matches writing a patriotic call to action on a blackboard.

J. Stuart Blackton was possibly the first American filmmaker to use the techniques of stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. Introduced to filmmaking by Edison, he pioneered these concepts at the turn of the 20th century, with his first copyrighted work dated 1900. Several of his films, among them The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) were film versions of Blackton's "lightning artist" routine, and utilized modified versions of Méliès' early stop-motion techniques to make a series of blackboard drawings appear to move and reshape themselves. 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces' is regularly cited as the first true animated film, and Blackton is considered the first true animator.

Another French artist, Émile Cohl, began drawing cartoon strips and created a film in 1908 called Fantasmagorie. The film largely consisted of a stick figure moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action where the animator’s hands would enter the scene. The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look. This makes Fantasmagorie the first animated film created using what came to be known as traditional (hand-drawn) animation.

Following the successes of Blackton and Cohl, many other artists began experimenting with animation. One such artist was Winsor McCay, a successful newspaper cartoonist, who created detailed animations that required a team of artists and painstaking attention for detail. Each frame was drawn on paper; which invariably required backgrounds and characters to be redrawn and animated. Among McCay's most noted films are Little Nemo (1911), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).

The production of animated short films, typically referred to as "cartoons", became an industry of its own during the 1910s, and cartoon shorts were produced to be shown in movie theaters. The most successful early animation producer was John Randolph Bray, who, along with animator Earl Hurd, patented the cel animation process which dominated the animation industry for the rest of the decade.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation