History and List Live Action and Animation

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History The tradition goes back all the way to the earliest days of animation with Winsor McCay's short Gertie the Dinosaur, which shows a live-action narrator (specifically, a "live" actor, instead of a filmed one) interacting with an animated landscape and character (Gertie). In one scene, the narrator appears to throw a real orange which is caught by Gertie (the real orange is replaced by an animated one just as it leaves the narrator's hand), and the film climaxes with a scene in which the narrator enters the animated landscape (again, replaced by an animated version) and takes a ride on the famous dinosaur's back. In the later days of silent film, the popular animated cartoons of Max Fleischer included a series where his cartoon character Koko the Clown interacted with the live world; for example, having a boxing match with a live kitten. In a variation on this concept, Walt Disney's first directorial efforts (years before Mickey Mouse was born) were the animated Alice Comedies short cartoons, in which a young live-action girl named Alice interacted with animated cartoon characters. In the era of sound film, the 1940 Warner Bros. cartoon You Ought to Be in Pictures, directed by Friz Freleng, can be seen as a predecessor to Roger Rabbit. The animated sequence in the 1945 film Anchors Aweigh in which Gene Kelly dances with an animated Jerry Mouse is one of the actor's most famous scenes. The Disney Studio mixed live action and animation in several notable films (which are primarily considered live-action): In The Three Caballeros (1945), Donald Duck cavorts with several Latin-American dancers, plus Aurora Miranda (sister of Carmen Miranda), who gives him a kiss. In Song of the South (1946), Uncle Remus sings "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" in an animated field, and tells the stories of Brer Rabbit through the animated sequences. So Dear to My Heart (1949)

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