You may have heard that the earliest version of Mickey Mouse, as featured in the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willie, is now in the public domain. Yet the history of animation began decades before Mickey Mouse. In the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, artists, cartoonists, and inventors such as Émile Cohl, Winsor McCay, Raoul Barré, John Bray, Max Fleischer, and Otto Messmer made significant contributions to the development of stop-motion and hand-drawn animation.
Yet it wasn’t until 1917's El Apóstol that animation was used to create a feature-length film. Unlike many of the animated shorts of the day that featured anthropomorphic animal characters, El Apóstol was a political satire with a rather unlikely protagonist: Argentine president Hipólito Yrigoyen.
The plot involves Yrigoyen having a dream in which he discusses his political frustrations with the gods on Mount Olympus and uses lightning bolts from Zeus to rid Buenos Aires of corruption. The 70-minute-long cutout animation film was directed and animated by Quirino Cristiani and produced by Federico Valle.
Although well-received in Buenos Aires (the destruction of the city at the end was particularly popular), it was eventually banned by the town council and was never distributed anywhere else. Tragically, the only known copy of El Apóstol was lost when a 1926 fire destroyed Valle’s studio.
Early feature film milestones:
- The specific length required for a motion picture to qualify as a “feature film” is up for debate. It must be at least 40 minutes long, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, and the British Film Institute, though the Screen Actors Guild says that it must run for at least 60 minutes.
- Though only 17 minutes survive, the first live-action narrative feature film was the Australian bushranger film The Story of the Kelly Gang, which ran for over an hour when it premiered in 1906.
- The oldest surviving feature-length animated film, 1926's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, was written and directed by German silhouette animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger. Based on the One Thousand and One Nights, the 65-minute-long, color-tinted film’s production used an early form of the multiplane camera. Notably, the film also features one of the earliest pairs of openly gay lovers in cinematic history, in line with Reiniger's efforts to destigmatize homosexuality.
- The first (live-action) feature-length film with recorded sound was 1927’s The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, which ushered in the era of the “talkies."
- Twenty years after El Apóstol, Walt Disney Productions changed cinematic history forever with the release of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-color cel animated feature film.
