Note 1: Bjørn Rasmussen: The
Films Who-What-Where, Danish titles and biographies 1929-1967, p. 484. It is
not correct when it is mentioned here that Storm P. already started making
cartoons in 1916. He allegedly did so not until the summer of 1919, and at that
time he had his small film with "The Three Little Men" developed and
copied at the Copenhagen branch of the Aarhus-based company Fotorama, which was
then located on Amagertorv, where "Løvebiografen" was also based.
Later - probably around 1924, the branch moved to the newly built property,
Nygade 3, where later the cinemas Alexandra Teatret and even later Nygade
Teatret came to be located. See e.g. The film in Denmark, pp. 29, 61-63, 63.
See more about this in note 16. - Sven Holm: I became a pharmacist, pp. 54ff.
"Industrifilmen", which was on Skt. Knudsvej 22, Frederiksberg, was a
film factory, where partly produced and partly developed and copied films. Sven
Holm's father, producer Aage Holm, bought Industrifilmen in 1922 and installed
his film-interested, eldest son, the then only 20-year-old Sven Holm, as
director. In his time, the film factory specialized in filming factory films,
commercials, cartoons, current films and nature films.
Storm P. and Karl Wieghorst
were responsible for the production of the cartoons, but strangely enough, Sven
Holm only mentions this pioneering work with these few lines in his 142-page
book (page 63): "We made a share commercials for Storm Petersen, but that
was too little to keep the rather large staff of employees going." In
addition, Storm P. is mentioned only twice in the book, p. 61 and p. 101, but
on a completely different occasion. On the other hand, it must be said that
there are almost no limits to the significant role that Sven Holm in his own
perception has played in the history of Danish film.
It has previously been a
common perception among Danish cartoon historians that the cartoonist Sven
Brasch (1886-1970) was the first to experiment with the cartoon medium in
Denmark, as his little cartoon The meaning is good enough or - as it is, - as
it feels is made in 1919, but before Storm P's first real cartoon, The Three Little
Men, which was produced in June-August 1919. Brasch's little film consists of
drawn, fixed images that transform, similar to what is the case in Stuart
Blackton's Enchanted Drawings from 1906. Sources: Niels Plaschke: Wonderful
Danish animated films. Available at the Internet address www.plaschke.dk. -
Lars Jakobsen: Mik - a biography of the artist Henning Dahl Mikkelsen.
Published by Wisby & Wilkens 2001. The latter author, whose book about Mik
was published on 20 April 2001, has, like Niels Plaschke's website, contributed
to the history of Danish cartoons with the surprising information that the
first cartoonist to make professional advertising cartoons in Denmark was the
painter Alfred Georg Olsen, whose artist name was Skibstrup. He started doing this
in the early 1920s, about a couple of years before Storm P. and the Industrial
Film, and during the 1920s he produced a series of approximately one-minute
commercials for industrial companies that could afford to pay for the films.
These were companies such as Kronborg Flødeis, Good Year and Nilfisk. Skibstrup
was an enterprising and enterprising producer of advertising cartoons, which
also produced advertising cartoons for Sweden and Norway.
According to Lars Jakobsen,
there were several other, unnamed Danish cartoonists who in the 1920s tried to
establish themselves as producers of commercials, but with greater or lesser
success, especially due to the fluctuating quality of the films.
In 1928, the same year that
Wieghorst produced his fairy-tale cartoons, the cartoonist Richard Johnsen made
the cartoon Flyvning uden Motor, which had two main characters, one of whom was
named Ole Bims, while the other character's name is not stated. The two
characters were confusingly similar to the cartoon characters from 1921: The
Lighthouse and the Beehive, which again borrowed titles from the famous Danish
film comedy duo of the same name. It was drawn until 1933 by Carl Røgind
(1871-1933) and then continued by the cartoonist Kaj Engholm (1906-1988), who
later became best known for his cartoon Father of Four. But Røgind's comic was
in fact to a large extent inspired by the American comic Mr. A. Mutt, from
1907, who from 1910 changed title to Mutt and Jeff - in Danish Store Klaus and
Lille Klaus. The series was drawn by Harry Conway under the artist name Bud
Fisher (1885-1954) and after his death continued by his assistant since 1922,
Al Smith.
Along with the comics, Bud
Fisher also produced entertainment cartoons with Mutt and Jeff. It was on his
initiative that the Canadian-American cartoon pioneer Raoul Barré (1874-1932),
together with another American cartoon pioneer, Thomas (Tom) Bowers
(1989-1946), in New York 1916 founded Barré-Bowers Animated Cartoon Studio,
with the specific purpose of turning Bud Fisher's cartoon Mutt and Jeff into
cartoons. Bowers wrote the scripts for the films, while Barré took care of
instruction.