page_title: Courtland Hector Hoppin
section_title: Pioneer work in animation
hierarchical_section_title: Courtland Hector Hoppin / Pioneer work in animation
caption_attribution_description: English: C.H. Hoppin in his Sarasota, Florida, home, December 1961
context_page_description: Courtland Hector Hoppin was an American artist, photographer and pioneer in the field of animated film. The works produced by Hector Hoppin and partner Tony Gross are studied today due to their artistry and as a reflection of the times in which they were created.
context_section_description: While living in Paris in the 1930s, Hoppin collaborated on several animated films with print-maker and painter Anthony Gross, providing his skill as an artist and photographer as well as the capital for the projects. The first animated film of the company they titled "HG Productions" was Une Journée en Afrique. Completed in 1932, it was followed by Les Funérailles and, in 1934, with their most popular and successful work, La Joie de Vivre. Hoppin and Gross hired Hungarian composer Tibor Harsanyi to compose music for the sound track of the film. La Joie de Vivre is described as a break from the "limiting comic tradition of the 1930s cartoon animation", and its free, decorative style and vague politics permitted its re-release in France during the early 1940s by the Vichy government.
  Frisky, naughty and bursting with raw power: [La Joie de Vivre] is one of the most technically adept animations ever made, and represents a milestone in the development of an international style of animation on par with the Art Deco movement.
  
  The nine-minute film is described in the Internet Movie Database as "A tone poem [in which] two woodland sprites dance about, atop power lines and among flowers and leaves, while being pursued. Everyone spends some time pulling levers to switch trains, too." 
  Following the success of this film, the pair produced works titled The Storm and Fox Hunt. Fox Hunt received praise for its use of color "with freedom and beauty quite outside Mr. Disney's picture-book range."
  In 1938, Hoppin and Gross began their most ambitious work, Around the World in Eighty Days, a color feature based on the Jules Verne novel financed by Alexander Korda of London Films.
  The project, however, was interrupted by World War II; all traces of the film were thought to have been lost, but in 1956 some negatives were discovered in a projection room at the National Film Theatre in London and efforts were made to piece-together a portion of the original work. The restored section has a running-time of eighteen minutes.
  "A reel of negatives from the London lab of Technicolor was all that remained. With the assistance of the British Film Institute's Experimental Production Fund, contributing some transitional scenes – such as animated diagrams of the voyage through the Suez Canal – it was possible to construct a usable, coherent, even vivacious film of great beauty. Hoppin & Gross were innovators. Only the informed eye of a painter could have chosen the colour-palette;the characters are intelligently animated, caricatured with distinction. Of all the film projects that year arising from producers keen to follow the success of Disney's Snow White, Around The World in 80 Days shines like a beacon turned towards the future. Despite some technical weaknesses and its truncated form, the film is a substantial achievement."
  The New York Public Library has a copy of this film, titled Around the World in Eighteen Minutes, published by McGraw-Hill in 1962.
caption: C.H. Hoppin in his Sarasota, Florida, home, December 1961
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