In days of yore, you'd go to see a movie, the lights would go down, and just before the feature presentation (if you were lucky) you'd get to watch a cartoon.

Not an 'animated short'. A Cartoon. The genuine article, complete with slapstick violence, talking animals, and comically oversized anvils and mallets that seemed just as alive as the characters who wielded them –all the things you think of intuitively whenever you hear the word Cartoon.

It's a word that's sometimes unfairly maligned, associated with low-brow, cheap entertainment. But these golden age cartoons weren't just churned out by the studio sausage machine. They were invented, labored over, and perfected with an almost alchemic eye for craft and mastery by the honest-to-god auteurs of their time.

Winsor McCay. Ub Iwerks. Max Fleischer. Bob Clampett. Chuck Jones. These are by no means household names, but without their foundational work you would never see the likes of Disney or Pixar or even Studio Ghibli. Before anyone even thought to consider animation as an artform, these men were in the trenches inventing the medium from the ground up.

If you sit down and watch these cartoons, you will be amazed at the originality, the cinematic technique, and the jaw-dropping commitment to craft that was pervasive throughout this unsung renaissance of animated storytelling.

It’s best to start at the beginning, the primordial soup from which the golden age cartoon would be brought kicking and screaming into the world. Where exactly did cartoons start? Well, like pretty much any art movement, it's up for debate. To draw a parallel from live-action film, there are those who would say that technically it was Edison or the Lumiere brothers who made the first movies. But come on, we all know the real answer is “A Trip to the Moon”. Similarly, animation had its fair share of primitive pioneers, but ask anyone who knows anything about animation and the answer will be Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur.

Winsor McCay was one of if not the premiere cartoonists of the early 20th century. His comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland is as unparalleled today as it was in the 1910's. But McCay had no interest in resting on his laurels as the era's preeminent comic strip artist, and in 1914, turned his attention to the new and shiny motion picture art form.

His most successful foray into the medium was “Gertie the Dinosaur”, a beautifully illustrated cartoon about McCay's imaginary pet dinosaur. When you consider the process of hand-drawing a dinosaur and its surroundings on semi-transparent rice paper, creating thousands of gorgeous illustrations with no roadmap whatsoever on the nature of timing and form in animation, it actually holds up remarkably well.

McCay even attended screenings in person, pretending to interact with Gertie, scolding her when she misbehaved and throwing pumpkins behind the screen to create the illusion that he was feeding her. Audiences fell in love. Unfortunately, the process that made Gertie a star just wasn't repeatable. It was a painstakingly long and arduous process, and very few cartoonists could keep up with McCay's impeccable work ethic. To complicate things further, Thomas Edison drafted a bizarre catch-all patent on the medium of animation, and few studios were willing to challenge it. So for more than a decade, this promising movement was trapped in stasis.

Thankfully, a miracle happened. It started with the invention of cels (or celluloids) which are basically transparent sheets akin to overhead projector slides. Artists would draw and paint the various characters and props in a given scene on cels, which would then be placed on top of a painted background, photographed, and transferred to a film reel. Gone were the days of Winsor McCay hand drawing each blade of glass frame after frame. With this new time-saving technology, only the essentials needed to be animated, and what was once an esoteric experiment was now a bonafide medium. The golden age cartoon was born.

Enter what I like to call the Big Three: Disney, Warner Bros and Fleischer studios, the titans of cartooning who would blast through Edison's absurd patent like tissue paper.

At Disney, you had Walt, who needs no further introduction. You also had Ub Iwerks, the true creative powerhouse behind Disney's early success. In Iwerks' cartoons, you can really see the staples of early animation start to take form: things like the "rubber-hose" quality of limbs, the emphasis on exaggeration, and even the penchant for violence against happy cartoon animals, as evident in the seminal “Steamboat Willie,” in which the sociopathic early rendition of Mickey Mouse grabs a cat by the tail and swings it around his head to impress his girlfriend.

Iwerks was a visionary in every sense of the word. As an artist, his work conveyed a strong sense of form and weight, a type of cartooning Disney dubbed "solid drawing" in which 2D characters are drawn in such a way that they appear to occupy real 3D space. You can see this practice at work in the now famous “Skeleton Dance,” where Iwerks rotates the form of a Skeleton with near-pixar level accuracy. He would push this idea of 3-dimensionality even further with an invention he called the multiplane camera.

The invention arose from a problem: how can animators make backgrounds move? It's a bigger challenge than you might think. Consider, for example, how distant objects like mountain ranges or the moon appear to stay still even when the observer is moving at a fast speed. To account for this phenomenon, Ub Iwerks created a towering ten foot tall camera rig which allowed multiple cels to be layered and mechanically raised or lowered. The multiplane camera took up nearly half a room, and looked more like the invention of a mad scientist than the co-creator of Mickey Mouse, but the results speak for themselves.

Soon enough, other big name studios emerged to compete with Disney's product, the largest of which was Warner Bros. With Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Warner Bros proved that animation was no longer a game for just one player. Characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig gave the increasingly popular Mickey Mouse a run for his money. But these characters owed their newfound fame to the faceless animators who brought them to life.

You have the prolific library of consummate gag man Friz Freleng, who realized that more than anything else, timing was what made cartoons funny. When it came to technical skill, Warner Bros couldn't hold a candle to Disney. But gags on the other hand were the domain of Freleng's Looney Tunes.

Then you have Bob Clampett, the Salvador Dali of golden age cartoons. Nobody–before, during or after Clampett's reign– could match his energy, the extremity of his poses, or the contorted exaggeration of his takes. His infamous “Porky in Wackyland” cartoon inspired countless late century cartoonists, and his magnum opus “The Great Piggy Bank Robbery” is said to be the Genesis of John Kricfalusi's “Ren and Stimpy.”

Lastly you have the virtuosic discipline of Chuck Jones, best known for classics like “The Rabbit of Seville” and “What's Opera, Doc?” Jones let his classical knowledge of art, literature and music inform his cartoons in an unforgettable way, however he wasn't afraid to experiment. Facing time constraints while directing “The Dover Boys at Pimento University,” Jones stumbled across a controversial method of animating now called smear frames.

Have you ever paused a cartoon, freezing at just the right moment to see the character with a stretched out face and multiple eyes? There's nothing wrong with your TV, it's just a smear frame, a technique by which the animator condenses several frames into one, simulating motion blur. When Chuck Jones invented it in the 1940's, he supposedly got an earful from Warner brothers executives. It was the kind of thing that Disney never did: cutting corners. Cheating. However, smear frames would soon become an animation staple, and you can see it used today in anything from Steven Universe to Paranorman (yes, smear frames are possible in stop motion as well).

Throughout the 30's and 40's Disney and Warner Bros would continue to compete, but there is a third competitor that's nearly been lost to time.

Fleischer Studios is a name you may not have heard before. This is mostly because, unlike the other two of the Big Three, Fleischer did not survive to see the end of the 20th century. Thanks to a very public falling out between the studio's founders, an acquisition by Paramount, and a litany of other legal complications, there is still uncertainty as to who owns what. But let's forget about the murky trappings of "intellectual property" and instead focus on the groundbreaking artist behind the drama: Max Fleischer.

Fleischer's contributions to the cartoon pantheon include Betty Boop, Koko the Klown and the first animated versions of Popeye and Superman. His cartoons had their own distinct style. Fleischer cartoons were dirtier, jazzier and racier than their Disney and Warner Bros counterparts. Their setpieces were often inspired by German Expressionism, with gritty locales like speakeasies or the fiery depths of Hell. Betty Boop's signature skimpy outfits were one of the first casualties of the infamous Hays Code, which pretty much sums up the Fleischer Studios attitude. But style isn't everything.

Max Fleischer is also known for inventing rotoscoping, a technique whereby the animator traces live action footage to create a fluid, lifelike animation that follows the original actor's movement. This revolutionary trick would more famously be used by directors like Ralph Bakshi and Austin's own Richard Linklater to create uncanny realistic animations. Fleischer also invented the Rotograph, which composited animation with live-action backgrounds, making for a truly mind-bending 3D effect.

We think of these classic cartoons as silly, whimsical stories for the emotionally immature. But a closer look reveals that those in the vanguard of the medium advanced not just the art, but the science of motion pictures as a whole. Most of us are familiar with the experimental inventions of Welles, Hitchcock or Godard, but I submit to you that the animated work being done in the early 20th century was just as groundbreaking.

There is something innately satisfying about these old cartoons, something primal that lets us slip into that other world. This isn't an accident. It's the result of 40 years of trial and error; the blood, sweat and tears of the golden age masters.

Bugs Bunny as Fine Art: The Golden Age of Animation