Listed as a 1938 film but perhaps first shown in 1937 since the TCM website states that as the year audiences first viewed An Optical Poem, this was a pioneering animation short. I'm surprised I never watched it before the year 2019, TCM should be showing it more often (and other stop-motion independent shorts from the time). While watching this short I began to think of how it was made. It's using stop motion, taking a picture of the scene and then moving the items in the frame a slight bit at a time and taking another picture and so many thousands of times. TCM has a lot of information about this short. It was done with cut out paper patterns held together by fishing line, no computers back then! It could have been done with animation but when you realize it is being done with stop motion it adds credibility to the degree of work involved in producing the film. MGM, a very conservative studio, paid Oskar Fischinger $11,000 to make the film. Anything he had left over was his to keep. The only problem was there was nothing left over, so Oskar, while he may have wanted to make some money, did this one for the love of his art. It was not widely released and was used as a "prestige" item, playing for high end movie audiences, like as the TCM article states, "first-class ocean-liner passengers". Many at the time thought it would be nominated for an Academy Award (it was not). Mr Fischinger would have a falling out with MGM over the money made from the film that included a physical altercation with MGM staff and his arrest, he would only do 5 more independent shorts before losing interest in film-making and devoting his work to painting instead. MGM, which was using an outside studio before for its animated shorts at the time, the Harmon-Ising studio and their Happy Harmonies series, around the time of An Optical Poem, created their own animation department resulting in many future Oscar winners from the Tom and Jerry franchise. This is the story of An Optical Poem, quite an interesting one not only on how it was made and the level of sophistication it presented in 1937 with its high fidelity sound, brilliant technicolor photography and inspired use of stop motion animation, but for the way mainstream audiences and Hollywood basically rejected it as being too far ahead of its time. For film history buffs it marks an achievement in film making and a time capsule on the social attitudes towards modern artists in the 1930s. 10 of 10.
Review of An Optical Poem
