Gulliver's Travels (1939)
Shipwrecked sailor Lemuel Gulliver washes ashore in the tiny kingdom of Lilliput, where he becomes an unwitting giant caught between Lilliput and its rival Blefuscu until his intervention brings the two kingdoms to peace.
Rushed out for the 1939 Christmas season as Fleischer Studios’ answer to Disney’s Snow White, Gulliver’s Travels was Paramount’s first animated feature; the production ballooned to some 800 staff and relocated to Miami to hit its eighteen-month deadline.
Background
Gulliver’s Travels was Fleischer Studios’ first feature-length animated film, rushed into production as Paramount’s answer to the success of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the previous year. Directed by Dave Fleischer, the production grew to include several hundred animators and staff and was relocated to a large new studio facility in Miami to help meet an aggressive release deadline in time for the 1939 holiday season.
What to watch for
Watch for the film’s visual approach, which uses rotoscoping, tracing over live-action footage, for some of the human characters to give them smoother, more realistic movement, a technique the Fleischer studio had already used in its Betty Boop shorts. The film’s story follows the shipwrecked Lemuel Gulliver waking to find himself a giant among the tiny people of Lilliput, whose rivalry with a neighboring kingdom he inadvertently helps resolve. It offers an interesting point of comparison with Disney’s very different animation style of the same period.
