3.From graphic design to animation

After 1940, alongside his work for Fortune magazine, Ragan began receiving orders for propaganda and educational animations from the NFB, which was founded in Canada in 1939. In the late 1930s, as countries around the world focused on propaganda, publicity became an important issue in Canada as well, but the presence of Hollywood in the neighboring United States prevented Canada from developing a film industry. Therefore, the NFB was hastily established to meet the demand for publicity and education and to foster the film industry. John Grierson, a British documentary film theorist, was brought in as commissioner, and the organization was conceived and operated almost entirely according to his ideas. The need for animation, besides Grierson’s specialty in documentaries, was recognized early on, but because establishing an animation studio would take time, an order was haphazardly placed with Disney Studio. In 1941, Disney held a screening for military personnel at their studios, and Grierson’s attendance in the screening led to the conclusion of the Disney contract (Shale, 1976). However, since the number of Disney films was not enough to fulfill the contract with the National War Finance Committee, the need to hire additional animators arose, and Ragan was chosen to do the job. The current NFB homepage briefly explains this process as follows:

To fulfill the terms of his agreement with the National War Finance Committee, Grierson also called in Philip Ragan, an animation filmmaker from Philadelphia who specialized in cartoon animation. Between 1941 and 1945, Ragan would go on to produce around 30 films for the NFB featuring the Plugger family, who explained how the public could participate in the war effort, with emphasis on buying Victory.

(St-Pierre, 2011)

Here, Ragan is introduced as an ‘animated filmmaker’ who was ‘specialized in cartoon animation’. However, Ragan’s work discussed in this paper so far does not include his involvement in animation at all because scarce information about it exists before the NFB. If Ragan was recognized as an animation production expert around 1940, as Marc writes, the time he started working in that field and the reason he was selected for the job remain in question. Hence, clarifying these necessitates a review of his activities, including those beneath the surface.

One source may provide a hint: The Investigation and Study of the Work Projects Administration (United States House Committee on Appropriations, 1939), a report on the use of WPA grants. This report contains a reference to Ragan’s work on the project titled ‘Project 6743, Graphical Presentation of Data and Statistics on Labor and Employment’ undertaken in 1937, which he applied to the WPA. It states:

Phillip E. Ragan and Dr. Stephen B. Sweeney apparently convinced the director of the Works Progress Administration in Pennsylvania of the desirability of developing Ragan’s ideas in the presentation of statistics in animated form, produced on a motion picture film in a manner similar to that used for animated movie cartoons and comics, except that the objects and figures were to be cut from Bakelite and animated mechanically instead of by drawing separate pictures for each motion of the object.

From this description, Ragan seemed to have started studying the cutout-style animation technique around 1937. However, so far we have been able to confirm Ragan’s involvement in only two films, Is Work Relief Better Than the Dole? and Shock Troops of Disaster, both of which were produced under the sponsorship of the WPA. Although Ragan was uncredited in the former, it was definitely Ragan’s work judging from its design; meanwhile, the latter, a documentary on disasters and the activities of WPA emergency workers engaged in relief efforts, includes a small portion of graphs containing Ragan’s figures.

3.1.Is Work Relief Better Than the Dole? (1936)

This film is simply an animation of a diagram representing the results of a questionnaire survey on nine WPA policies. It has a band chart and numbers with a triangle indicator representing the boundary between the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ percentages for each chart. While the continuity between the graphics and the animation can be confirmed, no other movement can be observed besides the fade-in/out of changing scenes, and because the animation is rudimentary, it can be considered an early experimental attempt.

Figure 8. Animation for the Works Progress Administration: Is Work Relief Better Than the Dole? 1936 (https://archive.org/details/IsWorkReliefBetterThanTheDole1936).

3.2.Shock Troops of Disaster (1939)

The 1939 documentary Shock Troops of Disaster depicts the tragic situation of the areas devastated by a hurricane that struck the eastern United States in 1938 as well as the WPA’s efforts in providing relief. While this film was not produced by Ragan, in the transition from the disaster damage depicted in the first half to the WPA activities in the second half, there is an animation of a symbol of a worker swinging a hammer, zooming down to depict the number of dispatched support workers. One can almost be certain that Ragan was involved here, but no movement can be observed in the pictograms themselves; rather, it is a zoomed-in shot of a stationary statistical graph, and like the previous example, it is a rudimentary animation.

Figure 9. Animated scene in Shock Troops of Disaster, 1939
(https://archive.org/details/ShockTroopsOfDisaster1939).

Other than these two films, we could not confirm any other images in which Ragan may have been involved, but we cannot deny the possibility that he produced some kind of cutout-style animation. 

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