4.Moving pictograms
Table 2 lists the films known to have been created or produced by Ragan. The NFB stated that Ragan made at least 30 films for them; therefore, including the period before and after the NFB, he may have made an estimated 50 films. Most of the films he made for the NFB were short, about two minutes each, and were projected along with news films in between the theatrical films.
Table 2. List of films made or contributed by Philip Ragan
Year | Title | Credit | Length | Client |
---|---|---|---|---|
1936 | Is work relief better than the dole? | – | 3min | Works Progress Administration, USA |
1938 | Shock Troops of disaster | – | Works Progress Administration, USA | |
1940-41 | Controls for Victory | 4min | National Film Board of Canada | |
1942 | If | 3min | National Film Board of Canada | |
Empty Rooms Mean Idle Machines | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Unmanned Machines Mean Unarmed Men | 1min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Unmanned machines mean unarmed men US NEWS REVIEW no,5 (1943?) | 1min | US Office of war information Issue no,5 | ||
National Income | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Rationing | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Price Shock | 1min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Pieces in Wartime | 10min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
No More Kitchen Sopranos | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
The String | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Story of Wartime Controls | 1min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Story of Wartime Shortages | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
1943 | Bits and Pieces Blues | 6min | National Film Board of Canada | |
Buying Fever | 3min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Curtailment of Civilian Industries | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Industry Wages War | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Price Shock | 1min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
He Plants for Victory | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Nutrition | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
The Missus Beats Him to It | 1.5min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Voluntary vs Involuntary Savings | 3min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Économies de guerre nº 5 | 3min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
What, No Beef? | 1min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
A Wee Thing | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
The String | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
1944 | the Rainy Day | Philip Ragan, Norman McLaren, | 1min | National Film Board of Canada |
The Rug | 3min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Seaforth Commings | 1min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
How Prices Could Rise | 2min | National Film Board of Canada National Film Board of Canada | ||
What Canada Does with the Money She Gets from You | 2min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
Providing goods for you | 5min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
She Speeds the Victory | 1min | National Film Board of Canada | ||
1943-44 | Mutual Aid | |||
1945 | Money, Goods, Prices | A Ragan Short | 15min | National Film Board of Canada |
Le contrle des prix et le rationnemen | Philip Ragan Associates | 10min | National Film Board of Canada | |
Price Controls and rationing | Philip Ragan Associates | 10min | National Film Board of Canada | |
Canada Communique No. 15: The Road Ahead | Philip Ragan | 7min | National Film Board of Canada | |
1945-47 | which way this time? | Philip Ragan Productions | 10min | Office of price administration, USA |
1946 | One World or None | Philip Ragan Productions | 9min | National Committee on Atomic Information,USA |
1948-9 | Uncle Sam M.D. | |||
The Employees’Thrift Plan | ||||
Of the people, by the people, for the people | The U.S. Treasury Department | |||
1948 | Stuff for stuff | Philip Ragan Productions | 16min | National Film Board of Canada |
1949 | Stuff for stuff | Philip Ragan Productions | 16min | MGM USA |
1953 | TARGET YOU | Philip Ragan Productions | 8.5min | The Federal Civil Defense Administration of the United States |
1955 | Front-lines of freedom | 14.5min | The Civil Defense Corps of Canada, The Federal Civil Defense Administration of the United States |
The first work Ragan produced for the NFB was Control for Victory (Figure 10), which was divided into two major parts, the first half of which is reminiscent of a diagram in the above-mentioned booklet One Year of WPA in Pennsylvania (Figure 5).
Since the release of this film, Ragan has made more than 30 short animations for the NFB, whose themes included wartime propaganda and education, such as buying war bonds, labor and wage control, fighting inflation, unemployment issues, saving money, and communal gardens.
For propaganda work with the purpose to educate, Ragan created a unique worker character named Plugger. However, Plugger was not a unique entity, as it was the pictogram of a worker that was also used in Sociographics Philadelphia’s emblem (Figure 11). Despite appearing as an anonymous person without eyes and a mouth but with strong geometric features, one may assume that people accepted it as a character because of its large thighs and peculiar walking stride. When he plays the role of a husband in the home, he is portrayed as authoritarian and patriarchal, while the female figure, who is supposed to be his wife, is represented as a rounded figure, emphasizing gender differences (Figure 14). In the environment outside the house, the large-legged walk evokes not only the worker but also the disciplined soldier, and when applied to the factory production scene, this powerful figure integrated with the war machine is depicted as a mechanical cyborg-like body (Figure 12).
Despite creating popular characters, Ragan should have focused on exploring new ways to depict social and economic structures through pictorial diagrams. Several films were produced to convey the fight against inflation and the need for price controls. In particular, Money, Goods and Prices, a film made at the end of the war to explain the economic system, does not rely on the Plugger character but instead uses diagrams and combines them with live action (Figure 14). Worth noting is that Ragan himself appears in the film and explains that despite the difficulty in capturing the economic system in photographs, it may be clearly expressed in pictogram-based diagrams.
However, one cannot deny the significant limitations in the use of pictograms compared to other animation forms. Hence, some of Ragan’s films attempted to overcome these constraints while maintaining a symbolic representation, as is the case with Canada Communiqué No. 15: The Road Ahead (1944–1945). Aiming to publicize government services in rehabilitating and reemploying postwar veterans, the work is staged so that the viewer is led through a simplified, straight avenue, with a bird’s-eye view of the service, and branch roads dotted with factories, universities, and retail outlets. The perspective flowchart of the road is shown mainly up close and panning, and as the viewer reaches the wharf at the road’s end, the entire road zooms down to an image of a globe in the Northern Hemisphere, and the film ends with an appeal for a ‘mutual understanding of the world’. This seamless transition between scenes can be seen in Mutual Aid (c. 1944) in a sequence in which a moving symbol of a ship transforms into an abstract arrow with a wake, which is then depicted as an abstract route on a world map (Figure 15). These attempts can be seen as an effort to overcome the limitations of representation using symbols, which are essentially static elements.
In an article introducing Ragan’s work, Dugan (1944) cited Ragan’s view that his work differs from Disney’s in its treatment of symbols, as Disney creates pictures that imitate reality. In addition, given that his animations are just 80 seconds on average, he asks whether they could be ‘one of the easiest means of spreading sound principles of international understanding throughout the world’.
However, with longer films such as Money, Goods, Price (15 minutes), Ragan’s films seem to have taken a turn that was not in line with Dugan’s expectations, namely a more dramatic direction.