Hey there all. I waded through the old threads for a while but was unsuccessful. I sent this question to Cecil but I thought I might as well try and see if any of the teeming millions might know since he might find the question unworthy. Here we go:
<< Okay, I admit it…I still watch cartoons. I know it seems childish but it’s just nice to sit back and relax after university or work to some Bugs Bunny or Pinky and the Brain. Anyway, my question is a two parter about the word “cartoon”. What’s its origin and who coined the term? I
suspect the “toon” part used to be “tune” and since a lot of old cartoons used to be set to music. I have no idea where the “car” comes from or who came up with it. How about it Cecil? Come on, do it for the kids…or the kids in all of us at least.>>
Can anyone help out? Thanks all.
The word’s a bit older than “Steamboat Willy” and friends.
Cartoon comes from the Italian cartone meaning “pasteboard”. The word was, and is, used to refer to a full-size preparatory sketch for a fresco, tapestry, mosaic, etc. If I remember my art history classes correctly, to transfer the image, from the paper to the wall or whatever, tiny pinholes were made in the drawing and the dust of the drawing medium (charcoal, graphite, etc) was rubbed through the holes.
Exactly how it came to refer to the daily funnies in the paper or the Saturday morning crowd I don’t know.
And BTW I watch 'em too. I can’t get enough of Batman Animated.
Thanks Mustapha, great explanation.
Also, Batman Beyond is pretty sweet as well.
Art History PhD student chiming in here- Mustapha is exactly right. The business with the pricking holes in the cartoon and using the charcoal dust is called “pouncing”. We still have a lot of them (the cartoons), including some Leonardos (the preparatory drawings for tapestries were also called cartoons). You can see the results if you look at a painting in infrared reflectography-- the charcoal marks show up as bloppy powdery marks aong the traced lines.
More than you wanted to know. Sorry.
Related-- the word “manga” now used to refer to Japanime cartoons is an old word used for sketches, so Hokusai’s sketchbooks, for example, are the Hokusai manga. I was recently at a web site where someone was using the word “manga” for moving cartoons and “cartoons” for sketches, and it confused me completely.
I just saw a Woody Woodpecker cartoon (damn insomnia!). And it makes perfect sense now. It wasn’t called a “cartoon” it was called a “cartune”. This is much closer to cartone and it’s now easy to see how it’s come to cartoon. Thanks all.
The word in Spanish is “cartón”, meaning the artwork needed for a fresco, tapestry or whatever. I guess initially they were just utilitarian sketches but later they became works of art in their own right. Many of the paintings by Goya you see in the Prado museum are actually “cartones” for tapestries. This term may confuse Spanish people because cartón" also means “cardboard” in Spanish and few people know this other meaning of the word. Of course, they are ultimately related, both come from carta (letter or paper).
I believe the way animated drawings were initially made was that the main artist and story teller would do the “cartoons” first with key frames (“cartoons”) of the story and then the rest of the frames would be filled in by himself or others.
The cartoons were the key elements like the background, key frames etc. and I do not think the word is related to “tune” in any way.
The tune thing: I just thought it wsa probably an animators play on words. Sorry for the confusion.
Carta is Italian for ‘paper’, so cartone just means ‘a big piece of paper’. The fresco artists had to paint a big picture very rapidly on the wet plaster before it dried. To speed up the process, they used the *cartone[i/] to get the outlines of the figures onto the wall all at once, then they could fill them in with paint.