Charley Bowers, The Quirky Genius Of Stop-Motion Animation
You’ve heard of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. You’ve even heard of Harry Langdon. Roscoe Arbuckle and Mabel Normand? Of course you’re familiar with them! Heck, you’re no stranger to Charley Chase or Marie Dressler–or even Monty Banks.
But what about Charley Bowers? “Wait, who?” you say. In the rarified world of silent film fandom the Bowers name is finally becoming more familiar, but this eccentric comedian and animation pioneer is still an obscure figure overall. Considering he was virtually forgotten for decades before several of his slapstick shorts were rediscovered in the 1960s–and it was still a challenge for historians to find out his name–he’s enjoying a happier fate than some of his contemporaries thanks to his wildly unique stop-motion visions.
Bowers was born in the small town of Cresco, Iowa, and sources vary as to whether it was in 1899 or 1877. In fact, sources vary about practically every aspect of Bowers’ life, thanks to his love of telling tall tales about himself–the more grandiose, the better. He would insist that his mother was a French countess and his father an Irish doctor (well, they were French and Irish respectively) and that he became a talented tightrope walker by the tender age of six. Supposedly a circus witnessed little Bowers’ amazing talents and kidnapped him, not allowing him to return for two years, and “the shock killed his father.” The rest of his youth was filled with odd jobs and he claimed to have had experience in everything from painting murals to acting in vaudeville to bucking broncos in the Wild West. What we do know for sure is that Bowers was an undeniably talented artist and worked as a newspaper cartoonist for the Jersey Journal, Newark Evening News, and Chicago Tribune in the 1900s and 1910s.
Somewhere along the way Bowers became fascinated with hand-drawn animation, becoming one of the animators on the Katzenjammer Kids and Bringing Up Father series. In 1916 he had worked his way up to being the head of the small Barré Studio churning out the popular Mutt and Jeff shorts under the wing of the Bud Fisher Film Corporation. Bud Fisher was the creator of Mutt and Jeff and happily took credit for writing and directing the films, but the plots came almost exclusively from Bowers’ busy imagination.
Barré employees got used to their eccentric boss’s endless tall tales–told in the most minute detail–and liking for practical jokes. They also suspected that he was involved in more than a few shady business deals behind the scenes. Sure enough, in 1919 he was fired from the Barré Studio for padding the employee payrolls–although he quickly resurfaced to direct another Mutt and Jeff at a new flung-together studio.
Bowers’ work in hand-drawn animation was supplemented by his growing obsession with stop-motion puppetry, which he experimented with on the side. By the mid-1920s he had decided to enter the realm of live-action slapstick comedy with cinematographer H.L. Muller as his co-director and co-producer. Bowers would be the star of what was dubbed the “Whirlwind Comedies” series, featuring the mysterious (and self-patented) “Bowers Process,” a mysterious-sounding term for his stop-motion animation.
Usually revolving around Bowers as an obsessive, excitable inventor coming up with Rube Goldberg-esque machines (and clearly drawing inspiration from Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon), these Whirlwind Comedies were breezily paced and full of bizarre animated imagery. Their logic hovered somewhere between “cartoony” and “downright surreal.” In his first Whirlwind, the wonderful Egged On (1926), Charley hides a basket of eggs in a Model T’s engine space. Later he sees the eggs hatching into miniature Model Ts, which zip all over the floor before hiding under their “mother” automobile. In Now You Tell One (1926) Charley creates a potion that allows him to grow any type of food using tree grafts. He successfully grows an eggplant containing a hardboiled egg and a salt shaker, and a pussy willow graft results in dozens of full-grown cats.
His “Bowers process” brought all this bizarre imagery to life in painstaking detail, one hand cranked frame at a time. His many unique stop-motion creatures, such ostriches made of broomsticks and sentient oysters with pearl eyes, are given droll personalities and little gags of their own–Bowers never shied away from adding little flourishes that doubtless added hours of extra work. In A Wild Roomer (1927), Charley invents a machine that can perform any household task, from polishing a stove to giving the user an “egg shampoo.” At one point the plot comes to a halt for a lengthy sequence showing the machine’s robot arms carefully creating a rag doll and bringing it to life, clothing it, feeding it a banana, and giving it a friend in the form of a walnut that hatches into a squirrel. If this sounds like a Mad Lib brought to life, rest assured that the visual experience is just as confounding.
Bowers and Muller made 20 Whirlwind Comedies, the series ending with Goofy Birds (1928). In the early talkie era a series of “Tall Stories” shorts was announced, debuting with the charmingly weird It’s a Bird (1930). The short featured Bowers in his first talkie role (wearing a Stan Laurel-ish bowler hat), where he played a scrapyard worker who hears about an exotic “metal-eating bird.” He captures the bird with the help of a wise-talking worm and puts it to work. In one incredible sequence, the bird lays an egg which hatches a hyperactive blob of metal. It expands and unfolds into a full size Model T.
While his imaginative shorts were generally well-received Bowers was always a minor figure, and his whereabouts grew dimmer as the 1930s wore on. The Tall Stories series didn’t seem to get off the ground, and he worked sporadically on small shorts starring stop-motion oysters, mice and other animals. He also animated the film Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939) for an exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, which starred singing, dancing drops of petroleum. After struggling with an unknown illness for several years, he passed away in 1947 in New Jersey, survived by his wife Winifred.
Soon Charley Bowers’ work was forgotten, but happily it wasn’t for too long. In the 1960s archivist Raymond Borde bought a stash of film cans marked “Bricolo,” which turned out to be the French nickname for Bowers. Thus began a slow revival of interest in this obscure, wildly unique artist. Today his rediscovered work has been restored, enshrined in box sets and played at film festivals, finally giving him the credit he always deserved–and doubtless would’ve gloried in.
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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.
Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.
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