metamorphosis / shape-shifting and animation

Of late we’ve been exploring the workings of metamorphosis, the transition of a single form from one shape to another. A phenomenon not unrelated to shape-shifting, evolution diagrams, and animation sequences.

Among the best inventors of metamorphic sequences was a Victorian artist named Charles H. Bennett (1828-1867). He was more generally known for comic illustrations, such as those for children’s books. He's worth looking into.

Above and below are examples from a series of metamorphic images that were initially published weekly in The Illustrated Times (c1863) as Studies in Darwinesque Development, which was later republished posthumously in a book titled Character Sketches, Development Drawings and Original Pictures of Wit and Humor (1872).

 

tobacco road / the story of a boy who smoked

EVOLUTION OF A BOY WHO SMOKED, in The Journal (Huntsville AL), February 28, 1907, p. 2. Reprinted from the Chicago Daily News. Artist unidentified—

Do you know any little boy that [sic] smokes cigarettes? If you do, just show him this picture. It is the sad story of Dick Sillypate. He saw another boy smoking a cigarette, and thought it looked so manly that he would try it himself. The picture shows what happened to him at the end of five months.

think life today is strange—just look at the future

Above Trompe l'oeil is an art historical term which translates literally from French as “fool the eye.” In this long-practiced tradition, artists create images that are so finely detailed that they might at first be mistaken for “the thing itself.” Until recently, I had not heard of Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, a seventeenth century Dutch painter. Not only was he an accomplished trompe l’oeil practitioner, he could also be terribly funny. Reproduced above, for example, is his The Reverse of a Framed painting (c1670), which is featured in an article on one of my favorite websites, The Public Domain Review, which includes an essay on Gijsbrechts and a selection of his paintings.

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Ring Lardner, TEETH AND HAIR TO DISAPPEAR, NOTES RING: Will Mean Radical Changes—Barbers and Magazine Proprietors to be Jobless—Highballs for Breakfast in the Davenport Democrat and Leader (Davenport IA), March 1, 1925, p. 3—

The future man, says [a Harvard University professor], “is certain to lose his teeth because he don’t need them no more. The ape man used them to tear sinews and break nuts and etc., but civilization has done away with these conditions. Hair was given us by nature to protect us vs. cold, but now we have got coats and artificial covering. Man used to half to have toes, to help climb trees to escape from animals, but now he don’t need toes no more and can get along with a whole lot less fingers. The shape of the human skull and man’s erect position is designed to promote an increase in the size and weight of the brain.”

Well, friends set down a wile and ponder what all this means. It ain’t no wonder people will be wearing longer faces as they will be thousands and thousands throwed out of work. Without no teeth and no reason for teeth they won’t be no dentists and without no dentists they won’t be no factories for making them weapons that nobody but a dentist would dast use. And without no hair they won’t be no excuse for barber shops which means that all the barbers will not only be out of a job but they won’t have no place to talk and nobody to talk to.

Without hair and whiskers and teeth, they won’t be nobody advertising shampoo cream or shaving powder or toothpaste which means closing up a lot more factories to say nothing about shutting down all the magazines, which is now supported by the boys that advertises these implements. Any ways you can see the finish of same magazines which I don’t need to mention their names but the only place you ever find them, is at barbers and dentists.

With the barbers out of business they won’t be no shelter for manicure girls and besides when people only has one finger they ain’t going to pay no 50 cents or 75 cents for a manicure to say nothing about how is the gals going to wield their scissors and file and etc. with only one finger. Along with manicurists will go chiropodists because our feet is going to have even less toes than our hands and they won’t be no parking space for a corn let alone a bunion.

There is a few facts to be faced but they ain’t by no means all. Like for instance: What is to become of all the folks now employed in comb and brush factories? And what will women talk about when they ain’t got no hair? And who is going to provide for the boys that makes their bread and butter playing a clarinet or a horn or a harp or a violin and etc. The only musical instrument a person can play with one finger is the piano and one finger piano music ain’t libel to overcrowd the dance halls. How can Babe Ruth swing a bat or how can Vanco pitch a curve ball with one finger? And what is the coacher at first and third base going to holler when they can’t say “Be on your toes?”

A person will get up in the morning and thank heavens that they don’t half to have or comb their hair but it will take them just as long to dress if not longer because it is some trick to button things up with one finger and if you ain’t got no hair—why they’s so much more surface to wash and specially when you have longer faces.

Without no teeth you can’t have nothing for breakfast except soup or a couple of high balls and by that time the high balls probably won’t have much nourishment in them because the professor says that it is going to be anywheres from 40,000 to 75,000 years before all these changes takes place. After breakfast you go to whatever work a person can do with one finger and no toes. At lunch you can have some more soup or scotch then back to work and a big dinner at night consisting of soup and liquor. They will still be theaters in the evening but people who prefers revues and gal shows will be up against it for entertainment as nobody wants to open their mouth and sing when they ain’t go no teeth and Gilda Gray is the only dancer in the world that can perform without using her hands and feet.

As I say [the good professor] don’t expect all these evolutions and revolutions for 40,000 or 75,000 years and the big majority of us won’t hardily live that long so we should worry, but it would be kind of interesting to look on from the outside and see how the world rolls along under the new conditions. Personally I haven’t no idear what it would be like to have no fingers or toes, but from the start I have got it ain’t going to take me no 40,000 years or nowheres near that long to appreciate what it means to live without teeth and hair. 

Related Link

Roy R. Behrens and Paul D. Whitson, Mimicry, Metaphor and Mistake

Charles Henry Bennett / Shapeshifting Cat

C.H. Bennett, Poor Puss (1863)

Above One of a series of elaborate comic metamorphoses (aka shapeshifting) created by Victorian-era British illustrator Charles Henry Bennett (1863) in sardonic reference to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, this one titled "Poor Puss." Courtesy The Wellcome Library.

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The Reverend Benjamin Newton (Vicar of Landwit), Diary (September 1, 1816)—

An entertaining German dined here who teaches the girls music and plays delightfully and sings well with no voice having been shot through the lung. A Mr. Causer having been bit in a drunken frolic by a man of the name of Shipley in the leg last week is obliged to suffer amputation. During an armistice in which the Prussian and French officers were drinking together a son of [Prussian Field Marshall] Blücher gave for a toast the King of Prussia, which a French officer would not drink and soon after when it came to his turn gave [Napolean] Bonaparte which young Blücher would not drink, on which the officer went up to him and without saying anything struck him a smash in the face. Blücher said nothing but went out of the room and returned immediately with a pair of pistols, with one of which without uttering a word he shot the officer dead and then held up the other and said he had that ready for any man who would take up the quarrel. This came to his father's knowledge, who put him under arrest for six weeks.

Charles Henry Bennett / Shapeshifting Dog

C.H. Bennett, Good Dog (1863)

Above One of a series of elaborate comic metamorphoses (aka shapeshifting) created by Victorian-era British illustrator Charles Henry Bennett (1863) in sardonic reference to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, this one titled "Good dog." Courtesy The Wellcome Library.

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The Reverend Francis Kilvert, Diary (July 22, 1871)—

Mrs. Nott told me that Louie of the Cloggau was staying in Presteign with her aunt Miss Sylvester, the woman frog. This extraordinary being is partly a woman and partly a frog. Her head and face, her eyes and mouth are those of a frog, and she has a frog's legs and feet. She cannot walk but she hops. She wears very long dresses to cover and conceal her feet which are shod with something like a cow's hoof. She never goes out except to the Primitive Methodist Chapel. Mrs. Nott said she had seen this person's frog feet and had seen her in Presteign hopping to and from the Chapel exactly like a frog. She had never seen her hands. She is a very good person. The story about this unfortunate being is as follows. Shortly before she was born a woman came begging to her mother's door with two or three little children. Her mother was angry and ordered the woman away. "Get away with your young frogs," she said. And the child she was expecting was born partly in the form of a frog, as a punishment and a curse upon her.

Charles Henry Bennett | Shapeshifting Fox

C.H. Bennett, Metamorphosis (1863)

Above One of a series of elaborate comic metamorphoses (aka shapeshifting) created by Victorian-era British illustrator Charles Henry Bennett (1863) in sardonic reference to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, this one titled "Beware of the goose when the fox preaches." Courtesy The Wellcome Library.

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Vincent Starrett (Chicago Tribune book columnist Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett), Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, pp. 295-296—

It is curious how the faces of acquaintances repeat themselves in foreign lands. Uncanny, too, for what could be more disconcerting than to encounter an old friend jogging past dressed like a mandarin or selling chestnuts in coolie cloth? No sooner had I reached the Orient than this began to happen. Friends and associates I thought I had left behind in America, sometimes fellows I hadn't seen in years, popped up in Yokohama, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Peking, looking very much as I had seen them last, yet subtly altered by the native costumes they were wearing. It was as if one met them coming from a masquerade. In Yokohama it was an old school friend who had been dead for years. He was running a cigarette kiosk near the docks and I knew better than to speak to him. In Tokyo it was a genial barber who used to shave me in Chicago. And in Peking [Beijing] here were so many that my blood ran cold.

Among the friends I met in Chinese garb (and with Chinese faces) were some pretty distinguished fellows…I saw Alex Woollcott many times: once he was chirping seductively at a bird he was carrying through the streets in a bamboo cage. Once my dead mother turned out of a side street and gave me a turn that almost bowled me over. Once I met Bob Casey driving a small donkey attached to a two-wheeled cart: he was selling vegetables. After a time it became an amusing game to look for absent friends and sometimes to hail them genially, and no harm came of it for the Chinese were a friendly people, always ready to hail one in return.

But one day I really did get a shock. Rolling down one of the main thoroughfares of Peking in my rickshaw, I came suddenly abreast of another rickshaw rider headed in the opposite direction. He was bundled up in a fur coat and wore a fur hat, rather like a turban, at a rakish angle. He looked exactly like J. P. McEvoy and for a moment we looked hard at each other. Then I said, “Hello, Mac,” and he stopped his boy and said, “Why, hullo, Vince! What are you doing in Peking?”