Norway is a small country, with only four million inhabitants. It is more famous for its cold climate and beautiful, mountainous fjords scenery than for its film industry. If you are lucky, an animation fan abroad may have heard about Ivo Caprino and seen a couple of Norwegian shorts at international animation festivals, but that's it. Very few, even in Norway, know that this little country has a long animation film history going back to the early 1900s.

As is the case today, when it came to animation, Norwegian cinema screens were dominated by American animation before WWII. The first animation stars in Norway were in the Colonel Heeza Liar (Norwegian name Mentulant), and Kapten Grogg series, made by the Swedish pioneer, Viktor Bergdahl. In the 20s, Felix the Cat was the leading star, and from the late 20s up until today, Mickey Mouse and the other Disney stars have ruled the ground.

Eventually, the American cartoons influenced Norwegian artists to make animated films themselves. As far as we know, the first animations made in Norway were done by Sverre Halvorsen in 1913, in Kristiania (Oslo), using a chalk on a blackboard technique. As with his fellow animation pioneers, Ola Cornelius and Thoralf Klouman, he was a cartoonist in the
press, and his films such as Roald Amundsen on the South Pole were based on the same subjects, and characterized in the same way as his newspaper drawings. These artists did also drawings for postcards and advertisements in the press, and most gave up animation because funding was difficult to find at the time.

A New Venue: Cinema Commercials
From the middle of the 1920s to the late 30s, more than 100 animated cinema commercials were made for Norwegian companies. One-third of them were made for the Norwegian tobacco company, Tiedemann. Among the directors that made them are leading international names as Viktor Bergdahl, Hans Fischerkoesen and Oskar Fischinger.

The start of animated commercials for the cinema goes back to Germany and Julius Pinschewer in 1912. In Norway, advertising films appeared in the cinemas at least from the early 1920s, and there was a boom in this
format in the latter half of the decade. The 1920s were a golden time for the advertising industry in Norway. From soap to cigarettes, customers were attracted to products with animated commercials. Static advertising slides had been screened in the cinemas for years, but in 1922, the leading cinema advertising agency, Sverdrup Dahl, organized screenings of advertising films. Now suddenly there was money for production of animated films in Norway, but those first animated commercials were still made abroad. The Danish cartoonist and animation pioneer Storm P. made a few margarine commercials in the early 20s. The domestic boom didn't happen until 1927, when nearly 100 different cinema commercials were
screened in Norwegian cinemas, at least 13 of which were animated. This high production volume continued into 1928 and into 1929.

Most of the early Norwegian animated commercial films were made with a combination cut-out and drawing technique, similar to the style of 1920s advertising films by Danish animators Viktor Bergdahl and Storm P. These two pioneers were likely the inspiration for many Norwegian animators from the late 1920s. The use of cels was still very limited at the time, but sometimes the animation was more advanced, with animation drawn directly on multiple printed cards with static backgrounds, a technique Bergdahl used in his Kapten Grogg films. Some films were done as object animation in combination with live action, by artists such as the Méliès-inspired filmmaker Ottar Gladtvet, but most of his films were animated cartoons with extensive use of additional cut-out technique.

The quality of the early Norwegian animation varied quite a lot. Some of the films are surprisingly good, like the 1927 Fiinbeck er rømt produced by Gladtvet. But most of the films suffered from being made in small studios, on simple equipment, and by animators who were still in the beginning of their learning processes. These films did impress the Norwegian cinema audience in 1927, but after Mickey Mouse entered the Norwegian screens at the end of the 1920s, Norwegian advertisers preferred live-action commercials over the "second-class," Norwegian produced animation. This is probably the main reason why the boom in Norwegian animation suddenly came to an end in 1929.