When Walt Disney was nineteen, he happened upon a book in the Kansas City Public Library: E. G. Lutz’s Animated Cartoons: How Are They Made, Their Origin, and Development (1920). While he later downplayed its significance — “it was not very profound; it was just something the guy had put together to make a buck” — the book’s “labor-saving devices and shortcuts” would greatly influence Disney’s early experiments with animation. Disney elevated Lutz’s “arcane tricks of the trade into standard industry practices”, writes Michael North, and, even a decade later, Mickey Mouse cartoons were built on a set of efficient techniques that Lutz pioneered.

What to Draw and How to Draw It (1913), one of Lutz’s many drawing primers, evinces a similar attention to efficiency and economy. Most of his subjects are animals, each plotted from repeatable geometric forms. Without its head, nose, and whiskers, a mouse is just two intersecting crescents. All fish are variations on the vesica piscis; birds are loops, their skeletons bent bobby pins; a pelican is a rhomboid with a beak. Humans are no more unique. When a man faces you wearing a top hat, he is merely a fancy rectangle; as he walks in profile, his trench coat and extended gate form the letter A. The foundation of Lutz’s method is the ability to draw ovals and ellipses — he recommends using a compass — which give rise to human faces. The book ends with humorous tableaux: chickens observe their likenesses in a gallery; a rabbit paints a self-portrait using Lutz’s principles; a crane peers through a pince-nez as his species is constructed on the page, step by step. 

Little is known about Edwin George Lutz (1868–1951). Born in Philadelphia, he studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art and, in his thirties, at the Académie Julian in Paris. When not authoring numerous works on the art of drawing and animation (seventeen in total), he made a living creating cartoons, typically anthropomorphic, for newspapers such as the New York Herald and Philadelphia Press. His most frequent work was illustrating for the “Book of Magic”, which was the special children's section of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, for which he invented children's craft activities that often involved clever optical tricks and interactive play.