Scholars Softening on Animation’s Artistic Merits

Among the offerings at the 10th annual conference of the Society for Animation Studies, which ended Sunday at Chapman University in Orange, were such topics as “Death and Animation,” “Women and Animation in Turkey,” “Jim Davis: The First Eight Years,” “Variations on a Mouse” and “Absolute Films and the Consequences of Abstraction.”

Some of these discussions, meetings, screenings and papers were interesting and well-researched; others were neither. The papers will have little, if any, impact on animated filmmaking or on the average filmgoer’s enjoyment of the medium.

But the fact that a large group of scholars would meet to discuss animated films indicates the growing acceptance in America of animation as a serious medium of artistic expression.

Animation was primarily invented in the U.S. In addition to many of the earliest experiments, the cartoon short and character animation, the art of making a drawn character move in ways that express a unique personality, are American creations.

Walt Disney established the definitive form for animated features with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937: virtually every subsequent American feature reflect its influence. Yet live-action filmmakers, graphic artists and mainstream critics in this country have treated animation as an unloved stepchild for decades.

European authors wrote seriously about U.S. animated films much earlier. In 1928, Marcel Brion of the Academie Franaise analyzed Felix the Cat: “He has escaped the reality of the cat . . . When he is walking like a man preoccupied, with his head buried in his shoulders, his paws behind his back, he becomes the impossible in cats, the unreal in man. . . . Nothing is more familiar to him than the extraordinary, and when he is not surrounded by the fantastic, he creates it.”

Aldous Huxley praised the Felix shorts as the outstanding illustration of his dictum, “What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.”

Although Walt Disney was the subject of widespread coverage in the popular press during the 1930s, most of the articles were superficial accounts of Mickey Mouse’s popularity or the “miracle” of producing an animated film.

Only a few commentators--notably painter Jean Charlot and caricaturist Al Hirschfeld--wrote about Disney in the context of the visual arts. During the early 1950s, the imaginative films of the newly founded UPA (United Productions of America) studio were praised in highbrow journals that had previously ignored the existence of animation, although many of the writers seemed more eager to whack Disney than to praise UPA.

The image of animation in America grew more tarnished during the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the medium was almost exclusively restricted to mindless Saturday morning kidvid. Artists and writers in Canada, Europe and Asia saw animation as a vital medium that could be used to present complex stories and serious social problems.

American critics were understandably reluctant to link a discussion of artistry to “Josie and the Pussy Cats in Outer Space,” “Inch High Private Eye” and “Thundarr, the Barbarian.”

During these dark times, artwork from important animated films was casually destroyed and key artists retired and died, their stories unrecorded.

The unprecedented success of the Disney features that began in 1989 with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “The Little Mermaid” sparked widespread interest in animation. Baby boomers bought videocassettes and laserdiscs of cartoons they had grown up watching--Warner Bros. shorts, Betty Boop, Rocky and Bullwinkle--and spent billions on character merchandise.

New television networks and cable channels began using animation to establish an identity in an increasingly fragmented market: “The Simpsons” helped to define the fledgling Fox network, just as “Dr. Katz” and “South Park” have set Comedy Central apart from its competitors. More books have been published in America about animation during the past 20 years than in the previous 70.

Yet the U.S. lags: More has been written about Looney Tunes animator Tex Avery in France than in the United States, and the British Film Institute has done more to honor American animators than has the American Film Institute.

Conferences such as the one at Chapman University suggest that the long-neglected art of animation is finally beginning to receive its due.