An Anthology of Animation. When you think about animated cartoons, you may think "Walt Disney" and call it a day. But if animation is a day, then Walt takes up just a few hours in the late morning. A lot came before, a lot came after.

He traces the development of the art at Disney, the forces that led to full animation, the whiteness of Snow White and Mickey Mouse becoming a logo.

In the first four years of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1961-64), Hollywood did not dramatize the current military conflict but rather romanticized earlier ones. Cartoons reflected only previous trends in U.S. culture, and animators comically but patriotically remembered the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and both World Wars. In the early years of military escalation in Vietnam, Hollywood was simply not ready to illustrate America's contemporary radicalism and race relations in live-action or animated films. But this trend changed when US participation dramatically increased between 1965 and 1968. In the year of the Tet Offensive and the killings of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy, the violence of the Vietnam War era caught up with animators. This book discusses the evolution of U.S. animation from militaristic and violent to liberal and pacifist and the role of the Vietnam War in this development. The book chronologically documents theatrical and television cartoon studios' changing responses to U.S. participation in the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1973, using as evidence the array of artistic commentary about the federal government, the armed forces, the draft, peace negotiations, the counterculture movement, racial issues, and pacifism produced during this period. The study further reveals the extent to which cartoon violence served as a barometer of national sentiment on Vietnam. When many Americans supported the war in the 1960s, scenes of bombings and gunfire were prevalent in animated films. As Americans began to favor withdrawal, militaristic images disappeared from the cartoon. Soon animated cartoons would serve as enlightening artifacts of Vietnam War-era ideology. In addition to the assessment of primary film materials, this book draws upon interviews with people involved in the production Vietnam-era films. Film critics responding in their newspaper columns to the era's innovative cartoon sociopolitical commentary also serve as invaluable references. Three informative appendices contribute to the work.

Traces the evolution of racial caricatures in American cartoons during the first half of the twentieth century

Animation has been part of television since the start of the medium but it has rarely received unbiased recognition from media scholars. More often, it has been ridiculed for supposedly poor technical quality, accused of trafficking in violence aimed at children, and neglected for indulging in vulgar behavior. These accusations are often made categorically, out of prejudice or ignorance, with little attempt to understand the importance of each program on its own terms. This book takes a serious look at the whole genre of television animation, from the early themes and practices through the evolution of the art to the present day. Examining the productions of individual studios and producers, the author establishes a means of understanding their work in new ways, at the same time discussing the ways in which the genre has often been unfairly marginalized by critics, and how, especially in recent years, producers have both challenged and embraced this "marginality" as a vital part of their work. By taking seriously something often thought to be frivolous, the book provides a framework for understanding the persistent presence of television animation in the American media--and how surprisingly influential it has been.

The golden age of animation stretched from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s, with movie cartoons reaching an extraordinarily high level of artistry and technique--far higher than today's TV cartoons, for instance. Nearly 1000 cartoons were produced by the seven major animation studios in the U.S. between January 1, 1939, and September 30, 1945--the immediate pre-World War II period up to the cessation of hostilities. More than a quarter of the cartoons substantially refer to the war, and thereby are invaluable in helping to understand American attitudes and Hollywood's reflection of them. The meat of Doing Their Bit is a filmography with extremely detailed summaries of the 260 or so commercially produced, animated, war-related shorts, 1939-1945. There is also a good bit of overall commentary on these films as a group. Two chapters wrap up animated cartoons of World War I and the general political tenor of animated talkies of the 1930s. This edition also includes a new chapter on the outrageous government-sponsored Pvt Snafus.

In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.