Prime Time Animation

Television Animation and American Culture

Carol Stabile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136481710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Fernsehen

In September 1960 a television show emerged from the mists of prehistoric time to take its place as the mother of all animated sitcoms. The Flintstones spawned dozens of imitations, just as, two decades later, The Simpsons sparked a renaissance of primetime animation. This fascinating book explores the landscape of television animation, from Bedrock to Springfield, and beyond.
The contributors critically examine the key issues and questions, including: How do we explain the animation explosion of the 1960s? Why did it take nearly twenty years following the cancellation of The Flintstones for animation to find its feet again as primetime fare? In addressing these questions, as well as many others, essays examine the relation between earlier, made-for-cinema animated production (such as the Warner Looney Toons shorts) and television-based animation; the role of animation in the economies of broadcast and cable television; and the links between animation production and brand image. Contributors also examine specific programmes like The Powerpuff Girls, Daria, Ren and Stimpy and South Park from the perspective of fans, exploring fan cybercommunities, investigating how ideas of 'class' and 'taste' apply to recent TV animation, and addressing themes such as irony, alienation, and representations of the family.

Part I

INSTITUTIONS

Chapter 1

“SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE ART FORM”

Animation in the television era

Paul Wells

THIS CHAPTER WILL PROVIDE A CONTEXT for the debates and issues that have arisen about the development of animation for television, principally in the American Broadcast arena. I will discuss how animation changed from its “classic” configuration in the theatrical era to the “reduced” styling for television, largely pioneered by Hanna-Barbera, but intrinsically related to work by United Productions of America (UPA) and Disney in the 1950s. In privileging the intrinsic “modernity” characteristic to the medium, I will challenge the prevailing argument that this move towards reduced animation was to the detriment of animation as an art-form, suggesting instead that the changes necessitated by the much-reduced economies for production both created a new aesthetic for animation which foregrounded its versatility and variety, and re-introduced the public to animation in a way which spoke to the ongoing “recombinancy” strategies in programming for television per se. This, in turn, will lead on to an analysis of how television animation has sustained this recombinancy strategy, and invoked an intertextuality which is not merely concerned with the relationship between previous forms and conditions of production in animation, but with other aspects of social, visual and new media cultures.

Exhausting cartoons

The current prominence and omnipotence of the animated form at the beginning of the twenty-first century has consigned the anxieties that once feared for the very survival of the medium to the long-distant past, but it is worth noting that it is the process of recovery and re-invention that followed the post-theatrical era that has created this position, and it is the nature of these changes that are the main preoccupation of this discussion. Writing in 1957, for example, Bernard Orna asks, “Are animated film script and character ideas exhausted; must cartoons disappear in an ever tighter circle of repetitions? After seeing the three most recent MGM cat-and-mouse and dog-and-cat set ups chase each other in familiar routine all over the wide screen, I went away with the thought that we had reached a dead end” – the proliferation of American cartoons – “cheap and mass produced affairs without regard to ideas” is blamed; non-American animation preferred, and “Cinemascope” productions viewed merely as cosmetic surgery on a corpse (1957: 33).

It is clear from these remarks that by the mid-1950s, the Hollywood cartoon seemed long past its “Golden Era” – arguably, the period between Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928) and Hanna-Barbera's Tom and Jerry classic, Mouse in Manhattan (1945) – but this is to neglect many important short cartoons made in the immediate post-war era, and indeed, perhaps the greatest of all animated cartoons, Chuck Jones’ What's Opera, Doc? (1957), made in the year in which Orna anticipates that the end is nigh.

This is merely one example, though, of the way in which the American cartoon tradition resisted its own epitaph. Jones, one of the medium's key auteurs, consistently progressed the form by using its intrinsic malleability and the openness of its vocabulary in redetermining the very conditions of expression. The cartoon was in effect defined by the refinements of the Silly Symphonies and the deconstructive maturity of the Looney Toons and Merry Melodies, and characterized by popular characters, full animation, and a socially suggestive form of anarchy which was culturally acceptable. Terry Lindvall and Matthew Melton (1994: 47) have suggested that animation's particular form of anarchy is foregrounded in its self-reflexiveness, whereby in commenting about the film making process, cartoons demonstrate their own textuality, speak directly to their audiences, and crucially, reveal the presence of their creators as the deconstructive agents of deliberate artifice, and in doing so, promote animation as a singularly auteurist medium. Donald Crafton notes this “self-figuration” – the presence of the creator either literally or implicitly present in the text – right from the beginnings of the animated form, and flags it as one of animation's distinctive qualities (1993: 11, 347–8). This capacity for “self-figuration” results in the idea that animation may be seen as a self-enunciating medium, literally announcing its intrinsic difference from other visual forms and cinematic imperatives. In many senses, this also underpins the view that the cartoon operates as a potentially non-regulatory or subversive space by virtue of its very artifice, and the assumed innocence that goes with it. Animation always has the excuse that “it's just ink and paint.”¹

The fears for the end of the medium were clearly premature, and largely prompted by the economic factors that led to the closure of the main animation studios’ production units, and the parallel emergence of television in the modern era. MGM closed their unit as early as 1957 – perhaps not surprising in light of Orna's comments – while Warner Brothers survived until 1964, by which time William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the directors penalized by MGM's decision to close down production, had established Hanna-Barbera as the key production house for television cartoons. These cartoons were predicated on the idea of “limited animation” – essentially the reduction of animation to its most essentialist form: little animation, no complex choreography, repeated cycles of movement, a small repertoire of expressions and gestures, stress on dialogue, basic design, and simple graphic forms. While Chuck Jones sought to engage with and extend the form, he clearly objected to the animation of the television era, branding it “illustrated radio,” because it prioritized the literalness of its dialogue and its soundtrack as the stimulus for a limited number of illustrative movement cycles, rather than emerging out of a purely visual concept of narrativization prioritized in full, traditional animation (Adamson 1980: 141). Jones could not accept that the new television aesthetic had any intrinsic value, and suggested that it merely regressed the art form. There is some irony in this, as one of the key aspects of the aesthetic change had been pioneered by Jones in his cartoon, The Dover Boys (1942), where characters appear to leap from position to position, and “smear” animation is used to “blur” the movement from the first point to the second. Jones’ work, of course, is in the spirit of aesthetic enquiry, and not predicated as a consequence of economic restraint, and it was this factor that was actually the mother of invention elsewhere.

From the Disney aesthetic to minimalism

Hanna-Barbera realized that the economic conditions which dictated change could also be exploited artistically, but their experimentation was of a different order. Walt Disney, too, recognized that the television economy would dictate different approaches, but rather than defining the principles upon which animation for television might be understood, Disney used the medium for more commercial rather than creative ends, debuting Disneyland in 1954 as a vehicle by which to use the back catalogue of Disney material, but more importantly, to promote his theme park. Hanna-Barbera, in essence, had no competition in determining the new television agenda. As British-based animation director, John Halas, had anticipated in 1956, “Animation is bound to be greatly stimulated by television in the future. In the last two years, on both sides of the Atlantic, it has resulted in the number of personnel engaged on cartoons being increased by nearly 100 per cent,” adding:

[T]he technical requirements of television lend themselves well to animation. The small screen and the necessity for keeping both the background and the foreground flat and simple is completely within the province of the cartoon medium…television films can be handled by very small units with every chance of retaining the original conception of ideas.

(1956: 6, 13)

This more “minimalist” aesthetic – effectively one of the self-conscious principles of modern art animation, as it had been adopted both by studios in Zagreb and by UPA – underpinned the populist works of the Hanna-Barbera studio. This was not conscious art-making in the spirit of modern thought, but a practical approach which recognized the intrinsic versatility of the animation medium in accommodating change, while remaining aesthetically engaging, and cost effective.

The deliberate interrogation of the possibilities of the form beyond its application in the Disney-patented full animation style had characterized many approaches in the US and elsewhere, in attempting work which offered a model of “difference” aesthetically, and most importantly, ideologically, from that of the Disney canon. The Disney aesthetic carried with it clear connotations of a “state-of-the-art” achievement that was seemingly unsurpassable, and which was, and remains, embedded in the popular memory as one of the key illustrations of a conflation of self-evident artistry with a populist, folk, quasi-Republican, middle-American sensibility. Disney had ensured that “art” seamlessly took its place within popular culture, and created an aesthetic that was inextricably entwined with intrinsically American values. This state-of-the-art identity ceased to be progressive, however, and while acknowledged as an extraordinary and enduring achievement technically and industrially, it was a model of art-making which was essentially static and conservative, and arguably, diametrically opposed to the inherent potential of the form itself. Disney essentially defined animation, and having established this as the benchmark for the industry, was reluctant to embrace other approaches. Walt Disney himself was clear that the potential “modernity” available through new styles and approaches should not challenge the established Disney aesthetic, and the classical definition of the form it represented. This was evidenced in his response to Ward Kimball's overtly modernist production of the history and development of music in Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953). As Marc Eliot has noted,

When Walt returned from Europe and screened [Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom], he was appalled at its unrepresentative, non-Disney visual style and lack of formal narrative. Walt and [its director, Ward] Kimball argued vehemently over the film. Frustrated by what he took to be Kimball's obstinacy, Disney at one point considered firing his animator, and would have done so if Toot had not won the Academy Award for Short Subject (Cartoon) of 1953. Nevertheless, Walt explicitly banned all further stylistic experimentation by any animator and limited Kimball's participation in future film productions.

(1994: 218)

Disney's reticence is not surprising in light of his understanding of the Disney aesthetic not merely as the embodiment of ideological stasis and security, but most importantly, as a brand in an era which was less versed and sophisticated in the creation of such a key market concept. Disney wanted to diversify the company's work in the light of its tradition and the meanings generated by the classicism and Americanism associated with the cartoons, and any sense that the work might signify either a perverse version of the avant garde or a model of economic cutback that served as a measure of supposedly reduced quality and achievement as evidenced on the screen, was unacceptable. Such “cheap” aesthetics were to be the provenance of others.

Crucially, it remains important to stress that the reduced or limited animation that Hanna-Barbera employed in their early television cartoons was the direct outcome of financial constraint. Nevertheless, their work was still made with the kind of ingenuity that privileged different approaches to the very language of animation that insisted upon embracing the versatility of the form, and some of the fundamental principles that had characterized some of the work of the pioneering animators in the field, long made invisible by the success and achievement of the Disney studio. While Hanna-Barbera were inevitably reductive in their approach, this is only significant when the work is measured against the dominant aesthetic created by Disney, and finds more correspondent value when actually measured against some of the work that defined the medium in the period before Disney “classicism,” which has been reclaimed and credited in recent years, particularly through the work of John Canemaker (1991) and Donald Crafton (1993). The early “primitive” works of animators such as Emile Cohl, Winsor McCay, and Otto Messmer were far more predicated on the graphic freedoms afforded by the simple use of lines and shapes. This is effectively what Hanna-Barbera returned to as its prevailing aesthetic, concentrating on producing simple forms in both line and form, but in color. In many senses there was less concentration on animation itself, and more on the ingenuity of visual joke-making and creating characters as graphic ciphers for specific ideas. The new television era recovered this principle, enhanced it through the greater concentration upon scripts and vocal performance, and most importantly, looked backward and outward to other ways in which animation could function and find productive influence, other than the seemingly oppressive artistry and history of Disney.

While it is clear that the Hanna-Barbera studio developed its own characters and situations to progress these ideas, it is quite useful also to look at a particular example of the way that the television era reclaimed a pre-Disney character as highly appropriate for the new medium. One might look at the ways in which Felix the Cat, the most popular cartoon character in the pre-Mickey Mouse era, created by Otto Messmer at the Pat Sullivan Studio, went through several periods of revival. In the television era, ex-Famous Studio animator, Joe Oriolo, a cartoonist on the Felix comics and a robust entrepreneurial spirit assumed the legal ownership of the character, recognizing that the minimalist aesthetics that underpinned aspects of Felix's construction and the execution of his cartoon stories might find a commercially viable place i...