New York's Animation Culture

Advertising, Art, Design and Film, 1939–1940

Kristian Moen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030279301
• eBook ISBN: 9783030279318
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book reveals and explores the thriving animation culture in midtown Manhattan, the World's Fair, art galleries and cinemas during a vibrant period of artistic, commercial and industrial activity in New York City. Alongside a detailed investigation of animated film at the time – ranging from the abstract works of Mary Ellen Bute and Norman McLaren to the exhibition practices of the Disney Studios and the New York World's Fair – New York's Animation Culture examines a host of other animated forms, including moving dioramas, illuminated billboards, industrial displays, gallery exhibitions, mobile murals, and shop windows. In this innovative microhistory of animation, Moen combines the study of art, culture, design and film to offer a fine-grained account of an especially lively animation culture that was seen as creating new media, expanding the cinema experience, giving expression to utopian dreams of modernity, and presenting dynamic visions of a kinetic future.

© The Author(s) 2019

K. MoenNew York's Animation CulturePalgrave Animationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27931-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kristian Moen¹

(1)

Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Kristian Moen

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, New York City showcased an extraordinary panorama of animation. Walking through the city and ducking into a cinema, you were bound to catch a short animated film as part of the program, perhaps one featuring a major star such as Mickey Mouse or Popeye. But you could also settle in to watch one of the feature-length animated films which had begun to appear after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), with Gulliver’s Travels (1939), Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940) playing in cinemas around Broadway. Along your walk, if you had timed it right, you might also watch animated films at a gallery such as the Museum of Modern Art, which was screening works ranging from contemporary Disney cartoons to the earliest animated films of Emile Cohl. If, like millions of others, you also wanted to take in the sights of the New York World’s Fair, which ran from 1939 to 1940, a plethora of short advertising and educational films were on display—including a Mickey Mouse film advertising the National Biscuit Company’s products, an animated three-dimensional film advertisement for Chrysler and an animated puppet film extolling the wonders of petroleum.

Animation had also spilled out from cinema screens to a wider visual culture, enlivening spectacles and displays. In a short stroll from Fifth Avenue to Times Square, you could gawk at the animated displays in the shop windows of the most prestigious stores, marvel at the scientific motion exhibits in the Hall of Motion at Rockefeller Center and gaze up at the animated signs lighting up Broadway. The World’s Fair offered another vivid landscape of motion, with the editor for Display Animation, I. L. Cochrane, excitedly explaining:

The great majority of all exhibits … will be made more fascinating and more impressive by means of motion and mobile light – and each will tell in dramatized simplicity the story of an industry or a product! That is real achievement for all those who have striven for better sales expression through artistic Animation. Approximately twenty percent of exhibits were animated in the great [Century of Progress] Chicago Fair of five years ago – and in those of next year ninety percent will be animated!¹

Exhibits were awash with motion, yoking kineticism to the Fair’s theme of “The World of Tomorrow.” If you were to visit the exhibit for the Ford Motor Company , for example, you could see an enormous animated mural depicting industrial machinery and science, an animated film playfully detailing the process of car manufacturing and a huge rotating display, entitled the “Cycle of Production,” that slowly revolved to show dozens of animated models engaged in various activities of production and labor. Amazed by such variety, a British visitor’s account began with the observation, “A book could be written about the exhibit of the Ford Motor Company at the World’s Fair.”² Writing in the journal Display, the visitor was astonished by the extraordinary scope of motion: “This Ford exhibit would suggest that these are really the days of animation.”

This book is about these days of animation in New York City. Focusing on the period from 1939 to 1940, I trace the diverse routes that animation took during this dynamic period in its history. I explore “animation” in a broad sense, common at the time, as a word that refers to giving motion or the impression of motion to images and objects that would otherwise remain static. Vivifying advertising and educational displays, creating new forms of art, extending the boundaries of cinema and expressing the vitality of modernity, animation was transformative. Whether using modes of producing animated films that had been in place for decades or experimenting with new technologies of mechanical movement , photoelectric cells and hand-painted film, animators were opening up new vistas of motion. Animation’s expansive possibilities were evident across different exhibition contexts—projected in cinemas, displayed in galleries and department stores and promoted in industrial exhibits. Not surprisingly, a vibrant conversation was taking place around these uses of animation, with the popular press joining artists, designers, advertisers, filmmakers and theorists in attempting to understand and explain animation’s potentials.

Rather than approaching these disparate strands of animation as separate, I examine how they were interwoven in a distinctive animation culture. I use the phrase “animation culture” to refer to the ways in which animation is understood, created and used in a specific time and place. My focus on animation culture relates closely to established ways of understanding other cultural practices. The notion of film culture, for example, indicates how cinema is something more than a collection of individual films, made up of exhibition practices, theoretical explorations, audience experiences and a host of other facets. Instead of something that naturally developed around cinema, film culture has taken on different shapes in different contexts. For example, Malte Hagener argues that film culture’s network of “film criticism and film theory, festivals and prizes, archives and repertoire cinemas, film schools and museums” emerges at a specific historical moment, in the 1920s and 1930s, shaped by a network of national contexts, institutional bodies and the efforts of an artistic avant-garde.³ And there have been countless variations and permutations of film culture across the world throughout the last century, each situating film within their own distinct circumstances. Animation cultures can be similarly diverse, engaging with different uses, values and possibilities of animated motion in a myriad of ways. While sometimes related to film culture, an animation culture can also follow its own path, separate from a wider cinematic context.

Exploring an animation culture invites us to pay close attention to the ideas that circulate around animation, from theoretical discussions or artist statements to a broader cultural reception. These ideas of animation both reflect and stimulate creative practices. Such practices can involve the use of established production methods, but they can also engage with new technologies, innovative techniques or aesthetic experimentation. This multiplicity extends also to how animation is used in culture; for example, animation has been a delightful children’s entertainment, a visionary form of art, a powerful means of advertising, an effective tool for education or a combination of these and other purposes. These uses of animation are inflected by the specific ways that animation is shown, whether in a cinema as a feature or a short film, or in other exhibition sites that have also played a significant role in animation cultures, such as galleries or displays. Tracing the ideas, creative practices and modes of exhibition that shape an animation culture—and seeing how they interrelate with one another—can reveal the multiple factors that determine animation’s place in culture.

In his introduction to The Culture of Print, Roger Chartier discusses a “dual definition of print culture” that can help illuminate how an idea of animation culture might be understood, despite the obvious historical and material differences between a visual culture of the twentieth century and a print culture emerging after Gutenberg. Chartier first describes print culture, in what he terms its “classic definition,” as “the profound transformations that the discovery and then the extended use of the new technique for the reproduction of texts brought to all domains of life, public and private, spiritual and material.” With cheaper printing costs and a greater portability, “such new means of communication… modified practices of devotion, of entertainment, of information, and of knowledge, and they redefined men’s and women’s relations with the sacred, with power, and with their community.”⁴ By foregrounding the transformations of existing practices that print culture generated, Chartier offers a dynamic sense of how a wider culture is responsive and open to change. While animation cultures do not have quite such far-reaching implications, they can nevertheless offer a similarly rich diversity of effects. As well as taking on different forms in different places and times, animation cultures—and the ways that they become attached to changing experiences and values—are multifaceted.

One way that this can become obscured is by focusing on facets of animation culture that resonate with a contemporary sense of animation or that relate mainly to well-documented areas of its history. Chartier identifies a similar problem in his description of print culture. He writes, “All too long this culture has been reduced to reading alone, and to a form of reading that is common today or was practiced by the scholars in medieval and early modern culture.”⁵ Rather than relating print culture to these practices, Chartier argues for an expansion of its meanings to include “festive, ritual, cultic, civic, and pedagogic uses” (1). Chartier’s approach to print culture brings to light aspects of historical experience that might seem, at first glance, to be marginal but which were still deeply significant. This approach is instructive in its attention to multiplicity rather than emphasizing singular forms or effects. The richness of animation history and the cultures that formed around motion’s aesthetic expressions, within and beyond the cinema, call for a similar attentiveness to multiplicity.

There have been many different animation cultures, each with their own ways of understanding, creating and using animation. Every animation culture has different emphases, with certain features standing out as particularly prominent or characteristic. The Fleischer Studios in the 1930s, for example, had a distinctive animation culture which not only foregrounded the production of popular animated entertainment but also included exhibition strategies, an in-house newsletter, technological experimentation and extensions of animated characters into other media. Animation cultures also take shape in certain locations, such as the vivid entwinement of animation, art and advertising in Germany during the Weimar Republic, explored in Michael Cowan’s work.⁶ While animation cultures can be seen as part of a larger history of animation, as well as other fields including film, art and advertising, examining the particularities of different animation cultures can offer new perspectives on the diverse artistic, social and expressive potentials of animation itself.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The City
• 3. The World’s Fair
• 4. The Gallery
• 5. The Cinema
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter