Cartoon Vision

UPA Animation and Postwar Aesthetics

Dan Bashara

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780520421097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Architecture Design

In Cartoon Vision Dan Bashara examines American animation alongside the modern design boom of the postwar era. Focusing especially on United Productions of America (UPA), a studio whose graphic, abstract style defined the postwar period, Bashara considers animation akin to a laboratory, exploring new models of vision and space alongside theorists and practitioners in other fields. The links—theoretical, historical, and aesthetic—between animators, architects, designers, artists, and filmmakers reveal a specific midcentury modernism that rigorously reimagined the senses. Cartoon Vision invokes the American Bauhaus legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes and advocates for animation's pivotal role in a utopian design project of retraining the public's vision to better apprehend a rapidly changing modern world.

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 • Postwar Precisionism: Order in American Modernist Art and the Modern Cartoon
• 2 • Unlimited Animation: Movement in Modern Architecture and the Modern Cartoon
• 3 • Condensed Works: Communication in Graphic Design and the Modern Cartoon
• 4 • The Design Gaze: Cartoon Logic in Hollywood Cinema and the Avant-Garde
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index