Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation by Tom Sito (review)

For anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to be a fly on the wall in the VIP lounge of the Disney party at Siggraph, Tom Sito’s Moving Innovation may offer the next best thing—a rollicking ride through the history of computer software’s takeover of the Hollywood animation industry, told largely through interviews with those who were there. As a 35-year veteran of this industry himself, with numerous credits that include working as the animator for Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) and animation director for the Warner Bros. movie Osmosis Jones (2001), Sito’s insider access to the backroom debacles, feuding temperaments, legendary failures, and astounding 12th-hour successes during the growing pains of computer animation make for a rousing read.

Recognizing a dearth of comprehensive histories of computer graphics (CG), Sito takes on the monumental task of tracing the development of computer animation by weaving together the strands of CG research and development in the history of film and visual effects (Chapters 1, 2, and 9), in academia and government (Chapters 3 through 6), in the videogame industry (Chapter 7), and in commercial animation itself (Chapters 10 through 14). Sito’s is largely a synthetic history told in broad strokes to highlight the “men and women who conceived this brave new digital world. Starched-shirted scientists, dope-smoking hippies, and insular math nerds, all united in a common goal, dreaming audacious dreams” (p. 2). Sito admits that he is not much of a computer enthusiast and is more interested in telling the story of the people who made computer animation happen rather than telling the story of the technology itself. Artists (and the engineers who appreciate them) are the heroes here. This is a history in which the success of Toy Story requires a John Lasseter as much as it does an Ed Catmull and in which there inevitably comes a time when “the scientist must step back and yield to the artist” (p. 199).

The first half of the book provides the warp of CG and film history on which the weft of computer animation will be woven in the second half. A history of Hollywood is provided in a breakneck five pages in order to set up a history of analog film technologies, where we first meet the likes of experimental filmmaker John Whitney, a recurring figure throughout the book, whom Sito names “the father of computer graphics” (p. 23). Luckily, Sito provides a helpful “dramatis personae” of names and biographies in an Appendix that lists the dozens of “pioneers” who show up in the book. At times one wishes for a more straightforward chronological telling rather than Sito’s character-centered organization of events, but the strength of the book remains Sito’s access to the personalities he relies on for his insider’s perspective.

The weakest chapters (3 through 7) tread the familiar ground of the roots of CG research in the wake of World War II and the subsequent Cold War funding of science and technology by the US government. Sito here relies on secondary sources, largely Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers in Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperCollins, 1999) and John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Viking, 2005). Numerous small factual errors and the repetition of apocryphal anecdotes are evident, as is some ambiguous attribution of direct quotes. However, Sito’s focus on oral history and his journalistic tone are virtues of his book for many—early reviews praised it for not being dry and academic.

Exactly half way through the text, Sito himself enters as a character. He recalls, “At the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, a young, black-bearded professor named Leonard Maltin hosted an evening class on the history of American animation… . Among the many animators in the audience … [was] me, your author. Suddenly this group of wild-haired people … would fill...