Animating the Science Fiction Imagination by J. P. Telotte (review)

J.P. Telotte’s Animating the Science Fiction Imagination explores the role of pre-World War II cinematic animation in forming the science fiction genre. The associations between the two, Telotte suggests, have been somewhat neglected in contemporary scholarship. Animation and science fiction not only share a similar modernist orientation, but the industrialization of American cartooning and the emergence of science fiction in the form of pulps and serials occurred almost simultaneously. Telotte thus explores the body of pre-war United States animation that directly engages with science fiction, or what by the 1950s we would come to understand as typical science fiction themes. He identifies four science fiction tropes: the extraordinary voyage associated with Jules Verne’s various odysseys, the robotic figure and artificial life, aliens and an alien strangeness, and finally gadgetry and inventions. Crucial to Telotte’s argument is how both animation and science fiction somehow embody the modernist spirit as neither a high nor low modernism, nor a conservative modernism seeking to shield viewers from the transformations occurring around them. Rather, he submits, borrowing from Miriam Hansen, the medium participates in a vernacular modernism, which both accounts for a “new visuality” ² and “dilutes”³ that visuality by presenting it in a playful animated world. Ultimately, these early cartoons helped audiences prepare for the themes, tropes, and concerns of the coming science fiction boom: “they expressed our simultaneous eagerness for and yet misgivings about those ideas, but by allowing us to laugh… they also helped alleviate some of those misgivings.”⁴

Animation during the interwar period, like much of the world at the time, became obsessed with the future of human flight. Lindbergh and Earhart captured the imagination of millions, leading to multiple live action and animated films considering the figure of the air, and space, craft. While often engaging in the exuberance and excitement of the public, animation’s vernacular modernism, as previously mentioned, “would often qualify” the public’s excitement by “framing these flights as fantasies and sometimes even follies.”⁵ However, animation’s preoccupation with human flight extends to a register beyond narrative. Telotte argues that the animating apparatus, which gives spectators a new vision of utterly alien worlds and bizarre creatures that resist taxonomy, acts as a kind of metaphorical space ship. Emil Cohl’s A Trip to the Moon (1917) features a lovable hobo, Happy Hooligan, journeying to the moon only to be hit over the head by a moon man. After being struck Hooligan awakens to a policeman’s club, realizing he was dreaming all along. Telotte writes,

it is a pleasant version of the dream he shares with his medium, with animation itself, which always seems to be straining against its own nature, trying to escape its own limited, flat ‘world’ and bounded space to discover other realms, other possibilities: the still image always pointing toward the possibility of motion.⁶

Animation and the voyages of flight within and beyond our atmosphere in science fiction both conceptualize our relationship with space and in separate ways index the transformations occurring in our visuality and senses in modernity.

The robotic in animation is, like the fascination with flight, both a narrative concern and an ontological one. The changing technology of the Machine Age and the increasing automation in the workplace influenced gags and cartoon narratives in shorts such as Disney’s The Mechanical Cow (1927), Fleischer Studios’ The Robot (1932) and Paul Terry’s The Iron Man (1930). These stories, like those mocking the era’s cultural fascination with flight, both participated in a shared fantasy and mocked an “all-to-easy embrace” of a “technocratic agenda and its supposed scientific solutions to all of society’s ills.” ⁷ Beyond thematic and narrative robots, cartoons, as Telotte writes, “invariably have something of the robotic about them.” ⁸ The figures are constructed in an assembly line mode of production in order to perform a certain type of labor, while their motion is both different yet oddly similar to the movement of...