The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture

Introduction: The Kong Trick

1 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Introduction The Kong Trick King Kong’s Penis Early in my academic career, I enjoyed an incredible naiveté and ignorance, awesome in its limits and simplistic premises. When first investigating King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, USA, 1933), for example, I sought only to know how King Kong had been done; my scholarly intrigue piqued only by the stunning stopmotion animation of Willis O’Brien. There seemed no other question. It was beauty killed the beast, after all, and there seemed to be no other suspects. Similarly, if you weren’t interested in Kong himself, what was the point? All you were left with was a screaming woman and an air show. I was soon made aware of an altogether different set of perspectives , however. Kenneth Bernard’s question “How Big Is Kong’s Penis?” (Bernard 1976, 25) came as a bit of a shock, as I had never even considered that he might have a penis; indeed, the thought of a complex ball-and-socket arrangement was about as close as I got on this issue. Further, Bernard’s view that “Kong is the classic myth of racist and imperialist repression and anxiety” (Bernard 1976, 129) also went over my head. I had not equated Kong with being a “black” man, largely because I had not seen him as anything but a large gorilla, “an animal,” and any stray thought that I might have had relating race issues to the story I vetoed on the basis that it was politically incorrect. Naive I may have been, but I was nevertheless “right on.” 2 T HE A NIM AT ED BEST I A RY So why this trip down the avenue of scholarly memory? Like many formative experiences, it provides the platform for the more engaged and, I hope, more conscious inquiry that I would like to make in this book. King Kong, for me, anyway, was more an animated film than it was a live-action spectacle, and it prompted my interest and investment in animation as a form. It was the first instance, too, of my recognition of the presence of animals in animated films. Simply put, the following discussion seeks to explore the representation of animals in cartoons, 3D stop-motion puppet and clay animation, computer-generated movies , and, more independent, fine art–based works throughout the history of animation. It is perhaps surprising that, given the ubiquity of the animal in animation since its early beginnings, it has not been a consistent preoccupation for analysis. There is an almost a taken-forgranted sense about animals in animation such that their status as the leading dramatis personae of the cartoon has scarcely been questioned. Arguably, the animal is an essential component of the language of animation , but one so naturalized that the anthropomorphic agency of creatures from Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur to PIXAR’s Nemo has not been particularly interrogated. I should be grateful, then, that I stumbled upon Bernard’s analysis of Kong: The impossible union between Fay and Kong is symbolic of mankind’s fatal impasse, the dream of paradise lost irrevocably. However, this particular symbolic inference is complicated by several other factors, notably the idea that Kong is a black man violating American womanhood and that Kong is the emerging (and rampant) Third World nations. With the first we suffer from colossal penis envy and ego collapse for we sense Fay’s attraction in despite of herself. In the latter we have violated Kong’s sanctuary and brought him back for profit and display, and now he threatens (literally) to screw us. (Bernard 1976, 29) Bernard, as many film scholars have done, sees such a narrative at a highly metaphoric, subtextual level, and usefully provides a range of perspectives from which the film might be interpreted. He is able to read Kong as a black man on the basis of the representational tropes INT RODUCT ION 3 about race current in 1930s America, and can make his assumptions about the particular imperatives of sexuality and political economy on this basis. Further, he teases out a psychoanalytic layer, which leads him to conclude that the implied (male) audience can only be threatened by Kong’s masculine credentials. The more literal-minded of us cannot quite make this leap, even if Kong’s attraction to Fay is selfevident , and her pity for him affecting...