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Reviewed by:
  • Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation
  • Kristin Thompson
Amid Amidi, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006).

During the 1970s, when I was a graduate student in film studies, UPA had a presence in the academy and among cinephiles that it has since lost. With 16 mm distribution thriving and the films only around twenty years old, one could still see Rooty Toot Toot or The Unicorn in the Garden occasionally. In the decades since, UPA and the modern style it was so central in fostering during the 1950s have receded from sight. Of the studio's own films, only Gerald McBoing Boing and its three sequels have a DVD to themselves, and fans must search out sources for old VHS copies of others. Most modernist-influenced films made by the less prominent studios of the era are completely unavailable.

UPA remains, however, part of the standard story of film history. Following two decades of rule by the realist-oriented Walt Disney product, the small studio boldly introduced a more abstract, stylized look borrowed from modernism in the fine arts. Other smaller studios followed its lead. John Hubley, sometimes in partnership with his wife Faith, became a canonical name in animation studies. But the trend largely ended after the 1950s. Now its importance is taken for granted. David Bordwell and I followed the pattern by mentioning UPA briefly in our Film History: An Introduction, where we reproduce a black-and-white [End Page 292] frame from the Hubleys' Moonbird, taken from a worn 16 mm print. By now, UPA receives a sort of vague respect, while few actually see anything beyond the three or four most famous titles.

All this makes Amid Amidi's Cartoon Modern an important book. Published in an attractive horizontal format well suited to displaying film images, it provides hundreds of color drawings, paintings, cels, storyboards, and other design images from 1950s cartoons that display the influence of modern art. Amidi sticks to the U.S. animation industry and does not cover experimental work or formats other than cel animation. The book brings the innovative style of the 1950s back to our attention and provides a veritable archive of rare, mostly unpublished images for teachers, scholars, and enthusiasts. Seeking these out and making sure that they reproduced well, with a good layout and faithful color, was a major accomplishment, and the result is a great service to the field.

The collection of images is so attractive, interesting, and informative, that it deserved an equally useful accompanying text. Unfortunately, both in terms of organization and amount of information provided, the book has major textual problems.

Amidi states his purpose in the introduction: "to establish the place of 1950s animation design in the great Modernist tradition of the arts". In fact, he barely discusses modernism across the arts. He is far more concerned with identifying the individual filmmakers, mainly designers, layout artists, and directors, and with describing how the more pioneering ones among them managed to insert modernist style into the products of what he sees as the old-fashioned, conservative animation industry of the late 1940s. When those filmmakers loved jazz or studied at an art school or expressed an admiration for, say, Fernand Léger, Amidi mentions it. He may occasionally refer to Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art, but he relies upon the reader to come to the book already knowing the artistic trends of the twentieth century in both America and Europe. At least twice he mentions that Gyorgy Kepes's important 1944 book The Language of Vision was a key influence on some of the animators inclined toward modernism, but he never explains what they might have derived from it. There is no attempt to suggest how modernist films (e.g. Ballet mécanique, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) might have influenced those of Hollywood. On the whole, the other arts and modernism are just assumed, without explanation or specification, to be the context for these filmmakers and films.

There seem to me three distinct problems with Amidi's approach: his broad, all-encompassing definition of modernism; his disdain for more traditional animation, especially...

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