Animation, Opportunity, and an "Intro-view" with Gene Luen Yang on Making Actual Movement in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Animation is a tricky thing to describe, because it is itself a trick—an illusion of movement and change brought about by making a series of small alterations to an image, placing them in sequence, and believing that the thing under observation is actually moving. If you're detecting a thinly veiled metaphor in the prior sentence, you probably can see me tapping my nose as well. This issue of ChLAQ came about as a germ of an idea well in advance of the 2016 ChLA conference on animation held at The Ohio State University in Columbus. At the time, the idea was merely to celebrate comics and animation, their ubiquitous relationship with Saturday mornings and children (for an example, see the cover to this issue), and their growth as literature in an issue that happened to dovetail with the conference. However, a lot can change over the course of a year, and from 2016 to 2017, the framework and governing ideology of this issue changed dramatically.

This issue was then and is now an opportunity to start a conversation. And the authors showcasing their work here embody the spirit of that change and movement—changes in patterns of thought and preconceived notions. Changes in the manner, perhaps, of our seeing something for the first time even though we've been looking at the thing our entire lives. Comics and animation, after all, are an inherently visual medium. Sometimes they're even interactive. Such is the case with Katharine Slater's "Who Gets to Die of Dysentery? Ideology, Geography, and The Oregon Trail"; here, Slater examines the famous educational video game over several of its iterations as it firmly places its protagonist into the "figure of the white male settler," reinforcing what she names as the supremacist narrative of the nineteenth century. In "Mickey Mouse as Teddy's Bear: The Political Cartoons of Clifford Berryman and the Origins of Disney's Iconic Character," Michelle Ann Abate revisits the history of one of the Western world's most famous anthropomorphized cartoon characters. Abate argues that Mickey's history, previously drawn as far back as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, has a gap in its evolutionary record—descent from Berryman's famous Teddy Roosevelt cub.

Lewis Roberts takes Disney into its own future with Pixar in "'It's a dangerous world out there for a toy': Identity Crisis and Commodity Culture in the Toy Story Movies," examining the adult child's greatest dilemma: Do I take the toy out of the box or leave it in there because it might be worth something in twenty years? (The obvious answer, of course, is to buy two, one for play and one for display.) But Roberts explores the passage of time—from ripping open packages in order to play with their contents, to preserving them untouched to protect their commodified value—as a condition that Pixar associates, respectively, with the domestic realm of childhood and the collector's trophy case of adulthood. This is a conclusion that Roberts does not think holds true. Moving away from Disney, Sarah Mohler examines a far less well-known film in "To Enchant and Instruct: The Use of Conceptual Metaphor and Counter-stereotypical Exemplars in Michel Ocelot's Azur & Asmar." In Mohler's words, the essay interrogates "how Azur & Asmar both activates and disrupts commonly held personal and cultural understandings of Islam and Islamic culture while it seeks to build bridges . . . for cultures different from one's own." The issue concludes with the proud presentation of a lightly edited version of the 2016 Francelia Butler Lecture, "Bonding Time or Solo Flight? Picture Books, Comics, and the Independent Reader," by Charles Hatfield and Joe Sutliff Sanders. The authors have taken their literal dialogue concerning the "unease" located between the desire to pull children close to the parental breast and the simultaneous desire to empower those young minds to find independence and have made it into something that may be read with as much pleasure as it was heard in Columbus.

By any...