Drawing The Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (review)

Drawing the Line happens to be one of the most intriguing labor stories of the culture industry, with a distinct historical narrative that extends from the 1930s to the present day.

The author takes us where viewers and readers, even readers on scholarly volumes about Hollywood, rarely go: behind the camera and inside the animation studio. Because Sito was a protégé of industry old-timers as he built his own reputation in the profession during the 1980s and 1990s, and because he is a self-trained oral historian (read: good and careful listener), he managed to accumulate the stories of the studio professionals from their beginning, mostly in the turbulent and creative 1930s. Scholarship takes him back further, but the main tail unfolds as the new labor legislation opened the possibility of industry unionization.

Faced with increasingly stressful conditions and treated like mere cogs in the machine, the assembly line artists revolted. This is not so simple as it might appear, however, because Sito has a genuine admiration for Max Fleischer and Walt Disney. They were ardent innovators in every respect, willing to put their accumulated reserves at risk when they sought a great leap forward into better animation, and had a deep respect for at least their foremost artists. However, they were also paternalists, through and through. They could not understand why they could not ratchet up production and remain the kindly uncle to grown-up boys and girls who were, for their part, amazing innovators in the field.

The animators lost at the Fleischer studios (famous for Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor cartoons) and won a pyrrhic victory at Disney (because the most talented soon turned their talents elsewhere). This was only the beginning of the union/management conflict, of course, but in Sito's account, it set the pattern early. The pattern was made more complicated by the doomed effort to create a kind of industrial unionism in the film industry, an effort ardently opposed by the studios, the FBI (which regarded most Hollywood unionism as politically suspect), the local "Red Squad," and the craft union of the film industry, the mob-tainted International Alliance of Theatrical and Screen Engineers (IATSE). The labor conservatives, led by leading Hollywood anti-Communist Roy Brewer, won a smashing victory and the animators were flung willy-nilly into what many saw as enemy territory.

However, the story was not over, not by a long shot. Low-key survivors and even victims of the approaching blacklist struggled to find their way back, as the industry itself fell into precipitous decline. The change in film production and film going happened so suddenly, younger audiences of the 1970s could hardly remember that the cartoon between features appealed to all ages and was often more carefully watched than the feature itself, for the best reasons. Television and the aesthetically reduced world of Hanna-Barbera style animation gave some of them work, but not much. Sito remarks that when he entered the field in 1975, he found directors and animators in their fifties (or older), assistants in their teens and twenties. There was a missing generation that lasted until the later 1980s.

Actually, there was some great work, from Rocky and His Friends on television to later Disney features, not to mention the highly experimental Ralph Bakshi efforts. Not until Who Killed Roger Rabbit? (1988) offered adult audiences a taste of what animators could do when freed from a kids-only market, perhaps not until The Simpsons became television's best satirical show in decades, bar none, did the latent possibilities become clear. Cartoons had entered a new golden age of sorts, with digital animation offering endless technological possibilities.

Golden ages do not seem to last long, anymore. Corporate employers have a habit of raising the bottom line by reducing labor costs, and the combination of outsourcing...