Anyone who came of age in the latter part of the twentieth century will recall the constant flow of animated cartoons that made up most of children’s programming on TV. In a culture of supposedly short memories, they were an art form that reached right back across time. On the radio, “oldies” were a separate genre within pop music, but on the kids’ shows there was a steady stream of cartoons from half a century’s creation, reality intruding mostly with commercials for pre-sweetened breakfast cereals. Everything ran together: bending, bug-eyed dogs and cats playing bad swing jazz on living clarinets from the thirties, spinach cans popping open and tattooed muscles popping up from the nineteen-forties, and Japanese animation of the sixties so limited that it hardly moved.
There appeared to be a boundless reservoir of historical cartoon styles—with some, the Bugs Bunny cartoons, clearly made on a theatrical scale and with big budgets and full orchestras, and others, like the Bullwinkle cartoons, cheaply made but slyly imagined, rich in satiric push. It all came at the viewer in an indiscriminate collage. R. Crumb, the great underground cartoonist, had the imagery so stored up inside that, amid LSD trips in the sixties, everything came spilling out—what he called “a grotesque kaleidoscope, a tawdry carnival”—and gave him a cast of characters for the rest of his career. The flow of cartooning past so imprinted itself on us that nobody found it odd that the 1996 movie “Space Jam” paired peak Michael Jordan with characters who had first appeared long before he was born, or that the relatively unsuccessful “Bullwinkle” series, which concluded in 1964, could inspire four feature films three and four and even five decades later.
In “Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation” (Atlantic Monthly Press), Reid Mitenbuler recalls that flood—and points out that the vintage cartoons within it were often censored by later distributors in ways that robbed them of their original spice and sex appeal. Of the kinds of popular books that have proliferated in the past few decades—the little thing that changed everything (cod, longitude, porcelain), the crime or scandal that time forgot (Erik Larson’s specialty)—none are more potent than the tale of the happy band of brothers who came together to redirect the world. The genre runs from Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” through Jenny Uglow’s “The Lunar Men,” and Mitenbuler’s “Wild Minds” is an attempt to do the same for the history of American animation.
“Wild Minds” assembles its history with love and a sense of occasion. The chronicle that results, as Mitenbuler explains in a prefatory note, also appears at a moment when, for the first time in the history of the form, everything is available. Obscurities that in the past one would have waited years to find in a stray MOMA screening are now online. Even the lewd (though government-sponsored) “Private Snafu” cartoons, made for G.I.s during the Second World War and written by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, can be found at a touch of the YouTube tab. The act of pulling everyone together in this way is new, and significant. The peculiar excellence of “The Right Stuff” was not that it showed astronauts to the world but that it showed the astronauts as worldly. Wolfe explained that they were far from dim-witted test pilots: they knew what they were doing and what was being done to them. Mitenbuler’s larger aim is similar: to show us that the best cartoonists were not haphazard artisans but self-aware artists, working against the constraints of commerce toward a knowing end of high comic, and sometimes serious, art. The book’s governing idea lies in its heroes’ collective intuition that animated films could be a vehicle for grownup expression—erotic, political, and even scientific—rather than the trailing diminutive form they mostly became. A cartoon tradition that could seem child-bound, sexless, and stereotyped was once vital, satiric, and experimental.
Mitenbuler explains that the familiar form of the cartoon arose, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because the same persistence of vision that enables a rapid sequence of photographic stills to give the illusion of movement works if you draw the images, with a pen. The joy of this discovery, made by a close succession of animators, was that it set you free from the constraints of realism: you could make anything you imagined exist on film, from waltzing dinosaurs to talking mice. Along with this discovery came a subsequent, painful one—that drawing the frames, one by one, was insanely laborious and expensive. (The commercial history of animation from then on was basically a contest between the pleasure taken in seeing the extravagant imagination come alive and the shortcuts that had to be devised in order to draw the pictures ever more cheaply.)
Very early animation has a single theme, the fluidity of form: what’s sometimes called the first fully animated film, the French “Fantasmagorie” (1908), is a two-minute-long study in visual metamorphosis, stick figures caught in a constantly changing two-dimensional world. The first hero of Mitenbuler’s American story is therefore Winsor McCay, the author of the “Little Nemo in Slumberland” series, the amazing accounts of dream experience that anticipate Surrealist fantasy. We learn that McCay, though best remembered now as a visionary fantasist, was also an editorial cartoonist in the Hearst stable. Nor did McCay see his inventions primarily as a means of entertainment. In 1916, after projecting his “Gertie the Dinosaur” cartoon as part of a vaudeville act, he invested his talents and money in a twelve-minute—long for the time—animated version of the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania, which had been torpedoed by a German U-boat the previous year, with a huge loss of life.
Though drawn in McCay’s distinctive Art Nouveau-ish style—two elegant fish under the ocean watch an ominous torpedo approaching with dismay, and turn away in synchrony—it is still piercing to watch. The sequence in which the ship tips over into the water, as human figures leap from it in dignified silhouette, is more memorable and affecting than anything in “Titanic,” exactly for its stylized equanimity. We register the tiny figures coming down ropes, the neatly outlined eruptions billowing smoke, the inkblot clouds of fire, the ship sinking beneath the hand-drawn waves—it’s like an early newsreel reimagined by Hiroshige.
But McCay was limited by William Randolph Hearst, who owned him as a kind of property and valued his political-editorial work, while seeing little profit in animation. In “Wild Minds,” McCay then retreats, while Mitenbuler’s Chuck Yeager figure—the too often overlooked and audacious hero who inspires the later, better-known adventurers—is double: the Fleischer brothers, Max and David.
Though now mostly forgotten by non-experts, in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties the Fleischers seemed as likely as their great competitor, Walt Disney, to become the masters of animated cartoons. Proudly Jewish (their cartoons occasionally exploded with Hebrew lettering) and extremely louche (Mitenbuler speculates that they started the studio with money from the race track), they threw their careers away in a series of misadventures worthy of a Michael Chabon novel, choosing Florida over California as the place to make cartoons and then overindulging in the pleasures of the flesh once there. The Fleischers, we learn, began by inventing a once famous clown, Ko-Ko, who was a fellow-traveller of the first famous cartoon figure, Felix the Cat, both drawn under the orbit of Chaplin, whose influence on early animation can be found everywhere.
The Fleischers didn’t see why animation needed to remain a diminutive form. Having made stake money with Ko-Ko, they took up what they thought was as obvious a subject for animation as, say, the adventures of Pocahontas or the working life of any number of dwarves: Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. Earning Einstein’s approval, the silent film, released in 1923, is still an astonishingly early and sophisticated popularization of his theory. But lacking, perhaps, a mascot—Li’l Al the Light Beam or the like—it was a flop, according to Mitenbuler. Two years later, undeterred, the Fleischers used the occasion of the Scopes trial to goose up a history of life on earth as imagined by Darwinian evolution. (It caused a riot at the American Museum of Natural History when it débuted, but seems to have made little money.)
The Fleischers—having secured backing from Paramount—had another go at presenting the drama of sexual reproduction: they invented Betty Boop, the first frankly sexy cartoon character. Later bowdlerized, and remembered now mainly for her “Boop-oop-a-doop” cry, Betty was in her day a full-fledged mini-Mae West. A zaftig Broadway showgirl, she went topless, routinely seduced Bimbo the dog, and was just as routinely seduced, and occasionally spanked, by her animal cartoon lover. (“Wanna be a member, wanna be a member?” she sings, after rubbing her hands up and down her body, in one bizarre fantasy about the initiation rites of a mystical order.)
A Disney princess Betty Boop was not. In the mid-thirties, her skirt got lengthened and her manners curbed when Catholic groups pressed the Production Code on Hollywood, and the Fleischers turned their attention to Popeye, from E. C. Segar’s lovely strip. They simplified the action; Popeye’s deus ex canica of spinach first became iconic in their cartoons. In one of the great misplaced bets in American show business, however, the Fleischers moved their studio to the nascent town of Miami, where their largely Jewish and very New York employees sometimes had a hard time with swamp insects and other swamp creatures. “On the mornings after Ku Klux Klan rallies, the air sometimes smelled like the turpentine used to burn the crosses,” Mitenbuler records. Many of them fled back home. (Others had already been poached by the Disney studio, all the way out in California.)
Even before this difficult time, the Fleischers—Max, especially—clearly had in mind the hot-ice-cream dream of a feature-length cartoon, made fearsomely difficult by the number of artists and the amount of time needed to produce so many frames. Time-saving tricks were sought. Max had developed the technique of rotoscoping, which is still in use and which enables live-action film to be overlaid with animation. It created the quivering, noir-El Greco effect of their heroic figures, including the Superman series of the early forties.
After Disney came out with a feature, the saccharine but successful “Snow White,” in 1937, Paramount finally gave the Fleischers the money to work on a feature of their own, a full-length version of “Gulliver’s Travels,” which was released in 1939. It lacks Swift’s satiric fire, but the juxtaposition of the rotoscoped and vividly human Gulliver with the smooth-edged cartoon Lilliputians has an almost creepy intensity that suits the subject. (In films with both human movement and cartoon movement, like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” it’s always the real-world footage that looks coarse, otherworldly, and disturbing.)
The contrast between the practices of the Disney studios in Los Angeles and those of the Fleischers in Miami—long in debt to Paramount—is the material for an American comedy. At Disney, classes in drawing and composition were compulsory. Mitenbuler tells us that “Jean Charlot, a Mexican artist who had painted murals alongside Diego Rivera, a revolver strapped to his hip, provided lessons on composition and geometry,” while Rico Lebrun, an expert on animal anatomy, “dragged a deer carcass into the studio and, over the course of several sessions, peeled back layers of pink tissue until he finally struck bone.” Bambi was born. Boris Morkovin, a professor at U.S.C., taught the theory of humor, announcing, “Ve vill now explain vott iss a gak.” (In the manner of the Russian formalists, he had analyzed “over two hundred gags into thirty-one basic types,” Mitenbuler reports.)
While the Disney animators were dutifully studying life drawing, the Fleischers were living the life. Mitenbuler writes that the red light above Dave’s door sometimes meant that he was having sex with his secretary, and that when Max complained about this, right in front of visiting suits from Paramount, David told them that Max was having an affair with his own secretary. “The tryst soured Max’s already stormy relationship with his wife, Essie,” Mitenbuler adds, who “was occupied with her gambling habit. In order to reach her bookie at any hour, she had wired the palm trees of their estate with telephones.”
Soon the Paramount executives, no surprise, more or less foreclosed on the Fleischers and took ownership of all their intellectual property. Max Fleischer never recovered his studio or his momentum, or, for that matter, his relationship with his brother. It was easier to blame his mishandling of his career on a business rival than on a character flaw. Throughout his long and mostly unhappy afterlife, this usually good-natured man would, at the mere mention of Disney’s name, mutter, “That son of a bitch.”
Despite wearing the red rose of the intrepid Fleischers, Mitenbuler is kind to Disney—kinder than a cultural historian of an earlier vintage might have been. It wasn’t so long ago that “the Disney version” was the standard term for the worst kind of vulgarization of the classics. Disney is in better odor now, in part because of the proto-Spielbergian spell he seems to cast in his best work, like “Pinocchio,” and in part because the lurid legends circulated after his death—that he was an anti-Semite who had himself frozen after death—turn out not to be true. Mitenbuler, while registering the relentless creep of formula into the work, gives Disney credit for genuine artistic innovation: “Fantasia,” with its high-art hungerings and a score featuring Paul Dukas and Igor Stravinsky, wasn’t the effort of a cynic. And, by eliminating sex, Disney landed, in an almost classic bit of Freudian-style sublimation, on evil, the forbidden energy that’s essential to any fable. Disney’s villainous characters—like the queen turned witch—tend to be more memorable than the doe-eyed good ones.
If the Fleischers are the doomed Hectors of Mitenbuler’s tale, his favorites are the hyper-energetic, demonic band of cartoonists who helped establish the Warner Bros. animation studio in the thirties and forties, inventing Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Pepé Le Pew, and, eventually, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. It was during one of those irresistible creative moments that, for a brief time, everything fell right: Mel Blanc, the voice artist, was integral to the invention of the characters. (At least one is a caricature of a studio executive.) Happy accidents happened: Porky Pig was voiced by an actor with an actual, frustrating stammer, who turned it to creative use. The wild-man directors of the “Looney Tunes” cartoons, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin, were hardly loony about their art. Tashlin articulated their purpose bluntly. “We showed those Disney guys that animated cartoons don’t have to look like a fucking kids’ book,” he said. Chuck Jones’s list of rules for his art are acute and broadly applicable: “You must learn to respect that golden atom, that single-frame of action. . . . The difference between lightning and the lightning bug may hinge on that single frame.” What is true of frames is true of words, and notes.
The Warner Bros. cartoons remain the high point of what might be called American Wise Guy comedy. Where Felix and Ko-Ko (and Chaplin) represented a beleaguered immigrant-naïf comedy, Daffy and Sylvester the Cat and, above all, Bugs Bunny are celebrations of unashamed American ingenuity. It’s a kind of second-generation-immigrant comedy, where wheedling and scheming are admired, very much like Phil Silvers’s later Sgt. Bilko. Bugs isn’t mean, but he’s always ready to protect himself from the Elmer Fudds of the world with his own cleverness. In the Second World War, Bugs became every put-upon G.I.’s totem and hero. Indeed, what’s demonstrated by the recirculation of those lewd training films—directed by, among others, Chuck Jones and voiced by Mel Blanc—is that the voice of the Everyman, Private Snafu, is indistinguishable from Bugs’s.
