In 1931 C. A. Lejeune noted the plethora of criticism on Chaplin and bemoaned the difficulty of finding anything new to say about him:

So much criticism, and so much good criticism, has been written during the last ten years on the work of Chaplin, that it is hard to-day to offer any portrait of him that has not already been sketched by another hand. . . . It is impossible to catalogue the good stuff that has been written about Chaplin—for this little clown seems to bring out, by his very shuffle on to the screen, the most...

Most examinations of the early films of Max and Dave Fleischer portray them as failed narratives, despite their considerable virtues in other areas. Leonard Maltin has characterized the Fleischer cartoons as examples of “raw, peasant humor . . . that relied more on technical ingenuity and comical invention than artistic expertise. There was no storyboard, just a general idea of what the picture was about.”¹ Bob Baker’s criticism was based on his feeling that the Fleischer “films give the impression sometimes of having been made up as they went along, from cel to cel. The plots frequently take off in...

In the summer of 1933 the Walt Disney studio released a new Mickey Mouse cartoon short:Mickey’s Gala Premier [sic]. In this cartoon all Hollywood, in the form of movie-star caricatures, turns out for the opening of Mickey Mouse’s latest picture. The film-within-the-film (a western bearing a loose resemblance to the 1930 Mickey shortThe Cactus Kid, but augmented with a host of new gags) rolls ’em in the aisles: stars ranging from Douglas Fairbanks to Boris Karloff, from the Barrymore family to Mae West, are reduced to helpless convulsions of laughter by Mickey’s antics. Among the star caricatures on...

It is axiomatic that cartoons from the studio period were made to make us laugh. Big belly laughs. Speaking as someone who attended the local “show” almost weekly for most of the 1950s, after the big producers had been forced to divest themselves of their theaters, but before economic pressures, changes in audienceship, and competing entertainments put the industry in its downward spiral, I can attest to the producers’ and exhibitors’ success in the jocularity department. We kids laughed like crazy at cartoons. But so did grownups. Movie audiences seem to have been much more exuberant then; if it was...

As this timely volume demonstrates, animated cinema has been undertheorized, particularly in the realm of humor and narrative. Some theorists and critics have concentrated their interest in the American commercial animated cartoon around the binary opposition between loose gag structures and more linear, developed narratives. One of the most extreme positions was taken by Brian Henderson, who dared ask, “Is there such a thing as a cartoon narrative?” He reduces cartoon series such as Tom and Jerry or the Roadrunner to repetitious chains of similar situations and patterns with arbitrary endings patched on. According to Henderson’s scenario, the chain of...

Most of us treasure cartoons for their ability to defy what is considered normal behavior. Roadrunners beep beep, rabbits sing opera, and ducks travel to Mars. Even animated films that don’t center on recognizable characters may play with spatial and temporal logic in ways that challenge our usual patterns of thought. Though many cartoons seem to live by their own rules, the ones produced in Hollywood during the studio era circulated within a system that expected the pleasure they produced to yield concrete profits. Whether they operated as independents, like the Fleischers and Disney, or functioned as the offbeat wing...

When it comes to cartoons, Sigmund Freud’s description of humor as the invocation of affect and its diversion speaks well to the existential horror we call the gag. Especially in the short subjects that fairly defined American animation until 1937, and still thereafter provided its bread and butter, life is an eternal cavalcade of pain. Bodies twist, stretch, explode, melt; they are crushed by anvils, pianos, giant mallets, whole buildings; they are sliced and diced by razors and knives . . . and through it all we laugh. Why is it that, faced with such horrific violence and fierce torment,...

Published inArtforumin 1982, J. Hoberman’s “Vulgar Modernism” represented a benchmark in critical discussions of “popular art.” Hoberman constructed the case for the formal innovation and artistic importance of a range of popular artists who were seemingly locked out of the canon on the basis of their low cultural status, even as their work continued to influence a broad range of modern and postmodern artists.¹ Hoberman described “vulgar modernism” as “the vulgar equivalent of modernism itself. By this I mean a popular, ironic, somewhat dehumanized mode reflexively concerned with specific properties of its medium or the conditions of its...

If cartoons were flesh, pornography would have to be reinvented. Pornography uses the body—its aura, its texture, its materiality, its morphology—to choreograph physical possibilities imagined through the dormant state of the inert (repressed) corpus. In this sense pornography animates the body into heightened states of arousal, erection, and expulsion. It actualizes all that can be desired of the body. Cartoons similarly employ the body to explode with latent libidinal energy, choreographing physical impossibilities imagined through the actual state of the innate (expressed) corpus. Yet cartoons perform this function all the while refuting the body’s fleshiness. Indeed, the hypergraphic...

A little more than seventy years ago, in 1937, the French surrealist André Breton jotted down a crib sheet for a new history of film comedy, inspired by a screening of Charley Bowers’s sound shortIt’s a Bird(1930). A comedy about one man’s discovery of a “metal-eating bird,” the film prompted Breton to a fresh conception of slapstick’s role in the history of film. To the extent that cinema was a medium of extremes, Breton averred, its encounter with slapstick had been inevitable and primary: “The first comedies of Mack Sennett, certain films of Chaplin, the unforgettable Fatty and...

There is a thin line between comedy and tedium. Anybody who has seen several Tex Avery cartoons in a row is probably very familiar with this boundary. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote, “To be sure, if you see as few as half a dozen Averys at a stretch, you’re likely to notice repetitions of gags and certain recurring obsessions . . . and as many as a dozen together is an experience promoting migraines and nervous exhaustion.”¹ The Avery scholar Floriane Place-Verghnes agrees: “Seeing that these cartoons should be entertaining, it may seem paradoxical to say that watching...

If the name “Frank Tashlin” is recognized today, it is generally for the reason that the trajectory of Tashlin’s filmmaking career is characterized by a couple of unusual swerves. Once a print cartoonist, Tashlin parlayed his drafting skill into a career as an animator and then as a director of animation; once a director of animation, Tashlin parlayed his gag-writing and shot-composition skills into a career as a director of live-action, feature-length films. It is this latter, midcareer turn on which rests whatever Tashlin’s reputation as anauteurmay be: inasmuch as he is known, it is as the director...

Discussing the various means of showing speed in a cartoon, Kristin Thompson describes a device in which Daffy, inConrad the Sailor(1942), moves so quickly that when he stops suddenly, several Daffys are used to show his movement across the frame, catching up to him, one at a time, as the director, Chuck Jones, makes explicit his means of suggesting speed.¹ Music’s understood place in cartoons, as with most film music, precludes it from commenting on its own subjectivity; it in fact remains one of the few constants in the animated universe typically immune to any character’s machinations yet...

In the history of the animation business there are two eras that stand out in terms of quality of animation and volume of production. The first is the Golden Age of Cartoons, which came out of the studio system in Hollywood; the second is the era that came on the heels of (and perhaps contributed to) cable television’s ascendancy to mass popularity. Not surprisingly, the Golden Age of Cartoons turned out to be the main influence on the most successful television cartoons of the 1990s. Here I will examine how the theatrical cartoons made in the 1940s and early 1950s...