Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation
Amidi, Amid
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 16mmdistribution 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 studios own films, only Gerald McBoing Boing and its three sequels have a DVD to themselves, and fans must search out sources for old VHScopies 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 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 Amidis 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book brings the innovative style of the 1950s back to our attention and provides a veritable archive of rare, mostly unpublished images for teachers, scholars, and enthusiasts.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 Leacute;ger, Amidimentions 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 Kepess 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 meacute;canique, 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 Amidis approach: his broad, all-encompassing definition of modernism; his disdain for more traditional animation, especially that of Disney; and his layout of the chapters.
For Amidi, 'modern' seems to mean everything from Abstract Expressionism to stylized greeting cards. He does not distinguish Cubism from Surrealism or explain what strain of modernism he has in mind. He does not explicitly lay out a difference between modernist-influenced animation and animation that is genuinely a part of modern/modernist art. Thus there is no mention of figures like Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute, though there seems a possibility that their work influenced the mainstream filmmakers dealt with in the book.
This may be because Amidi sees modernisms entry into American animation only secondarily as a matter of direct influences from the other arts. Instead, for him the impulse toward modernism is as a movement away from conventional Hollywood animation. Disney is seen as having during the 1930s and 1940s established realism as the norm, so anything stylized would count as modernism. Amidi ends up talking about a lot of rather cute, appealing films as if they were just as innovative as the work of John Hubley. At one point he devotes ten pages to the output of Playhouse Pictures, a studio that made television ads which Amidi describes as 'mainstream modern' because 'it was driven by a desire to entertain and less concerned with making graphic statements'. I suspect Playhouse rates such extensive coverage largely because its founder, Adrian Woolery, had worked as a production manager and cameraman at UPA. At another point Amidi refers to Warner Bros. animation designer Maurice Nobles work as 'accessible modernism'.
This willi
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现代卡通，50年代的动画风格和设计
Amidi, Amid
在20世纪70年代，当我还是一个电影专业的研究生时，美国联合制片公司UPA就受到了学院和影迷们的关注。伴随着16 mm胶卷技术的蓬勃发展，16mm电影拍摄技术的发展已历经了二十年了，现在人们仍能偶尔在电视上看到动画片“多根的嘟嘟声”或“花园里的独角兽”。在此后的几十年，美国联合制片公司UPA以及50年代的流行动画片，正逐步淡出人们的视野。而那些小制片公司出品的动画电影，只有杰拉尔德仍然有DVD的续集，影迷们必须自己想办法找到资源，才能看到其他的动画片。大多数其他的受现代主义影响，其他小型的制片公司出口的不太突出的动画，现在则完全找不到资源了，影迷们想看也很难找到了。
然而，美国联合制片公司在电影的历史长河中仍然占有重要的地位。接下里的二十年，迪士尼出品的现实主义色彩的动画占据了动画业的主导地位，一些小型的制片厂更是大胆引入了一个更抽象的现代主义风格动画。其他的一些小制片厂就跟着这一潮流，推出了类似的产品。约翰bull;哈比利和他的妻子合作，致力于为动画行业设立一个规范。但这一趋势，从很大程度上说，早在50年代就结束了。现在看来，他们的这一做法是理所当然很重要的。我和大卫·博德维尔两人沿着这一模式继续研究，本文简要地介绍了下美国联合制片公司UPA的动画电影历史，一个简单的介绍，我们也介绍了16mm黑白动画电影。虽然现在，美国联合制片公司UPA及其动画产品获得了影迷们的尊重，只不过不像以前那样有名了。
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