Growing up, I always had the impression I was supposed to grow out of things, like collecting action figures, reading fantasy novels and the staple of any cereal-eating, boob-tube addicted child: watching cartoons on Saturday mornings. And while it’s true I don’t indulge in these to the degree I once did, I never grew out of them.
Instead, these habits merely changed states: action figures became DVDs, fantasy novels became science fiction novels (so sue me) and cartoons became art. I never could let go of the fact that something animated can tell a story just as well as something live-action or that the personal lives of an irritable duck or a cantankerous ogre could engage me as easily as any Hollywood blockbuster.
But where did it all begin? To answer this question, I’ll stick with what I know, which is America’s history of animation and a slice of Japan’s.
American animation began in the late 1800s with inventions such as the praxinoscope, the zoopraxiscope and eventually Edison’s motion picture camera, which besides being easier to say than a word with “prax” in it, improved upon previous models through its use of stop-motion and cel animation. Cel animation is essentially the animation style that preceded today’s use of Cg and is successive frames of hand-drawn images.
At first, cartoons were silent, and often comic strips like Mutt and Jeff and their artists were called upon for material. This gave rise to characters still familiar today such as Felix the Cat, though the addition of sound in the 1930s overshadowed this. Enter a kind-hearted guy named Walt and his imaginary mouse, which brought sound and color to a world soon to be made quiet and gray by World War II.
Eventually the first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was made, and from there came the creation of such iconic characters as Popeye, Betty Boop and the expansion of the Disney cast. But this was all for film. Once businesses saw the need to enter the field of television, Hanna-Barbera was born to take the stage.
Beginning in the 1960s, The Jetsons, The Flintstones and Jonny Quest were household names. Before long, TV was the new realm of animated experimentation, as a decline began to appear in the ticket sales for films. America, ever the ADD kid on a sugar binge, had developed a shorter attention span, but Warner Bros. picked up on the new atmosphere and moved its Bugs Bunny shorts from film to Saturday mornings.
Meanwhile in Japan, the culture, in seeking a more optimistic future for their war-torn country, gave birth to Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) and Tetsujin 28-go (Gigantor), both of which portrayed a futuristic, hopeful Japan fueled and maintained by massive innovations in technology and the robot industry. Little did they know.
From here a lot of us know the rest of the story, if only in pieces. Disney came back in full force in the film department, only to lose it years later during Michael Eisner’s reign, and yet somehow remake itself through the Pixar company.
The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-head and South Park gave teenagers — and adults — friendly entertainment through TV. And modern Japanese animation, or anime, has seeped its way into the forefront of modern animation to the point that the name Dragon Ball Z has attained a deep-seeded, perhaps frustrating, cultural identity we simply can’t escape.
There’s always more that can be said, topics such as the decline of hand-drawn animation, the maturation of ’90s Saturday morning cartoons and the recent push for live-action, early teen-oriented television, for starters. But this is just a peek into a topic that holds a special place in my heart and a deep-reaching history in global culture. Animation is art, and one that’s managed to adapt over the years to the point it, irrelevant of age, has allowed us all to identify with art and color in a very distinct way.
