‘This New Mode of Expression’: The Idea of Animation in 1930s France

Introduction

In 1939, writing in the French newspaper L’Humanité, Louis Chéronnet (1939) described animation as ‘among the most marvellously poetic expressions of art in existence’, responding to ‘profound needs of mankind’s spirit’. ¹ Along with Chaplin’s films, animation is ‘what the cinema has produced of the greatest purity’. Going on to discuss the ways in which animated films are made, Chéronnet does not justify or develop these claims. By 1939, there was no need to – these were critical commonplaces. In France during the 1930s animation was the subject of considerable interest in a range of articles, reviews and commentaries in the popular press and film journals. Critics, commentators and theorists marvelled at the form. René Jeanne (1938a: 10), writing in Le Petit Journal, notes that ‘agreement is always made when it comes to speaking of animated film. The animated film has only friends.’ Similarly, Suzanna Chantal (1938: 338) begins her review of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand, 1937) by agreeing with Jean Effel: ‘Just as everyone loves strawberries, just as everyone loves roses, everyone loves animated films.’ From film theorists to critics in the popular press, the friendship and love that animated film received helped generate an idea of it as an artistic form of the highest order, emblematic of cinema’s potential.

Within this conversation, certain ideas about animated film’s expressive and cultural possibilities were developed. At the same time, discussions also highlighted how animated film was comparable to other art forms and media, borrowing from them and sometimes supplanting them. A multifaceted sense of animation as pure cinema, as an extension of other arts and as a new form of art emerged. Examining how an understanding of animation was articulated in mainstream newspapers and film journals in 1930s France, this article aims to illuminate an important example of animation’s reception, a sometimes neglected area of its history, during a period of resurgent interest and fascination in the form. While a wider audience may have understood animation in the ways which I discuss or may have been influenced by the discourse which I examine, tracing the complexities of audience response is not the aim of this article. Rather, I focus on the discourse circulating around animation in order to see how it was figured, understood and imagined. More broadly, this article also aims to set out ways in which we might consider animation’s history as integrally entwined with its reception and the discourse surrounding it, less in terms of production contexts, technologies, specific films and individual animators and more as a culturally formed idea.

I would argue that this idea of animation was more significant than simply an expression of general opinions on the artistic or cultural potentials of animation: in many respects, the articulation of this idea of animation, decades after the first animated films, helped fashion it as a new artistic medium. In ‘Painting in the text’, Jacques Rancière (2007) argues that a medium does not derive from its technological or material basis, but instead develops from the words that are used to describe and circumscribe it. Rather than a form having its own essential specificity as a medium, its particular expressive potentials are created through discourse. Rancière argues:

A medium is not a ‘proper’ means or material. It is a surface of conversion: a surface of equivalence between the different arts’ ways of making; a conceptual space of articulation between these ways of making and forms of visibility and intelligibility determining the way in which they can be viewed and conceived. (pp. 75–76)

Part of what discourse does, then, is to designate a medium in order to show a specific form’s ‘visibility as art’ (p. 78), to elaborate on its expressive potentials and to situate it alongside other artistic forms, each with their own distinctive potentials and properties. This is a useful way to consider the discourse circulating around animation in 1930s France. From this perspective, critics and commentators were shaping an idea of animation’s distinctiveness as a medium rather than revealing an idea of animation based on essential facets of its material or technique.

In ‘A medium is always born twice’, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion (2005) also develop an argument about the emergence of media which foregoes technological determinism or an essentialist approach. They present a dynamic model of media formation. They write that ‘a medium does not really impose itself as an autonomous medium, one worthy of the name, until it has rendered its own opacity tangible and credible; in other words, until it has defined its own way of re-presenting, expressing and communicating the world’ (p. 3). Emerging from within an intermedial field, a medium develops its own identity through both reception, which offers ‘a recognition of the “personality” and often increasingly specific use of the medium’, and production, which presents ‘a consciousness of its potential for an original, medium-specific expression capable of disassociating the medium from other media or generic “expressibles” that have already been distinguished and are being practised’. Focusing on a central aspect of their important and influential argument by attending to the reception of animation, this article traces the ways in which animated film was conceived of as a medium through discourse.

In order to examine this constitution of animation, I focus on three key facets of the discourse that circulated around animation in 1930s France: perspectives on its aesthetic form, discussions of its intermediality and accounts of its history. These facets, often interwoven and overlapping, helped form animation’s identity as a nascent medium. This raises wider questions about how we write the history of animation. First, how significant is locality in articulations of animation as a medium? I would argue that looking beyond the locality of production and attending to the ideas that circulate around animation in different places can offer new perspectives on the form. While the example of France, and the Paris-centric discourse that I will be examining, was certainly quite international in its purview, it nevertheless offered specific national inflections – as this article will go on to explore – that helped create an idea of animation that was tied to a specific locality. As Miriam Hansen (2000: 341) writes, in an observation which refers to Hollywood cinema but which applies also to the case of animated film:

To write the international history of classical American cinema, therefore, is a matter of tracing not just its mechanisms of standardization and hegemony but the diversity of ways in which this cinema was translated and reconfigured in local and translocal contexts of reception.

France offers one such local configuration.

This leads to a second question: can animation be seen to operate with multiple moments of creation or re-creation over the course of its history? While I would not suggest that an idea of animated film was entirely reinvented in the period that I am examining, nor that key concerns that I trace from the discourse of the time were altogether novel, what I nevertheless hope to draw out is how a considerable amount of the attention generated by animated film in 1930s France articulated how animation could be seen as a new form of art and expression. In doing so, this discourse can also be seen as fashioning animation as a new medium. Rather than approaching media identity as constituted through the introduction of a specific technology, Donald Crafton (2011: 105) writes:

The animation effect … doesn’t define the medium. Its biomechanical nature is a given. It’s the applications of the effect as technology and as a social discourse that have made it critically and historically interesting.

Taking up Crafton’s observation, I examine how animation was discussed, configured and re-created in the discourse of 1930s France.

The aesthetics of animation

The potentials of animated film were heralded in 1930s France: it was described as ‘one of the highest, if not the highest, expressions of cinematic art’ (Le Petit Parisien, 1934: 7), ‘this new mode of expression’ (Vuillermoz 1935a: 6), ‘this miraculous art’ (Brisson, 1938: 5) and ‘in future, the richest, the freest form not only of cinema, but of spectacle’ (Vinneuil, 1938: 5). While other critics and commentators would sometimes frame animation in more limited terms, as a genre or a formula, this would often be entwined with a discussion of it as something more akin to a form of art or a medium. For instance, Claude Jeantet (1929) and Maurice Huet (1931) slip between different categories in their descriptions of animation, referring to it at some points as a ‘genre’ and other points as ‘the art of animated film’ (Jeantet, 1929: 4) or a ‘form of cinematographic art’ (Huet, 1931: 5).

While often elaborating on animation with particular reference to the Walt Disney or Max Fleischer animated short, for some critics the Felix the Cat series from the 1920s, with its fantastic situations and quasi-surrealist tone, had already established animation’s expressive and artistic possibilities. Pat Sullivan, credited with developing the series, was characterized as the ‘creator of the genre’ (Huet, 1931) of recent animation. Sullivan’s obituary in L’Intransigeant (1933: 1) describes how Felix the Cat anticipated the later Mickey Mouse and Flip the Frog films, noting that Felix was ‘always lyrical and overflowing with a light and spiritual fantasy like the spirit of his creator, Sullivan, the first poet of the screen.’ Similarly, Jean Mitry (1928: 109), writing before the surge in interest generated around the Disney and Fleischer films, described the character of Felix the Cat as ‘the champion of liberty and fantasy’, ‘the magician of our time’ and a ‘vagabond poet, humorist and philosopher’. This served to link the series to a sense of fantasy and poetry, encapsulated by Mitry’s further description of Felix as: ‘Surrealist poet, stronger than any other, he lives his own dream.’ Such a vision of animated film as an expression of oneiric freedom and wonder was carried forward into the 1930s, with typical accounts describing ‘the miracle of animated film’ as a ‘marvellous universe delivered from earthly laws, refuge for fantasy’ (Marguet, 1935: 6), observing that ‘by its very possibilities, animated film is made to express fantasy and the fantastic’ (L’Humanité, 1938: 7) and describing animated films as ‘masterpieces of an always new fantasy; like fairy tales, their unreality enchants us’ (Brisson, 1934: 3). Such comments helped articulate an idea of animation as an art of poetic fantasy.

This fascination with animation’s expressive fantasies extended to perhaps its most striking power for many critics: its ability to imaginatively fashion a world that comes alive through anthropomorphism and metamorphosis. By giving life to non-human beings, some commentators envisioned it as a form which allows for a new realm of expression, distinct from cinema. For example, Jean Marguet (1933: 6) marvelled at how ‘cats, mice, frogs and now piglets are the great stars of animated film, not to mention the figuration … of all the animals of creation’, with another critic (Laury, 1937: 5) noting how ‘Walt Disney clothes beasts in poetry and artistry and populates, for young and old, a zoological park where the marvellous dominates for our perpetual enchantment.’ For Emile Vuillermoz (1938: 5), the influential film critic for Le Temps, this takes on a further creative force; in animated film ‘cinema no longer uses reality. It is no longer a copyist, it creates for each work its own decors and its characters. It fabricates from the unreal and galvanises the inanimate.’

Critics like Vuillermoz shifted attention away from an established discourse of individual artistry that was, as Gaudreault (2011) argues, crucial to the development of the idea that live-action cinema could be conceived of as a medium or art form. While the importance of individuals such as Walt Disney was noted, the artistry of animated film was often seen to be generated by the potentials of the form itself. This sense of animated film’s properties opening up new avenues of expression and creativity was described in an earlier article written by Vuillermoz (1932: 4): ‘If animated film permits us to compose human beings which we can nuance to our will, what perspectives are offered to the imagination of creators! Today, science allows us to industrially revive the miracle of Galatea.’ Entwining animated film with longstanding myths of metamorphosis and transformation, Vuillermoz gestures towards a profound underlying power in the form. Such discussions of filmic animism continued earlier theorizations of the possibilities of cinema, from the late 1910s and 1920s, in which Vuillermoz was a pivotal writer (see Abel, 1988). In some respects, cinema’s nascent power had finally been realized, not through the work of individual artists but rather through the expressive potentials of animation.

The discourse circulating around animated film was by no means univocal – there were other considerations and observations about the form at the time, some of which I will discuss later when I explore the intermedial and historical considerations of animation. That said, in a wide range of articles and commentaries, fantasy and liveliness were two of the key elements in developing an idea of animation’s aesthetic form and artistic potential. The prominence of these features partly stemmed from their ability to bridge different perspectives on animation: fantasy could draw together the popular appeal of animation with important trends in French art (such as Symbolism and Surrealism); and animism could acknowledge notions of the medium’s apparent properties while at the same time emphasizing its relation to long-standing artistic and mythological forms. Of course, animated films themselves invited such approaches to the form of animation through their uses of aesthetics and their subject matter. Moreover, the reason why critics saw fantasy and liveliness as key features of animation was also likely informed by the borrowing, repetition and familiarity that are features of any popular discourse. In general, though, instead of focusing on why these were fundamental properties of animation, critics were much more interested in how they were evident in individual films, how they might shape our understanding of animation in general, and how they could figure animation as a form of art.

In this respect, the prominence of the idea of animation as rooted in fantasy and liveliness provided a framework for discussions of new technologies in animation such as synchronized sound and colour, new forms of animation such as the feature-length film, and the ways in which animation was produced. To take the example of the introduction of synchronized sound, Maurice M. Bessy (1930: 29), in an article which provides a selective account of animation’s history from Mutt and Jeff to Felix the Cat, ends with a discussion of the ‘new craze’ for sound animated film, and particularly Mickey Mouse. He writes that the Mickey Mouse films ‘first revealed the captivating and original poetry of sound animated film’ (p. 30). Sound’s impact, however, was not seen as a radical transformation of animation but rather an extension of its fantasy, so that the ‘new genre [of sound animated film] singularly enlarges the profoundly cinematographic domain of dream and unreality.’ Similarly, the introduction of three-strip technicolor in animated films attracted considerable interest, but was seen by some to be revitalizing rather than transforming. Jeanne (1932: 4), for example, noted how it ‘renews a genre of which certain spectators had begun to tire’. Other accounts would welcome colour’s more visionary or abstract potentials, such as a description in Le Petit Journal (1934: 6) of how ‘the freshness of colours [in Disney films] is so dazzling and rejuvenating that a whole world of colours comes towards us and charms us’. Similarly, François Vinneuil (1932: 4) described how certain uses of colour ‘make us dream of féerique [fairytale] possibilities’. In such accounts, colour embellished animation’s aesthetic possibilities, extending and enlarging their scope in a manner much like sound. While these new technologies added considerable appeal and new expressive avenues for animated film, they were not seen as defining characteristics of the form.

Similarly, the appearance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first Disney feature-length film, led to considerable interest in the expanding potentials of animation but did not substantially alter pre-existing conceptions of the form. By the time it was released in 1938, ideas of animation’s artistic and aesthetic qualities were well established. While the film was described as a ‘major event in the art of cinema’ (L’Humanité, 1938: 7), ‘a great date in the history of cinema’ (Vinneuil, 1938: 5) and ‘a revolution in the “seventh art”’ (Vuillermoz, 1938: 5), its actual novelty was often characterized as an extension – rather than a change – in animation’s artistic and expressive power. Familiar qualities of animated film were central to its significance. Reviews noted, for example: ‘the general atmosphere where one feels that anything can happen and that the impossible becomes normal’ (L’Humanité, 1938: 7) and ‘what is worthy of admiration even more than the pencil of Walt Disney is his fantasy and his imagination. These are truly inexhaustible … Snow White is a miracle which lasts an hour and a half’ (Jeanne, 1938b: 10). This description of the film as a ‘miracle’ was a feature of advertisements and was further developed in terms of the film’s creation of life through animation. Vuillermoz (1938: 5) elaborated on this, writing that Snow White’s ‘way of walking, tilting her head, lightly lifting her skirts to climb a stair, dancing, curtseying, expressing a carefree attitude, terror, good humour or the most delicate confusion is of an exactitude which gives the sensation of a miracle.’ Presenting an ‘intense and accurate life’ created ‘entirely by a human mind’ offered ‘absolutely new impressions which we have never felt at the theatre or in life’. Other accounts drew attention to a wider world of liveliness in the film, writing of how, through animation, ‘the entire animal kingdom is emancipated’ (Brisson, 1938: 5) and that ‘the soul of the forest itself will sing’ (Lehmann, 1938: 8). Within such a vision of the film’s use of animation aesthetics, narrative and character were secondary concerns. Vinneuil (1938: 5) wrote, referring to the story, ‘This naïve canvas, gracious and dramatic, is really only a support for the innumerable inventions of Walt Disney and his collaborators.’ Similarly, Vuillermoz (1938: 5) noted that ‘whatever the charm of the tale of Grimm, here it is not the subject which matters.’ Instead, what is of interest is its use of properties of animation, the fantasy and creation that lead to a ‘discovery of a new universe’.

The film’s well-publicized production was discussed in similar terms. The review in L’Humanité (1938) saw the production as able to maintain a balance between the weight of industry and the lightness of creativity:

We know the quasi-industrial way in which animated films are fabricated and the number of collaborators who participate in their confection. The miracle is that even with such a complex technique the initial animator can conserve in his work so much freshness and spontaneity. (p. 7)

Lehmann (1938: 8) described how the fantastic qualities of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were not really dependent on the scope of its production: ‘We bow our head as well, with admiration, in front of this magnificent labour, but admit however that there is as much grace, poetry, fairytale fantasy [féerie] and imagination going into the shortest subjects of Walt Disney.’ These examples note the production context but go on to point out how key aesthetic qualities of animated film nevertheless shine through. Similarly, summarizing the contrast between the mode of production and the aesthetic qualities of the film, Chéronnet (1939: 8) noted that ‘it’s not overstating it to say that the animated film is “fabricated” like an automobile: on the conveyor belt. Nothing is more industrially conceived than this poetry.’ The industrial production of animated films became interwoven with their artistic sensibility, despite what might appear to be an obvious disjuncture between the two. The context of production, just as with technology and major changes in the form of animation, did little to alter an understanding of the aesthetic idea of animation. This idea dominated discussions of the form, providing a sense of how it worked, where it drew its artistic potential from and how one might understand its significance. The expressive tropes of fantasy and liveliness came to the fore as constitutive features of a medium, as features that formed a new art.

Impure animation

The discourse circulating around animation aesthetics only gives a partial sense of how animation was seen as a new art form or medium. Another way in which this was examined and discussed was through comparisons to other, more well-established, artistic forms. For example, in the case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, René Manevy (1938: 8) and Vinneuil (1938: 5) both link it to colour prints from England or Japan, with a review in Le Matin (1938: 4) describing how the film would ‘fascinate not only the cinéastes, but also the art critics’; Jeanne (1938b: 10) writes of how it ‘resuscitated by modern means’ earlier traditions of French theatrical fairy tales [féeries], as well as the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm; and Louis Arlet (1938: 8) situates it in the context of opera. Within this discussion of the film’s relation to other media, there were voices which expressed concern that animation was losing some of its purity. For Chantal (1938: 338), the film’s relation to the visual arts drained animation of much of its power:

[Disney’s] drawings before, in three strokes of a pencil, were barely a sketch, taken on the fly, and not at all ‘drawn’. Each image, isolated, immobile, had no existence, no significance. But the tapestries of Snow White could serve as illustrations to a deluxe edition book. Profound difference. The other day, an artist friend pinpointed this difference: ‘Walt Disney made drawn film [film dessiné]. He now makes animated drawing [dessin animé].’

A shift in emphasis from filmic qualities of movement to the individual image meant that the film was a ‘less important revelation’ than the earlier Mickey Mouse colour films. These discussions of animation’s relation to other expressive forms encapsulated ongoing considerations of to what extent animated film was an extension of other forms of storytelling or visual art, or its own medium.

Such distinctions and comparisons between animation and other forms offered commentators an opportunity to assert an identity for animated film. As Gaudreault and Marion (2005: 7) write, ‘it is through intermediality, through a concern with the intermedial, that a medium is understood.’ Rather than conceiving of media as appearing with their own identities fully formed, as might be the case with the assumption that new technologies create new media, Gaudreault and Marion emphasize the crucial role of intermediality in the development of media identities. Louise Arlet (1938: 8), writing for Le Petit Parisien, addressed similar issues, describing a process through which new artistic forms come into being:

The action exerted by the theatre on the cinema is a fact that we cannot deny. An art takes birth but it ought to consider those that preceded it, to assimilate their forms in order to create itself anew. During the time when this metamorphosis exists, the new art can appear under the yoke of its predecessor, but it need not halt its expansion.

It is probably from under this constraint, and in order to liberate itself, that an original mode of expression bursts out, a mode which, in turn, exercises its influence.

The masterly film of animated drawings created by Walt Disney under the title Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs appears as a work so new, so rich with possibilities, that we still cannot foresee all the repercussions of it, but only attempt to perceive some of them.

The suggestion that animated film had begun under the ‘yoke’ of cinema, and that it was only with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that it had found its own identity, indicates a contemporaneous interest in how animation as a ‘mode of expression’ had emerged as part of a process, drawing upon and then going beyond previous forms.

One way in which commentators considered this idea was in terms of animation’s relation to live-action film. Pierre Brisson (1938: 5), for example, wrote of how Snow White ‘has human gestures much too accurately “imitated”’, arguing that ‘the instant where the animated film looks to supplant photography, it strays from the point and loses its sense.’ Similarly, almost a decade earlier, Claude Jeantet (1929: 4) had argued that animated film should maintain its purity:

The latest productions of Max Fleischer are worrying, in so far as they move away from the essential characteristics of the genre, whether silent or sound … Max Fleischer seems to add little by little many disparate procedures: such as superimposing characters imprinted on real films, or photos bizarrely mixed with drawings. The little world where Felix the Cat, Fido and Koko, Popeye, and Mickey live is sufficient to itself; it can lose its homogeneity and its own life at the same time that it distances itself from its fundamental stylisation.

Expressing a sense in which animation had ‘essential’ or ‘fundamental’ properties, Jeantet aimed to dissociate it from what he characterized as ‘real films’ and ‘photos’.

Critics were not solely concerned with distinguishing animation from live-action film; some described animation’s capacity to enhance a cinematic vision through its creation of revealing details and visual discoveries. Vuillermoz (1935b: 6) marvelled at ‘all the power of observation’ evident in the depiction of Mickey Mouse as the conductor in The Band Concert (dir. Wilfred Jackson, 1935), wrote of the ‘innumerable discoveries of observation, poetry and humour’ (1937) in The Old Mill (dir. Wilfred Jackson, 1937) and emphasized the relation between the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and its power of observation: ‘Three years of collective, methodical, relentless labour have allowed us to see an infinity of details of which the virtuosity of execution is indescribable’ (Vuillermoz, 1938: 5). Writing how animated film ‘humbles the simple daily observation of reality, because it corrects, exalts and spiritualizes the universal life’, Vuillermoz (1938: 5) pointed to animation’s ability to enlarge our perspective on the world. Others were less grandiose in their claims, while still taking pleasure in the details within animated films. This would sometimes relate to the care in animating their subjects, as in Peculiar Penguins (dir. Wilfred Jackson, 1934) where ‘for weeks’ the filmmakers would apparently ‘oblige these strange birds to waddle in front of mirrors, to swim and to run, so that the animators can know the exact mystery of their movements’ (NP, L’Intransigeant, 1934: 12). Others marvelled at a more all-encompassing activity of animation where ‘the smallest details of décor or props are embellished with lively touches of an absolute sharpness’ (Le Petit Journal, 1934: 6). Such comments emphasized an animated world which was constructed through a vast visual account of the perceptible world in a manner related to, but surpassing, live-action film.

Other critics focused on different features in order to situate animated film in the context of live-action film. One form that this took was through comparisons to the films of Charlie Chaplin, implying a shared level of popular and cultural value. In L’Humanité (1938: 7), Chaplin and Disney were described as ‘geniuses’ who had made ‘the most authentic contributions to cinema’ as ‘both are equally full of humanity and poetry’ and able to offer ‘the most profound and total joy’ in cinema. And just as Chaplin’s films themselves had been transformed with the move to feature-length narrative in The Kid (dir. Charles Chaplin, 1921), the reviewer noted a similarly important change with the arrival of the feature-length Disney animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Similarly elaborating on the resonance between Chaplin and animation, Lucien Wahl (1936: 10) recounted a mock interview with Betty Boop in which she explained: ‘I am always stupefied that Charlie Chaplin is the only author of films played by men and such that I understand. It is perhaps that he conceives like a great creator of animated films …’

As well as suggesting that animation and the films of Chaplin share underlying elements, discussions also highlighted specific similarities between animation and live-action film more generally. For example, film stars were compared to animated characters. In an article in L’Intransigeant, Wahl (1936: 1936) reports meeting with Betty Boop and Popeye at the Lyon station in Paris and discussing their stardom over a café-crème. He conflates their fabrication with the creation of a live-action star:

While Walt Disney has created Mickey and the dazzling heroes of the Silly Symphonies, and while Marlene Dietrich (at least it’s a rumour) is the work of von Sternberg, Betty Boop and Popeye are the children of Max Fleischer. The public only knows them dressed for the screen.

Jean Vidal (1936: 7) approached the stardom of animated characters with more seriousness, observing cinema’s creation of ‘a certain way of feeling and seeing life’ that ‘has introduced, in our everyday existence, a particular rhythm and new values’; going on to note the influence of major stars such as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, Vidal then turns to the characters of animated film, describing them as ‘perhaps’ the figures who are most a part of our daily life, ‘like figures in our dreams’.

Another route that the relation between live-action film and animation took was in discussions of the potential aesthetic influence of animation. This took shape particularly in terms of the new technology of sound. For example, in a review of City Lights (dir. Charles Chaplin, 1931), Vuillermoz (1931: 5) suggested that the film’s lack of dialogue did not necessarily indicate that Chaplin had turned his back on this technological change in cinema; rather, Chaplin’s use of sound leads Vuillermoz to suggest ‘that he has studied very closely these little masterpieces that are animated films and that he has strongly understood the part that one can draw from them in a normal mise-en-scene.’ More broadly, for example, René Girard (1931: 102) noted that the synthesis of sound and image that Arthur Honegger had written of had been ‘realised in the films of [Walter] Ruttmann and in Mickey Mouse’. These observations on animation’s use of sound were part of the broader trend that I have been examining, where the identity of animated film was delineated by comparing its aesthetic qualities and its cultural place to the more familiar terrain of live-action film.

Accounts of the distinctions and overlaps between animation and other expressive forms also examined the relation of animated film to fables and fairy tales. Critics and commentators would frequently describe animation in terms of earlier traditions of fantasy or children’s storytelling. One discussion (Escoube, 1933: 10) described Disney as ‘this brother of Puck’ who ‘should be thanked and blessed as one of the benefactors of humanity’ because of ‘the miracle of animated films … this stunning world which returns us to all the evanescent splendours of childhood fairytale fantasies [féeries].’ Discussions of animation in terms of iconic creators of fantasy (with Walt Disney as ‘the Perrault of today’ (Brach, 1935: 6)) and childhood reveries (with these films returning adults to ‘the poetry of our childhood’ (Bizet, 1932: 10)) helped to construct a vision of the medium as a form of fantasy closely linked to earlier traditions.

Some, however, were concerned about the implications of this, worrying that it diluted the aesthetic expression of animated film. For example, Jeanne (1933: 6) criticized what he saw as a shift towards moralistic storytelling in Three Little Pigs (dir. Burt Gillett, 1933), describing how its emphasis on narrative comprehensibility, communicated through sing-song voices explaining the action, was a ‘regrettable error’. Similarly, suggesting that ‘the new tendency of animated films’ was to emphasize moral values, a column on animated film in Le Figaro (JL, 1937: 5) noted, ‘we are far from their first intrigues, full of fantasy and the marvellous, destined only for the pleasure of the eyes … We can be assured to see next Mickey politician, Betty Boop suffragette and Oswald, the duck, in fraudulent banking.’ By contrast, the reviewer for the left-wing newspaper L’Humanité (1938: 7) gave Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs credit for being a significant step forward in the form, but went on to argue that animation should aim for a wider social resonance:

One can ask what will be the future of animated film, in what sense and where is it going to be able to advance its conquests. It can’t stay devoted to fairy tales forever. Is it going to be strong enough to create a sort of legendary cycle of modern times, is it going to be able, staying in the tone of Popeye for example, to invent a cycle of satirical characters?

These varying responses to animated film indicate shifting perspectives on how to consider the medium’s relation to other forms of fantasy. Animation’s relation to traditions of moral storytelling was a subject of particular interest, with some arguing that animation should retain its specific purity of form and others suggesting that it should bring earlier traditions into a contemporary frame. But whatever the argument, animation was still seen as something distinct from, although intersecting with, these forms of storytelling.

Animation was also seen to interrelate with music; in particular, it was seen as expanding or even supplanting well-established forms of opera and dance. Vuillermoz (1933), both a film critic and a music critic, was particularly fascinated by this:

I haven’t forgotten the day there was, for the first time, a sound animated film, one of those delightful Mickeys which we remember so well; a great dancer, who is also a celebrated choreographer … told me with discouragement: ‘When one has seen that, one no longer wants to pay for ballets. Never have we with living beings, no matter what their talent, an equilibrium and a precision of rhythm giving us such complete visual satisfactions. It’s the end of dance!’ The end of dance? Isn’t it rather its beginning? (p. 5)

Others were similarly fascinated by the new potentials offered by animation: Brisson (1938: 5) described Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as ‘itself a bit like the great Opera of animated film’ and Arlet (1938: 8) wrote that animated film could ‘well renew opera one day’ through the fluid ways in which it merged image and sound. Such discussions cast animation within an artistic and cultural sphere of dance and opera, developing an understanding of the form distinct from its relation to cinema or fables.

Much like accounts which gestured towards how live-action cinema could learn from animation, discussions also drew attention to animation’s potential to influence opera. In an article about Christophe Colomb, Vuillermoz (1930: 6) wrote of how ‘the technique of animation, fixed projection and the displacement of images by a rotating screen’ provided ‘unlimited decorative variations’. A similar integration of projected images and theatrical staging was evident several years later in a production of Damnation of Faust, which Henry Malherbe (1933: 3) described as ‘a step forward in the advancement of scenic decoration’ where ‘for the illustration of certain episodes of the masterpiece we have, effectively, recourse not only to luminous projections, but also to a cinematographic suite of coloured and animated drawings.’ With such possibilities of animation’s integration with opera being hinted at – even if not realized as fully as Malherbe suggests – the relationship between music and image undergoes a significant transformation: ‘With the help of the luminous projection, the lyric theatre no longer suffers from its constraints and takes a footing in modern art.’ Such ways of envisioning animation as offering new means of expression further solidified its cultural and aesthetic status.

In one respect, these perspectives on the interrelation of animation with dance and opera, traditions of fantasy storytelling, and live-action cinema indicated that animation was not yet considered distinct, instead understood through reference to more established forms. At the same time, though, these discussions generated a specific identity for animation, implying that it had its own expressive and aesthetic properties that could reinvigorate these artistic and cultural forms. Whether envisioned as a model for live-action film’s use of sound, a means to expand the role of fantasy in contemporary culture or a new avenue for exploring the relation between image and music, animation was drawn into a wider field of artistic and cultural expression. This resonated with specific interests about the status of animation as a form of art, such as its relationship to American cinema, its rootedness within French traditions of fantasy, and its modern means of integrating movement and sound in a visual spectacle. Discussing animation as an impure form became a vital means for critics to articulate what they saw as its potential, as well as its identity.

Animation and history

Animation was understood partly through its relation to other artistic and cultural forms. Alongside this synchronic approach, there was also a diachronic understanding of animation as rooted in history. Not just an aesthetic form situated within a milieu of other types of entertainments and arts, animation became part of a history of visual forms which might go back centuries. In the more limited sense of animated film, historical accounts would typically note the key role played by Émile Cohl. However, Cohl’s animations were sometimes situated as distinct from an idea of animation as a medium or form of art that critics saw as having taken shape only recently: he was described by Manevy (1937: 8) as the ‘inventor’ of a type of film that would only be ‘brought to perfection by the Americans’, seen by Jeanne (1938a: 10) as working as an artisan unlike the industrialized form of contemporary (American) animation, and approached by Chéronnet (1938: 7) as a primitive of sorts, with his films described as ‘only a graffiti of transformations’ that ‘are still far from the poetry of Snow White!’

Cohl’s animated films were also sidelined in quite a different way by being seen as only part of a much longer lineage of French animation. One account (Cossira, 1936: 5) describes how, despite assumptions in America, Winsor McCay ‘and those who have imitated him have only industrialized’ the animation of Cohl, and that, moreover, ‘the true creator of animated film is the Brusselian [Joseph] Plateau who in 1832 invented the phenakistoscope which we still find imitations of in the toy bazaars’. The article goes on to describe other examples of animation: Émile Reynaud’s praxinoscope, ‘the shadow theatre from Seraphin up to the Chat Noir’ and ‘the simple magic lanterns [which] used many transformation views’. This list of inventors and forms, repeated in other discussion at the time, presented a multifaceted vision of animation’s history which preceded both Cohl’s first animated films and cinema itself. By shifting attention away from the novelty of animated film towards a more extended history of animation such accounts helped establish a more stable grounding for the form, rooting it in the past.

Discussing animation’s past in this manner was sometimes seen as something more than an effort at historical research; in some accounts, it was potentially vital to instilling a nationalist sense of pride that could reinvigorate France’s production of animated films. In an article on the possibilities of French animation, Huet (1931: 5) begins by drawing attention to the past through reference to shadow plays: ‘You recall the famous “Histoires sans paroles” of Caran d’Ache? Don’t they contain the embryo of our actual animated films? Since that time, why has this become a foreign specialty?’ A couple of years later, also writing in Le Petit Parisien, Marguet (1933: 6) picked up the same thread of argument: ‘Couldn’t we make marvellous animated films by giving life through cinema to the shadows of Caran d’Ache and others, or to a shadow play of M. Maurice Donnay?’ Marguet continues, writing of how this history could offer ‘our country intellectual treasures from which the cinema could pump new blood, strong and truly French, which would give it new life’. Instead of nostalgia for a lost era of cultural brilliance, an understanding of the history of animation could provide inspiration for contemporary production.

This interest in animation history (or pre-history, depending on the way one approaches the subject) could also be an opportunity to reflect on animation as a medium, and its place within wider contexts of French history and culture. While this is partly a concern in these accounts of animation history’s relation to French cultural pride and national spirit, it becomes central to a scene from one of the decade’s most ambitious French films, La Marseillaise (dir. Jean Renoir, 1938). Following events leading up to the French Revolution largely through a focus on the details of everyday life rather than a more epic viewpoint, the film does not contain an animated film in the limited sense, but rather depicts a scene of animation’s history. Shortly before the climactic events of the film, the forces from the South arrive in Paris and some of them go to see an entertainment. We then share their view of a staged shadow play at Seraphin’s theatre, depicting a version of the canonical Pont Cassé. The original shadow play told of a man trying to cross a river, and his argument with a workman on the other side of an unfinished bridge; in the shortened and revised version presented in La Marseillaise, this is turned into a political allegory. Speaking in a sing-song voice across a broken bridge, the King asks the Nation (the silhouette of a woman holding a flag) to embrace him; she responds that this is impossible: ‘The bridge between us is broken and an abyss separates us.’ Asking what it is that separates them, she replies that it is ‘The Brunswick Manifesto’, and turns away and leaves. A flock of ducks then passes along the water, unaffected by the broken bridge – following the Nation and mocking the King’s powerlessness, they are greeted with laughter from the audience in the film. As well as providing a detail of cultural life from the late 18th century, the scene also functions as a centrepiece, succinctly capturing the film’s larger themes of social and political rupture. Dudley Andrew (1995: 295) writes that the scene ‘replicates in miniature Renoir’s project’ by showing the characters ‘watch a political allegory on a white screen just as we do in a movie theater. Their laughter forms a community meant to spill from the eighteenth-century theater to the one in which we sit.’ In this way, the historical scene depicted in the film could resonate with the highly charged political moment in which the film was released in France.

This shadow play in La Marseillaise evokes the contemporaneous discussion about animation’s history, but casts some of the key concerns outlined earlier in a different light. Much like other media and arts that La Marseillaise also depicts – from the popular press to song – the shadow play is shown as a popular expressive form with its own identity. This is developed in the film by the presentation of details about the shadow play, rather than simply presenting a timeless allegory of cinema: we are shown characters looking at a series of posters advertising shows, the foyer of Seraphin’s theatre where a sign heralds this ‘Spectacle for Children of France’, and then the exhibition hall, with a pianist playing. Elaborating on the extratextual facets of the show, we are immersed in a particular milieu of the shadow play’s history. Or rather, from a contemporaneous perspective, we are shown a scene of animation’s history. The cultural form of the shadow play develops partly in terms of aesthetic elements that had been closely associated with animation. The scene depicts artificially constructed and iconic figures invested with life within a context of childhood wonder and entertainment. With its populist fantasy, its attention to small gestures and its anthropomorphism, the scene uses elements that were key to the understanding of animation’s expressive potentials in 1930s France. Lotte Reiniger – a major animator who had made the feature-length Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) more than a decade earlier – designed the shadow play, and her input adds to the sense in which animation is treated as a specific cultural and artistic form.

By situating animation’s history within a larger historical context with immense importance to France, the film places the medium of animation centre stage. Andrew (2005: 166) writes:

Among the documents that constitute the film’s dossier, one can read three of Robespierre’s speeches before the Convention in the first weeks of 1792, all dutifully transcribed from the Bibliothèque Nationale by Renoir’s assistant Marc Maurette. Though early on Renoir had thought of giving voice to these discourses of Big History, now he mocks that urge, for in a telling scene his camera follows Bomier and his girlfriend to a shadow play rather than Arnaud, who has gone to hear Robespierre. Not only does this validate our own decision to watch history on a screen; it suggests a new hierarchy in art and politics …

Part of this ‘new hierarchy’ is reflected in the film’s emphasis on daily life rather than grand historic events and speeches. Extending this process of revealing subjects marginalized from certain kinds of history, a scene of animation’s history supplants events with a more well-established importance. In doing so, La Marseillaise offers a renewed attention to the status and place of animation in French history and culture.

Conclusion

Examining the rich conversation that circulated around animation in 1930s France, this article has traced some of the dominant ways in which animation was understood and imagined during a specific time and within a specific place. Foregoing explanatory models of historical origins, production practices or technological essences, I have explored how animation’s identity as a medium became articulated through a multifaceted discourse of aesthetics, intermediality and history. One question I asked at the start of this article had to do with the significance of locality in understanding animation. In the context I have examined, discussions of animation were marked by locality, often drawing upon French contexts of history, art and cultural heritage to articulate the form. In some respects, although the examples of actual films were almost exclusively American, animation as a medium was still cast as something that was entwined with French identity. From its artistic sensibility to its historical basis, from its modernist experimentation to its cultural impact, the medium itself was partly configured in a French cultural vernacular. This could be seen as an implicit resistance to the power of American film culture, reasserting a sense of French culture in understandings of the medium, if not in the actual day-to-day production of films. More broadly, though, these references to locality indicate how the idea of animation as a form of art or a medium can be productively situated within a specific place and time, expressed through discourse and framed by culture.

Another question I asked at the start of this article related to how we can approach media as being refigured, changing over time rather than being fixed at some originary point. In the case of animation, perhaps one of the reasons why critics and commentators were drawn to tropes of fantasy, creativity and limitlessness in order to articulate their ideas of the form was that they found themselves remarkably free from constraints in describing and discussing it, without hearkening back to a single moment of invention, without invoking a particular moral or representational aim, and without holding on to a technological determinism. Michel Gorel (1930: 105), writing in Cinémonde, encapsulated this sense of animation: ‘The imagination … no longer works to create social values or morals. Quite simply, and in all liberty, it shakes them off. It constructs with an unsurpassable speed, worlds as charming as derisory, as enticing as artificial.’ While ultimately developing a framework for the medium after all, through discussions of its aesthetics, intermediality and history, the discourse of animation in 1930s France offered a particularly striking instance of how animation could be envisioned as a new form of art, ‘a mode of expression of a limitless power’ (Vuillermoz, 1937: 5). Animation was cast as a nascent medium, and it fell to words and ideas to articulate its expressive and affective liberty.