Book review: The World History of Animation

This book’s foreword, penned by French animation director Sylvain Chomet – known for The Triplets of Belleville (2003) and The Illusionist (2010) – assures the reader that ‘this is the kind of book that [he] would have dreamed of finding in [his] Christmas stocking as a boy’ (p. 6). Indeed, any book offering a comprehensive, wide-reaching world history of animation is a cause of celebration for lovers of the form. Giannalberto Bendazzi’s informative encyclopedic volume Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation remains a useful reference source, but its 1995 publication date leaves two decades of the most recent animation history unexplored. In the last 20 years, the proliferation and technological advances in computer-generated imagery have drastically altered the animation landscape. This trend has been addressed directly in a number of excellent recent studies on digital animation and visual effects, such as Tom Sito’s Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation (2013) and Stephen Prince’s Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (2012), but no other English-language historical project of this magnitude has been released in the digital era. This volume is, therefore, an ambitious undertaking which attempts to at once illustrate (literally, in this case) a century’s worth of animation history and bring the historical record up to date.

Cavalier himself places the book in its immediate context in the introduction, arguing that animation has come full circle: ‘in the same way that early animation was just part of the whole fairground slideshow experience, CGI animation and special effects have become an integral part of the modern blockbuster, often a roller coaster/ghost-train type experience’ (p. 10). This is not a novel idea, having been previously developed in Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) and Scott Bukatman’s Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (2003), among others. However, it provides a clear frame for Cavalier’s historical narrative and establishes continuity between early animation and today’s moment, setting the stage for the book’s year-by-year exploration of animation trends and developments.

The introduction is followed by a section entitled ‘Brief Histories of World Animation’. It is here that Cavalier’s work first betrays its Western bias. The author writes that ‘American animation is the sun around which all other animation has orbited’, grouping the entire rest of the world under the common denominator of ‘these other planets [which] contain weird and wonderful life-forms and mutations of their own that are worth exploring’ (p. 13). Furthermore, he provides historical overviews for only three continents: North America, Europe (divided into Eastern and Western), and Asia. South America, Australia, and Africa, along with ‘Nordic animation’, are grouped together in a chart which takes up a total of two pages and lists about 20 films each. The films chosen for each category represent almost every decade of the past hundred years, albeit only through a couple of examples in most cases. The lists include very few female directors and tend to focus mainly on a few countries from each region (South Africa and Egypt, Brazil and Argentina, etc). Given the presence of the word ‘world’ in the book’s title, this marginalization of certain animation traditions (here and in the main body of the book) is puzzling and unfortunate. This omission to include even the briefest written account of animation from these continents could be interpreted as a comment on the insignificance of their contributions to the development of the cinematic mode. Moreover, it represents a missed opportunity to address and compensate for the scarcity of information in English-language animation scholarship on these regions. For the volume to truly live up to its title, all continents would need to be well represented in future editions and given the same meticulous attention that the current version dedicates to Western animation.

Still, Cavalier’s introductory section provides a solid entry into his book by offering a concise and focused breakdown of the geographical areas he will cover for the rest of the book. His ‘brief histories’ of North American, Western European, Russian and Eastern European, and Asian animation include good short summaries (of four pages, on average) of the historical development of the mode in the respective regions. The author emphasizes the unique and notable contributions of each area, such as Europe’s role as a ‘fertile area for the experimental and the avant-garde’ (p. 18) or Canada’s recently established position as a ‘world leader in digital animation’ (p. 17). At the same time, he singles out specific countries with prominent animation industries or traditions in order to profile them in more detail. Thus, the brief history of UK animation includes information about the GPO, Halas & Batchelor’s studio, the importance of Channel 4’s contribution to animation production, and Aardman Animations, succinctly expressed in just under half a page. While this prevents the sections from being too general and adds depth to the information offered, it also occasionally leaves very little space for other nations. Such is the case in the section on Asia, which is almost entirely devoted to Japan and China, leaving only a small paragraph for India, and even less for Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Each ‘brief history’ features relevant film stills and a convenient list – separate from the main text and outlined in yellow – of key figures and films, which can serve as a starting point for further research. To take a case study, Eastern Europe is represented by such prominent directors as Walerian Borowczyk, Yuri Norstein, Priit Pärn, and Jiří Trnka. The overall selection is representative and well chosen, even though there are some omissions: not a single animator from Bulgaria, Belarus, or Slovakia is mentioned, for example. Moreover, the names of the films are only given in the original language (also the case for Asia and Western Europe), which may pose some initial difficulty in cross-referencing.

This shortcoming aside, Cavalier’s work offers a stunning collection of lush illustrations and short informative sections, recalling Jerry Becks’s similarly structured edited volume Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, The History of Cartoon, Anime & CGI (2004). The World History of Animation provides an impressive range of information organized chronologically and divided into clearly delineated and well-chosen periods in animation history: ‘the origins of animation’ (pre-1900), ‘the era of experimentation’ (1900–1927), ‘the golden age of cartoons’ (1928–1957), ‘the television age’ (1958–1985), and ‘the digital dawn’ (1986–2010). ‘The origins of animation’ features a single-page account of the prehistory of animation. It touches upon the discovery of persistence of vision, optical toys and devices such as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope, as well as on Emile Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique. The following encyclopedic entries, starting from 1872, cover several important early developments which paved the way for cinema, namely Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs, the praxinoscope, Étienne-Jules Marey’s motion photographs, the kinetoscope, and Georges Méliès’ early trick films. While short, this section offers a solid introduction to some crucial episodes in pre-1900 film and animation history.

‘Film animation: The era of experimentation’ examines the first three decades of the 20th century, defining the turn of the century as the moment when ‘the history of animation really became distinguishable from the history of cinema’ (p. 46). This section focuses predominantly on American animators and cartoonists and the beginning of the industrialization of American animation. Early pioneers from Russia, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and India are also introduced, but Cavalier devotes less space to them. Germany’s contribution to early animation is represented through the work of experimental filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, and Lotte Reiniger. This part of the book also features biographical entries for Emile Cohl, Ladislaw Starewicz, Winsor McCay, Max and Dave Fleischer, Walt Disney, Willis O’Brien, and Lotte Reiniger, which provide good overviews of their careers and major contributions to animation. Finally, it includes a short history of avant-garde animation and highlights key animation terms such as cel animation, rotoscoping, cutout animation, and the multiplane camera.

‘Film animation: The golden age of cartoons’, which covers the years 1928–1957, begins by introducing Walt Disney as the visionary the world of animation needed to ‘pull the best … artistic and commercial ideas together’ (p. 95). Disney films (both iconic shorts such as The Old Mill and features such as Fantasia) feature prominently in the section. Cavalier also includes entries on Warner Bros and Fleischer studios, in addition to Walter Lantz, Hanna and Barbera, and Tex Avery. While commercial US animation dominates this part of the book as well, important avant garde figures such as Berthold Bartosch, Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Len Lye, and Norman McLaren are also mentioned. Additionally, Cavalier brings attention to animators who played pioneering roles within their respective national traditions: Russia’s Alexander Ptushko, China’s the Wan brothers, Japan’s Kenzo Masaoka, and the Czech Republic’s Jiří Trnka.

Despite its title, ‘The television age’ does not focus on animated TV productions, but rather on features and shorts released during the period between the late 1950s and mid-1980s, which Cavalier introduces as a time when the rise of television brought about ‘a culture of limited animation [and] simplified design approach’, as well as increased use of animation in advertising and reduced animation feature budgets (p. 170). Here, the author adheres to his established pattern of mixing vibrantly illustrated short entries about important animators and films from different nations with biographical data and glossary inserts defining terms such as anime or clay animation. Perhaps due to the need to save space, the biographical entries are reduced to a single column or one page at best, which means that significant figures such as Osamu Tezuka, Ralph Bakshi and Terry Gilliam receive comparatively little attention. On the other hand, the inclusion of two highlighted entries entitled ‘1970s computer animation milestones’ and ‘1980s computer animation milestones’ is an inspired choice which sets the stage for the book’s final section, ‘The digital dawn’.

‘The digital dawn’, dated 1986–2010, features most of the milestone shorts and features one might expect from an historical overview of the past quarter century, such as Luxo Jr (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Akira (1988), Jurassic Park (1993), Toy Story (1995), The Triplets of Belleville (2003), Waltz with Bashir (2008), etc. However, instead of focusing exclusively on CGI and visual effects, as the heading might suggest, Cavalier covers a broader and richer spectrum of animation filmmaking, including Aardman Animations’ clay animation films, Adam Elliot’s stop-motion short Harvie Krumpet (2003), Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated TV series Samurai Jack, Piotr Dumala’s Crime and Punishment (2000), Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998), etc. This section, which features some of the most extensively illustrated and effectively laid-out pages in the book, also includes an insert on Flash and the animation boom and ‘a brief history of motion/performance capture’.

The book’s thematic periodization, along with the clear regional and time markers above every entry, makes Cavalier’s reference source reader-friendly and easily navigable. The inclusion of biographies of key animation figures is an excellent resource which adds to the book’s encyclopedic value, although the variation in length of these biographies can seem arbitrary at times (why dedicate only a single page each to Len Lye and Norman McLaren, and three to Emile Cohl?) The same is true of the entries dedicated to specific films: while they are informative and well written, some of them are noticeably shorter than others (a couple of paragraphs versus a full page or even two) leaving so much blank space on the page that one may wonder whether they could not have been expanded.

While Cavalier’s entries are well written, carefully selected, and varied in content (MIT’s Whirlwind computer is mentioned alongside Norman McLaren on p. 158), they suffer from occasional editing and fact-checking errors. For instance, the terms ‘cel’ and ‘pixilation’ are both spelled with double ‘l’ on p. 10 and p. 399, respectively. There are also some factual mistakes, such as referring to animation historian Jerry Beck by the name ‘Jeff’ (p. 225), attributing the film A Wild Hare (1940) to Chuck Jones instead of Tex Avery (p. 122), and illustrating Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) with an image that does not appear in the film (p. 63). It is unfortunate that editing oversights like these partly undermine the book’s reliability as an authoritative resource and may diminish its appeal to scholars.

The final section of the volume, entitled ‘Resources’, features a glossary of animation terms, a list of Academy Award winners in the ‘Animated Feature’ and ‘Animated Short’ categories, as well as a short collection of animation book titles, ‘useful websites’, and animation colleges around the world. The glossary contains clear, succinct definitions of key animation terms such as ‘in-between’ and ‘doubles’, as well as descriptions of various animation techniques, including direct animation, pinscreen, and pixilation. The section dedicated to Oscar laureates is convenient and useful, but could be improved by the addition of other award-granting institutions, particularly major animation festivals such as Annecy, Hiroshima or Ottawa. Likewise, the list of suggested animation books, websites, and colleges is a good resource, but could be expanded in order to be more comprehensive. This is especially true of the books section, where the works of prominent animation scholars such as Alan Cholodenko, Paul Wells, and Donald Crafton are conspicuously absent.

Some of these weaknesses are counterbalanced by the book’s value as a visual resource. With at least one crisp, high-quality image per page, it is a delight to simply flip through. At once an annotated album and an encyclopedia, The World History of Animation is a beautiful, well-designed object with an effective layout and striking images. On its visual merits alone, it deserves a place on any animation aficionado’s shelf. As a work of historical scholarship, however, it leaves something to be desired. While it offers an impressive range and wealth of information, the occasional inaccuracies and strong regional bias prevent it from being a definitive chronicle of world animation.