Book review: Terrytoons: The Story of Paul Terry and His Classic Cartoon Factory

At first glance, W Gerald Hamonic’s Terrytoons: The Story of Paul Terry and His Classic Cartoon Factory promises a much-needed expansion to the historiography of classical studio animation in the United States. In a field dominated by work on Disney and Warner Bros., any monograph dedicated to the lesser-celebrated output of New York-based studios like Terry’s comes as welcome. Indeed, motivating Hamonic’s attention to Terrytoons is the idea – promulgated by Terry himself in an oft-repeated metaphor – that the studio was ‘the Woolworth to Disney’s Tiffany’, relying heavily on formula to churn out what Leonard Maltin (1987: 125) has characterized as a ‘product manufactured on an uncompromising schedule and sold with remarkable success’. Michael Barrier (1999: 35) has credited Terry with ‘establish[ing] cartoon production on an industrial basis’ in the early 20s. Thus, taken as an object of historical inquiry, Terrytoons would seem to offer an ideal case study in the industrial constraints of cartoon production, from the specific aesthetic implications of rock-bottom budgets to the broader consequences of programmatic distribution. Furthermore, because Terrytoons (considered alongside its predecessor, the Fables Studio) made cartoons from the early 1920s through the industry’s shift toward television in the 1950s, the studio is a valuable case for a diachronic analysis of responses to broader industry changes. Hamonic’s Acknowledgements section further reveals promising and extensive access in this regard to primary material on Terrytoons, including the Terry family’s private collection of studio documents, author interviews with surviving studio employees and holdings at numerous archives, all of which bode well, as Hamonic explains, for ‘chronicling a significant and much overlooked chapter in the history of American animation’ (p. viii).

And, in the strictest definition of the term ‘chronicle’ – that is, a chronologically-organized recitation of historical facts and events – the book succeeds, to a point. For historians interested in basic facts about Terrytoons and the biographical details of its founder Paul Terry, Terrytoons contains extensive information supported by a broad array of documentation collected over a 20-year span of research. Anyone seeking the week-to-week details of the labor strike that affected the studio in 1946–1947 or the particulars of Paul Terry’s army service in World War I will find this book a useful resource. Three appendices offer brief biographies of studio personnel, filmographic information about every Terry short and overviews of the studio’s TV series production. Richly illustrated, with production materials, cels, posters, photographs and archival documents appearing on most pages, the book is certainly a valuable reference work.

However, as a work of historical scholarship, the book has a number of limitations. First and foremost, Terrytoons fails to compellingly articulate its central contribution to work on classical studio animation beyond simply attending to a company and figure about which little has been written. Despite the depth of historical events and details covered here, the reader is left with little sense of the ultimate significance of the studio’s output within the context of the wider industry or of what knowledge a close look at Terrytoons yields to the wider field of animation history. This relative absence of interpretive work is partly a consequence of the structure of the book, which consists of 27 relatively short chapters, each covering an average of three to four years’ worth of events in the studio’s history. Crucially, the book lacks a formal introductory chapter that might have presented an interpretive framework for the chapters to follow. Instead, Hamonic starts with an extensive account of Paul Terry’s ancestry. The approach is typical of the author’s encyclopedic style throughout the book, which tends to present information in a raw, unrendered way that leaves historical interpretation largely up to the reader. More framing and articulation of the significance of its narrated events was needed to make the book successful as a historical intervention.

Another structural issue in Terrytoons is the extent to which it slips back and forth between being a history of the Terrytoons studio and a biography of Paul Terry himself. This is not an inherently problematic format, but the book’s account of the company’s style and industrial strategy is attributed almost exclusively to Terry’s decisions rather than to wider circumstances in the industry. In the process, Hamonic unfortunately applies an uncritical ‘great man’ model to Terry and commits the error common to so many popular biographies of figures like Walt Disney. While it would be a step too far to dismiss the book as hagiographic, it does miss many opportunities to more critically engage with Terry as a historical figure.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the book is its failure to offer a detailed account of Terry’s influence on American animation in the 20s, when his Aesop’s Fables cartoons were quite successful and influenced a number of animators, including Disney. To Hamonic’s credit, the book does partially correct Terrytoons’ erasure of its own animators, whom Terry explicitly refused screen credit while he ran the studio. Hamonic points out that Terrytoons employed one of the four women animators in the United States in the 1930s, Margaret Roberts, and the book’s attention to other Terrytoons employees from underrepresented groups, such as Robert Kuwahara and Doug Moye, is a great starting point for future work.

However, even in the sections of the book that take place after Terry’s sale of Terrytoons to CBS in 1955, the history of the studio is cast largely as the stories of the individuals who ran it: primarily Gene Deitch, Bill Weiss and Ralph Bakshi. While any history of studio animation will tend to privilege examining individual artists to a certain extent, the book does so without effectively integrating broader industry context, thereby limiting the power of its historical explanation. The book’s chronicle of Terrytoons post-Terry stands as a lost opportunity for a deeper look into the shifting economics of animation production during that period. To what extent did the studio’s low-cost, assembly-line strategy position it to make animation for TV in the 50s and 60s? To answer this and related questions in depth, the book as a whole would have benefitted immensely from a more comparative approach, one that considered Terrytoons with respect to peer studios like Walter Lantz Productions or other New York houses like Fleischer. More nuanced discussion of the aesthetics of the studio’s cartoons, its foray into CinemaScope production, and its international influence would also have been welcome.

Terrytoons is also prone to small factual errors, ambiguities and unanswered questions. For example, Hamonic claims that Terry’s first short, the 300-foot Little Herman (Thanhouser, 1915) was a bit over three minutes long and assumes incorrectly that it would have run at a sound speed of 24 frames per second rather than a silent speed of 16 or 18 (p. 8, note 1). Similarly, in a section on Terry’s Human Interest Reels, a 1917 animated shorts series about phrenology, the book fails to clearly and consistently characterize it as a pseudoscience (p. 81). The treatment of Terrytoons in relation to racial and ethnic representations in its cartoons is also somewhat lacking. Citing a 1969 interview with the studio head, Hamonic claims that Terry believed that any humor derived from stereotype ‘is inappropriate and capable of offending people’ (p. 80), despite ample evidence that Terrytoons like 1930’s Chop Suey and 1944’s Eliza on the Ice, among others, contained stereotyping. In his account of the studio’s caricatured Japanese mouse Hashimoto-san, animated by Bob Kuwahara, Hamonic says nothing about the character’s complicated representational status. While the Terrytoons shorts may very well have been less comparatively offensive than the output of other studios, the book’s limited discussion of animated representations of race and ethnicity unfortunately leaves the reader without a strong sense of the studio’s legacy in that regard.

Ultimately, Hamonic’s book is useful as a reference work for animation historians working on the classical studio period. However, its chronicle approach prompts in the reader a number of tantalizing research questions that it neglects to articulate explicitly or pursue in depth. While Terrytoons may not yield many interventions in the broader field of animation history, it does till new soil for future research.