Cartoons made by Warner Brothers, Metro Goldwyn Mayor, Walter Lantz, and other animation studios, depicted ridiculous stereotypes of Blacks with disquieting regularity. It cannot be denied that the cartoons that so many enjoy to this day contained images that are by today’s standards completely unacceptable were they to be created now. One cannot see the images on television because they have been cut out, rendering the cartoons more suitable for children but it is easy to see where the censor’s hand has been when watching the cleaned up versions. Every time something explodes in a cartoon character’s face the character becomes a racial stereotype. Those myriad sight gags are no longer visible but the very choppiness is indicative of how prevalent these images were. Therefore it is ludicrous for a true lover of old animation to disassociate the unfortunate images with the rest of any given cartoon. The racism is intrinsic to the cartoon.
TS-12: Bobby Bumps A collection of lost and forgotten animated cartoons starring Earl Hurd's groundbreaking star! Includes: Bobby Bumps On His Goatmobile (1916), Bobby Bumps Gets a Substitute (1916), Bobby Bumps Starts a Lodge (1916), Bobby Bumps. Animated Films are ones in which individual drawings, paintings, or illustrations are photographed frame by frame (stop-frame cinematography). Usually, each frame differs slightly from the one preceding it, giving the illusion of movement when frames are. We’re very grateful to archive supporter, Chad Coyle for allowing us to digitize his collection of cartoons and illustrations from 1960s Playboy magazines. You might remember our previous posts on Erich Sokol, Eldon Dedini, Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi. Today, we focus on the 'Grand Old Man' of. McCay came to be known by his middle name, Winsor. His drawing skills emerged early. According to a story told within the family, McCay made his first drawing in the aftermath of one of the many fires that hit Spring Lake: he picked up a nail and etched the.
However, too many authors writing on the subject of animation would just as well not have to deal with the question at all. The only reference to race is in a description of the cartoon “Uncle Tom’s Cabana”: “Uncle Tom is a grand old black man (not so much a caricature as a parody of a caricature)” . And if the interview with Avery is to be believed, the main issue that modern audiences took him to task for was the violence in his cartoons! Do we become apologists and downplay the images or languidly claim that they are not racist at all?
Do we demonize them and grimly claim that there is no excuse for them whatsoever? It is not necessary to condone racism in order to acknowledge and study it in entertainment dating back to the 4. Bugs Bunny can still be a celebrated character emblazoned on t- shirts even if we admit that he put on blackface. Rather than shy away from unpleasantness, it is far more fruitful to delve into the racism and how it relates to our collective history.
Whether Americans like it or not, cartoons of the 30s and 40s, considered the Golden Age of Animation, were extremely racist. Cartoons made by Warner Brothers, Metro Goldwyn Mayor, Walter Lantz, and other animation studios, depicted ridiculous stereotypes of. The early animated frames were drawn by hand, a very time intensive task. Even though animated films, or 'cartoons,' as they're called, were never specifically aimed at children, they very often do appeal to the younger audience the most. As cartoons developed. Herald and His Moving Comics, is a 1911 animated short film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. One of the earliest animated films, it was McCay's first, and adapted characters from McCay's comic strip.
Why was it acceptable at the time? What does it reflect about the times in which the cartoons were made?
Watch over 70 free animations online. The collection features some classics, plus some modern gems. You’ll find a number of animations of literary classics in the mix too. For more great films, please visit our complete collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir. Newspaper comic strips debuted in North America in the later 19th century. The Yellow Kid is credited as the first and thankfully we have examples here! Slowly the the art form developed into what we now all recognize as a comic strip. Another strip we have in our.
What were the animators thinking? How did black people at the time feel about the stereotypes? And why did the stereotypes start to become unacceptable before the advent of the civil rights movement? Any animated cartoon is a reflection of its time and, when viewed as such, is an informative historical document. The racism in animated cartoons originated in large part with newspaper comic strips from the turn of the twentieth century.
The typical depiction of a black person is similar across both media and the pioneers of early animation were frequently comic strip artists to begin with. What is more, newspaper moguls regarded those cartoons of the Silent Era as ways to promote the comic strips and hence sell more newspapers. Therefore, cartoon characters appeared both in the print and movie media. A prime example is Winsor Mc. Cay and his comic strip “Little Nemo,” created in 1. Little Nemo in Slumberland” in 1.
A character common to both works is Impy, a grass skirt- wearing cannibal who utters gibberish such as “google- greegle- gimpleg- bumble.” (Sampson 1). Black cannibals would appear over and over again in cartoons. Other highly influential men who made the transition from comic strip to animation were Pat Sullivan, Walter Lantz, John Randolph Bray, and Paul Terry. Were these men racist? Probably no more than the average person at the time. It would be more accurate to say that they took the easiest road in expressing themselves. In Dark Laughter, the Satiric Art of Oliver W.
Harrington, a 1. 99. M. Thomas Inge notes in the introduction: Throughout the history of comics, the artists were given to drawing racial stereotypes, whether the characters were Irish, Jewish, Asian, Italian, or African American. For visual humor to be effective, as in editorial cartoons or comic strips, it tends to reduce the target of the satire or joke to a recognizable, generic image, which in turn unfortunately can become a negative stereotype (Sampson 1).
So while animation helped perpetuate negative stereotypes, it by no means originated it. American racism is as old as American history, in which slavery plays a major role. One of the recurring racial themes in animated cartoons began with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s immensely popular book.
Early filmmakers loved to use this story: It’s not hard to understand why early moviemakers were attracted to it. Besides the book’s continuing popularity with readers, the fact that just about everyone already knew the characters and the plot made it an easier story to “tell” through the essentially wordless medium of silent movies. And the large number of “Tom shows” still performing the novel on stage or in tents meant that movie makers had a reservoir of trained actors, made sets and sewn costumes ready to hand. It was an easy movie for them to make, and for audiences, still learning the conventions of the new medium, to appreciate (IATH). Naturally, the makers of animated cartoons followed suit but they did so in farcical fashion, blunting any subtleties and exaggerating certain traits. In a way that today’s minds would see as grossly insensitive, cartoon makers added anachronistic gags. For example, in a 1.
Uncle Tom’s Bungalow,” Uncle Tom, cowering under Simon Legree’s whip says, “My body may belong to you, but my soul belongs to Warner Brothers.” At the end of the cartoon he is able to buy his freedom because of his lucky dice. As usual, it is simplistic to decry the cartoon makers as racist when they were taking a well- known story and turning it into a squash and stretch cartoon. Uncle Tom was such a standard theme that a 1. Terrytoon cartoon, “Eliza on the Ice,” is almost identical to the former cartoon, even with Eliza running from the dogs as if the scene were a horserace. The main difference between the two cartoons is that in the latter, Mighty Mouse saves the day. Another recurrent image takes its cue from vaudeville and minstrel shows.
Mickey Mouse made his first appearance wearing tattered pants, a feature of the vaudeville costume (Klein 1. Also, music, and more specifically the very popular black jazz of the time, had a key influence on animated cartoons. Bosko, the first Looney Tunes character, was a chipper little black man given to breaking out in song and strumming a banjo at any given moment. The problem as it relates to the issue of racism is that black characters are portrayed as lazy and shiftless at any time when no music is heard.
Take for example the 1. Walter Lantz cartoon “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat,” in which particularly racist stereotypes sleep the day away in Lazytown until a Lena Horne (?) look- alike sashays off a riverboat and motivates the lethargic populace to dance and shimmy.
The message is that only music can energize black people. Racist images in cartoons actually increased with the America’s involvement with World War II. Naturally, cartoons portrayed the Japanese and the Germans in an unflattering light.
Take, for example, “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,” in which the Japanese are portrayed as yammering myopic, buck- toothed imbeciles. But blacks continued to suffer the brunt of the stereotyping, which might seem odd given that the United States was fighting a dictator who wanted to eliminate races he deemed inferior. Norman Klein links this increased racist imagery with the evolution of the chase cartoon. The war made cartoons more frenetic, more in keeping with a world at battle (1. Klein suggests that blacks in cartoons were in fact white people on the loose.
The war brought changes at home, particularly in Los Angeles, where most cartoons were being made in the 4. The big cities experienced a large influx of blacks and immigrants coming in to man the factories fulfilling defense contracts. Inevitably the races clashed, sparking riots. On a more psychological note, human beings typically stereotype others different from them in order to allay their own insecurities. Klein also suggests that the racism in cartoons betrayed white people’s anxiety over modernization. Perhaps it was soothing to see the same images of an earlier time reinforced again, especially if framed within more frenetic pacing.
Indeed, audiences might have felt strangely reassured upon seeing a familiar blackface after a calamitous explosion. It is amazing how frequently the same gags were repeated.
One might think that almost every black man looked like Stephin Fetchit . Any time something exploded near a character’s head or if he was doused with tar or ink, it was certain that the he would turn into a minstrel blackface with bulbous lips. Take just about any Tom and Jerry cartoon from the 4. Anybody that traveled to Africa was guaranteed to find himself in a cauldron surrounded by dancing cannibals. Characters that were black to begin with were typically lazy, oversexed, and loved to gamble. In “All This and Rabbit Stew” Bugs Bunny easily lures a shuffling black hunter into a craps game.
What were the makers of the cartoons thinking? Did they have contempt for black people? Were they simply conforming to the norms of society at the time? Were they attempting to satirize racism? Did they mean any harm?
George Pal was a Hungarian artist who immigrated to Hollywood, where he founded George Pal productions and produced stop- motion animation under the banner of Puppetoons and Madcap Models. From 1. 94. 2 to 1. Jasper, a little black boy whom a bad intentioned scarecrow and crow try to lead astray.
Pal explained to Cinefantastic magazine in 1. American Negro and believed it to be the richest and the most colorful in American History.” (Sampson 3. In 1. 94. 6 Hollywood Quarterly took him to task for the Jasper cartoons, not so much for Jasper as for the scarecrow and crow who, in their opinion, embodied the worst aspects of racial stereotyping: Pal “perpetuated the misconception of Negro characteristics.