Footnote #64 - The Golden Age of Animation
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Fresh from last week’s discussion of Mickey Mouse, Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr David McGowan (Lecturer in the Contextual and Theoretical Studies of Animation at the University of the Arts London) to map the mythology of the Golden Age of Animation, and in particular how this phase of the medium’s history has been framed in relation to the cartoon’s move from silent to sound technology but also its emergent stability and security as an industrial art form. Listen as they cover animation’s artistic recognition, questions of distribution, and the economic dominance of the major players in Hollywood cartoon production; the precise terms of ‘golden’ as a descriptor for the business of U.S. commercial animation, but also how alternate histories and representations suggest its limits for certain studios and identities; technological innovation, Disney-level aesthetic qualities, and the solidification of ‘full animation’; and the sentimentality afforded to the Golden Age as a period defined as much by dead ends as the heralding of animation’s growing prestige and ambition.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Barrier, Michael. 1999. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, Karl F. 1997. Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America. North Carolina: McFarland & Company.
Klein, Norman M. 1993. Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. London: Verso.
Maltin, Leonard. 1987. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New York and Scarborough, Plume Books.
McGowan, David. 2019. Animated Personalities: Cartoon Characters and Stardom in American Theatrical Shorts. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Schatz, Thomas. 1988. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York: Pantheon Books.