Wild Minds

Starred review from October 1, 2020
Entertaining history of early cartoon animation. Demonstrating impassioned research and technical know-how, Mitenbuler presents a series of historical anecdotes that, sequenced together, bring to life one of the world's most beloved art forms. When Winsor McCay, creator of the "Little Nemo" comics, debuted his first moving drawings in 1911, he jolted an entire industry to its feet. During the next few decades, a network of feuding production studios emerged, each trying to one-up the other with their inventiveness and intellectual properties. It was a cutthroat business, often leaving animators at odds with their executives. Otto Messmer, for example, the artist behind Felix the Cat, was frequently overlooked while his producer, Pat Sullivan, basked in fame and merchandising success. A rivalry brewed between Walt Disney, whose new animation studio wowed audiences with shorts like the "The Skeleton Dance" (1929), and Max Fleischer, the man behind the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons and inventor of technical marvels like the rotoscope. Mitenbuler chronicles the debut of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 and the unusual production of Disney's 1940 music-animation hybrid Fantasia while also giving ample time to the rambunctious crew behind Looney Tunes and the various hijinks on the Warner Brothers lot. The narrative crackles with captivating charm, adding color and nuance to a cast of familiar cartoon faces. The author is skilled at exploring historical context and tracks how most turns in the industry were reactionary, shifts in response to not just popular trends, but to labor politics, the Great Depression, and World War II. In the words of a Disney memo on his studio's core philosophies, "we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real unless we first know the real." Mitenbuler, too, proves adept at this tenet and, like a one-man animation department, effortlessly renders both celluloid and background. A finely drawn history of a critical period in the history of animation.

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Starred review from October 26, 2020
Journalist Mitenbuler (Bourbon Empire) casts the creators of animated cartoons as characters themselves in this rollicking history of the first 50 years of animation. The author tracks animation as a medium and an industry from the early 20th century to the 1960s, when cartoons moved from the theater to televisions and animation “changed almost overnight.” The book begins with the “restless” Winsor McCay, a famous New York Journal cartoonist who had a lasting impact on better-known animators (Walt Disney among them), but was “all but forgotten by the time of his death.” Meanwhile, directors Bob Clampett (who “pushed the limits of absurdity and aggressiveness”) and Chuck Jones (“sly and mischievous with a dirty sense of humor”) made up a mid-century “pirate crew” that brought such characters as Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Porky Pig to the silver screen. Household names like the Walt Disney Company get plenty of ink, but so do such edgier competitors as Fleischer Studios, formed before Disney and all but wiped out when legal trouble threatened its famed Betty Boop. In snappy prose, Mitenbuler writes a history rich with personalities. This Technicolor tour de force is impossible to put down. Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management.

December 4, 2020

While animation is often considered a children's medium, its early days were filled with social commentary, sexuality, satire, and countless creative and financial battles. The "golden age" that Mitenbuler (Bourbon Empire) refers to in his title spans from 1911 to the late 1960s. As the popularity of animated short and feature films exploded, so did the fates of the artists and their creations. Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland enchanted audiences, but John Randolph Bray patented McCay's methods and developed a successful animation studio. Otto Messmer tirelessly worked on Felix the Cat cartoons, while studio head Pat Sullivan toured the world taking credit. Eventually, the popularity and increasingly adult content of some cartoons led to the Hays code, which created strict rules about content in films of any kind, but this new censorship actually gave many cartoons a more universal appeal. The author explores dozens of artists, but the through line is the rivalry between early innovator Max Fleischer, who produced huge hits with Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman, yet endured almost constant financial and creative battles, and Walt Disney, 20 years younger but the eventual master of the medium, both artistically and financially. VERDICT An entertaining and revealing look into the dawn of a revolutionary art form.--Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

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