[On April 17th,
1937, Daffy Duck made his debut, in the Warner Brothers cartoon “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” In
honor of that foul-tempered feathered friend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy five
animated histories. Share your thoughts on them, on Daffy, or on animation or
cartoons of any kind for a weekend post that’s sure to draw a crowd!]
On an animation
icon’s surprising starting points.
As I wrote in one
of my earliest posts, it’s possible to read The Cat in the Hat (1957) as particularly radical in its portrayals
of family and gender roles (especially in relationship to dominant 1950s images
and narratives). But even if you don’t subscribe to that reading of Cat, it’d be very difficult to argue
that its author, Dr. Seuss
(Theodore Geisel), didn’t have a substantial and generally very radical impact on the
world of children’s books and animation—not just in his voice and style,
his silliness and playfulness, his breaking of virtually every formal and
generic rule, but also in his subtle but frequent inclusion of progressive
themes and morals, including prominently the anti-Cold War (and anti-war period)
ethics of The Butter Battle Book, among many other such messages.
Which makes it
that much harder to grapple with the fact that Geisel got his start crafting
animated propaganda films for the military during and after World War II. But
he did—first making army training films (featuring the cautionary tales of one Private
Snafu) as part of Frank
Capra’s Signal Corps (the organization that produced the most prominent
U.S. WWII propaganda, the epic eight-part Why We Fight series), then branching
out into even more overt anti-Axis propaganda works. Geisel even continued to
make such films in the aftermath of the war, creating works to be distributed to soldiers in
occupied post-war Germany. To call these films propaganda isn’t to critique
them, necessarily—the term has come to be used pejoratively much of the time,
but at its core it’s simply descriptive, a categorization of works that are
overtly designed to further political purposes. Geisel’s World War II works
were precisely that, and achieved their purposes clearly and convincingly.
As the Capra
reference indicates, Geisel was far from alone as an artist who enlisted in the
war effort—in fact, he was more the
norm than the exception. Moreover, it’s even possible to link his World War
II works directly to (for example) his later anti-Cold War messages, since in
both cases he could be seen as opposing the proliferation of violence and war
(in the first case by the Axis powers, in the second by the Cold War
superpowers). But for me, the problem is more one of style—whatever else we say
about propaganda films, they are by design and necessity both straightforward
and conservative, neither of which are terms that we would likely apply to most
of Seuss’s subsequent children’s books and works. Of course we can simply say
that Seuss evolved and changed, as does any artist (especially a talented one)
over the length of a long career. But we also have to consider that each stage
of Seuss’s career tells us something about the man and his work, and can’t
dismiss or minimize the first stage just because it doesn’t line up with how we
(or at least I) like to think of him.
Next animated
history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other animation or cartoon thoughts you’d share?
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