| This dissertation concentrates on the Golden Age of American animated cartoons from the teens to the end of thirties, and extends its scope to present-day digital animation. Works addressed include popular cartoons by Fleischers, Disney, and Pixar. My approach is interdisciplinary, encompassing film, working-class culture, management ideology, culture history, critical theory and psychoanalysis of mass entertainment with its mechanism of laughter and utopian aspiration.;As a whole, the dissertation approaches the studies of animation through the labor process. The unfolding of the frame-by-frame construction is simultaneously a record of the creative labor. The angle of labor opens up space for discussions of producers and the production process, and by extension, the spectators and audiences implicated in the Fordist and post-Ford industrialization. My production analysis relies on Harry Braverman's critique of Taylorism and the division of labor, Richard Sennett's theory of the craftsman and Donald Crafton's "self-figuration" thesis of early animation. Braverman's craftsmanship critique serves as the theoretical basis for analysis and comparison of the modes of production of various cartoons studios, while Sennett' theory of the material consciousness of the craftsman helps formulate analysis of the aesthetics informed and molded by respective mode of production. As such, I propose that Crafton's self-figuration thesis that the animator tends to "interject" him- or herself into the cartoon be incorporated into the theoretical frameworks by Braverman and Sennett. Taken together, I argue that the aesthetics of studio cartoons evolved out of the struggle for craftsmanship, dialogue with materials and techniques and the mode of production. American animators developed various aesthetics that at the same time mimed and negotiated the mode of production of their own studio and the society at large. |
