7 Minutes – The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon

By Norman M. Klein

Verso, 1993

7" x 9½", 284 pages

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I started reading this book while I had to travel on the plane, back and forth, between Canada and US for an event. Given that I had to spend 30 hours in the planes and airports, I needed something to read that was not too voluminous but still long enough for the trip. This book seemed to go in the same line as the book, "Of Mice and Magic", I've read just before.

This is another book that focuses on the history of cartoon. But it presents the history from a very different perspective. The author, who teaches at Cal-Arts examines the social, economic and most of all the cultural environment that influenced the authors, directors and animators from the very beginning to the 60's. This is much more a scholar book than a casual read. It could be classified on the "Theory of Cartoons" section of the library if such a section existed. But I like those types of books. When I was doing comics, I used to love to read French scholar books about semiotics, semiology, semantics treaties of comics as well as psychanalysis of comics characters and situations. Reading "7 minutes" felt like back in those days. I mention this as a sort of warning. This is not a light read.

So while books like "Of Mice and Magic" and "Hollywood Cartoons" spend all their time explaining how the form of cartoons evolved through the years, examining the personality influences, like how developped such technique the first time. How Disnet was steering his production team, ect, "7 minutes", while also touching those aspects, explains how those cartoon presentations and how those evolutionary decision came from the cultural environment of the time.

For instance, the cartoon that were produced in the 10's and 20's and early 30's were greatly influenced by the vaudeville format of presentation just like silent cinema format, apart from a few influencial innovators, was greatly influenced by the vaudeville format. For instance, McKay and his "Gertie the dinosaur" was actually a vaudeville act. The projection of the film and McKay interacting with the dinausaur was presented in vaudeville saloons.

But also, those early cartoons themselves, in addition to be presented in a vaudeville format, were also animated graphics. People doing those cartoons came from the newspaper cartoons. They extended their graphics cartoons into the animated realm. Since they were in black and white, what was perceived on the screen was more graphics elements than characters. So it was not unusual to see a character playing with the environment and tweaking it as if it was just lines on a white sheet of paper. There were a lot of morphing of representation into another by simply moving lines on the sheet of paper.

When sound came to the cinema, the culture environment started to change, Vaudeville was not in anymore. Furtheremore, because of the sound effects, a lot of what was previously graphically represented on the screen was now superfluous. During the 30's cartoon started to change to be more like cinema. Disney was the most active in transforming the cartoons so it looked more like cinema. Cartoon characters were not considered as just a set of graphical elements that could just be morphed to whatever, but were considered as true characters. And cartoon shorts were not just a set a vaudeville acts and gags anymore but were more like real stories.

It took years of steering the studio internal culture but by the mid 30's the whole Disney studio culture had changed. This steering, of course, required that new animation techniques be invented to give more "life" to the characters. This is basically where the "animation principles" were developped. Other studios followed suit but took more time to adjust and some of the studios never adjusted and eventually died.

Cartoons were presented as first part of the feature film presentation so it had to be on the same cultural level as the films that were presented. But that was not good enough for Disney. He wanted to do his one feature films. So Disney did. And Disney stayed in this track for years, producing animated features after animated features.

Meanwhile, the world was still evolving and changing. There came the 40's and the war. Disney, as well as about all the other animation studios executed commissioned work for the army. Disney, however, stayed in his track of producing animated features. The other studios, though, adapted to this new social and cultural environment that came with war. It is during this period that the chase cartoon format was developped. Chase cartoon that gaves us the best of Tex Avery at Warner Brothers first and later at MGM, and the best of Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett at Warner Brothers.

The chase cartoon format persisted after war but then came the popularity of television in the 50's. Another important cultural changer. There again, cartoon had to adapt to the new cultural environment. Most of the studios did not survive this cultural pression. Disney was big enough and diversified enough to survive but it's cartoon success was already on the decline. But UPA and Hanna Barbera were adapted to this new culture and produced a lot of cartoon specifically for TV. In the case of Hanna-Barbera, not only the format of presentation changed but the subjects were almost copies of TV series in cartoon format.

The book ends with Hanna-Barbera and UPA so to speak. The author seemed to have lost interest in cartoon after he published this book so we cannot get to know how he would analyse the social and cultural influences of the contemporain cartoons that we see on TV today. It would have been interesting if he kept a blog somewhere with his observations. So many succesfull cartoons have been produced since the 60's. There are so many cartoons that goes in all directions, though, these days, that it might be an impossible task to analyse the influcences. And it might just be infeasible to do antropological research on too contemporary piece of art anyway.

Still I wonder, given the world in which we live today, what are the influences and what type of succesfull cartoons will that get us a few years from now?