Animation, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Imagination.

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  • Author(s): Telotte, J. P.
  • Source:
    Science Fiction Studies. Nov2015, Vol. 42 Issue 3, p417-432. 16p. 6 Illustrations.
  • Additional Information
    • Subject Terms:
      Animation (Cinematography); Cinematography; Modernism (Literature); Science fiction; Adventure stories
    • Abstract:
      This essay surveys a curious absence in accounts of science fiction's cinematic development--the numerous examples of sf-themed animation during the 1920s and 1930s. In this formative period when sf was finding a scant place in live-action cinema, with much of its appearance limited to serials, the sf imagination established a vigorous presence in the work of the period's key animation studios, all of which produced cartoons on the subjects that were then populating the new pulp magazines--space travel, alien encounters, robots, fantastic inventions. Seen from the vantage point of a "conservative modernism," these cartoons both reflected and critiqued science and technology's presence in and influence on modern life, in the process affording the emerging sf genre a most appropriate and fertile ground in the decades before World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]