Moving Pictures: A History of American Animation from Gertie to Pixar and Beyond

Larsen (A Book About the Film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life), a film professor at Brigham Young University, presents a robust history of American theatrical animation from its newspaper comics strip roots to the present day. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, early animators borrowed “almost whole cloth from the printed page’s format, humor, and caricatures.” In the 1910s, the industry was propelled forward by such innovations as the rotoscope technique, which involved tracing over live-action footage, frame by frame, to create more lifelike cartoons. Those advances set the stage for Walt Disney’s rise from small-time ad man who churned out commercials in Kansas City, Mo., to founder of the L.A. studio where he developed his first animal-based cartoon, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, in 1927. (The character’s “impish, schoolboy” qualities also turned up in Mickey Mouse, who debuted in 1928.) Larsen energetically traces the remarkable adaptability of the medium from Disney’s meteoric success, through the use of animation studios during World War II to produce public service films, to the advent of television, which undermined cinematic shorts yet offered an exciting new avenue for animators, and the growth of such powerhouse studios as Pixar and Dreamworks. The result is a lively chronicle of a perennially evolving medium. (June)