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Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation by Donald Crafton
Animation variously entertains, enchants, and offends, yet there have been no convincing explanations of how these films do so. Shadow of a Mouse proposes performance as the common touchstone for understanding the principles underlying the construction, execution, and reception of cartoons. Donald Crafton's interdisciplinary methods draw on film and theater studies, art history, aesthetics, cultural studies, and performance studies to outline a personal view of animated cinema that illuminates its systems of belief and world making. He wryly asks: Are animated characters actors and stars, just like humans? Why do their performances seem live and present, despite our knowing that they are drawings? Why is animation obsessed with distressing the body? Why were California regional artists and Stanislavsky so influential on Disney? Why are the histories of animation and popular theater performance inseparable? How was pictorial space constructed to accommodate embodied acting? Do cartoon performances stimulate positive or negative behaviors in audiences? Why is there so much extreme eating? And why are seemingly insignificant shadows vitally important? Ranging from classics like The Three Little Pigs to contemporary works by Svankmajer and Plympton, these essays will engage the reader's imagination as much as the subject of animation performance itself.
- GenresNonfictionFilm
Paperback
First published November 5, 2012
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March 21, 2020
In this book animation historian Crafton analyzes animation film, and classic cartoons in particular, using several art theories. In this respect this book is a follow-up to Paul Wells's 'Understanding Animation'.
In part one Crafton puts performance theories to use to argue that animated toons are performers. What this part particularly illustrates is that art theory is not an empirical science, and could use some input from psychology and neurobiology. To be frank, to me most of Crafton's argument consists of philosophical blabbering with little rooting in the real world.
Much, much better is Part two. In the first chapter Crafton convincingly describes how vaudeville traditions have entered the animation style, and how they lived on in this medium. Better still is the second chapter in which Crafton demonstrates how 'animated performance space' (the settings, layout and space of action of animated films) changed over the course of the 1930s, mostly at the Walt Disney studio. These two chapters are important additions to the animation history canon, and are highly recommended.
Unfortunately, in Part three Crafton reverts to the baloney of Part One. In the first chapter he tries to say something vague and unconvincing about laughter, and whether it has either an uplifting or destructive role on the public. This is the weakest chapter of the whole book, and the hypotheses put forward literally scream for thorough empirical research. The last chapter is on eating and on getting eaten. Here Crafton suddenly jumps to analysis of more modern animation films, like those of Jan Švankmajer, Bill Plympton and Blu. Even though these films certainly deserve analysis, the argument is ill-suited within the larger narrative Crafton's book aims to be.
To me Crafton's daring undertaking to write a unified book on such wide-ranged topics has failed, and I think he had better stuck to analysis of animation from the 1930s, the period he cherishes so dearly. But Crafton certainly is a well-informed and engaging writer who clearly loves his subject, and who has provided the reader with a plethora of notes and an interesting bibliography.
Recommended to cinema scholars, and Part Two to animation history lovers in general.
In part one Crafton puts performance theories to use to argue that animated toons are performers. What this part particularly illustrates is that art theory is not an empirical science, and could use some input from psychology and neurobiology. To be frank, to me most of Crafton's argument consists of philosophical blabbering with little rooting in the real world.
Much, much better is Part two. In the first chapter Crafton convincingly describes how vaudeville traditions have entered the animation style, and how they lived on in this medium. Better still is the second chapter in which Crafton demonstrates how 'animated performance space' (the settings, layout and space of action of animated films) changed over the course of the 1930s, mostly at the Walt Disney studio. These two chapters are important additions to the animation history canon, and are highly recommended.
Unfortunately, in Part three Crafton reverts to the baloney of Part One. In the first chapter he tries to say something vague and unconvincing about laughter, and whether it has either an uplifting or destructive role on the public. This is the weakest chapter of the whole book, and the hypotheses put forward literally scream for thorough empirical research. The last chapter is on eating and on getting eaten. Here Crafton suddenly jumps to analysis of more modern animation films, like those of Jan Švankmajer, Bill Plympton and Blu. Even though these films certainly deserve analysis, the argument is ill-suited within the larger narrative Crafton's book aims to be.
To me Crafton's daring undertaking to write a unified book on such wide-ranged topics has failed, and I think he had better stuck to analysis of animation from the 1930s, the period he cherishes so dearly. But Crafton certainly is a well-informed and engaging writer who clearly loves his subject, and who has provided the reader with a plethora of notes and an interesting bibliography.
Recommended to cinema scholars, and Part Two to animation history lovers in general.
Displaying 1 of 1 review