Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age

by Michael Barrier

In Hollywood Cartoons, Michael Barrier takes us on a glorious guided tour of American animation in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, to meet the legendary artists and entrepreneurs who created Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Wile E. Coyote, Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry, and many other cartoon favorites.
Beginning with black-and-white silent cartoons, Barrier offers an insightful account, taking us inside early New York studios and such Hollywood giants as Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM. Barrier excels at illuminating the creative side of animation--revealing how stories are put together, how animators develop a character, how technical innovations enhance the "realism" of cartoons. Here too are colorful portraits of the giants of the field, from Walt and Roy Disney and their animators, to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Based on hundreds of interviews with veteran animators, Hollywood Cartoons gives us the definitive inside look at this colorful era and at the creative process behind these marvelous cartoons.

Genres: History, Film, Nonfiction, Art, Business

648 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Garrett Cash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barrier's history of animation is detailed and revealing, even for those who already know a good deal of what he's talking about. As another reviewer pointed out, this book is best read in conjunction with Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons; Revised and Updated (which you should read first), since Maltin's approach and style is extremely different from Barrier's. While Maltin focuses more on the history of different studio's overall changes, Barrier is more focused on the evolution of character. He spends much of his time discussing animator's struggles with trying to get their characters just right, trying to evolve them, getting them to have good chemistry with the other characters, choosing to have a realistic style or nonrealistic, etc.

My main complaint with Barrier is actually one of the strengths of the book as well, which is his hyper criticism. Leonard Maltin begins his book with the sentence "I love cartoons," and you can feel that enthusiasm run throughout his work. Barrier on the other hand, is clearly just as passionate, but not quite as adoring of all things animated. There are times in the book where you wonder what the guy does like, since he seems to find major fault with even all the cartoons or animated features that are typically considered masterpieces. Without a careful reading, you might walk away thinking that all that Barrier likes is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, anything by Bob Clampett, and select masterpieces by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. While it's true that he has a somewhat overly sharp critical eye for works that achieve greatness just fine, his criticisms are generally insightful and deeply technical from a storytelling and animated point of view which would be hard to notice for most people.

While you may not always agree with him, there will surely be thoughts he has on some of your favorite works that you never thought about. One of my favorite Tom and Jerry cartoons is Mouse in Manhattan, and while Barrier has nothing nice to say about it, he points out that the animators failed to animate any people populating the city! I always wondered why that version of Manhattan always felt sort of empty. So this is an example of how you can learn from Barrier's thoughts and become a more nuanced thinker on animation. I noticed many things watching Chuck Jones' The Dover Boys of Pimento University before I read anything from Barrier about it that I had learned from reading his book, and once I did get to his analysis he pointed out the very things I noticed! So the book does train your eye!

I would highly recommend reading this book along with Maltin's if you're an animation obsessive like me, since you'll never think of characterization, style, detail, and storytelling in animation quite the same again.

[William Coates · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1969 Michael Barrier traveled to Los Angeles to record interviews with veterans of comics and animation. At the time, he was proprietor of Funnyworld, a mimeographed piece on comics that would soon be converted to a fully printed magazine devoted to comics and especially animation. "The idea," writes Barrier on his website, "was to publish the interviews in Funnyworld." On that first trip to Los Angeles, he managed to record interviews with Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, Roger Armstrong, Ward Kimball, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Carl Stalling, and Billy Bletcher. These interviews were indeed published in Funnyworld, but then he got more ambitious. Along with friend and animator Milt Gray, Barrier began recording interviews "on a much larger scale" for his proposed book on a history of animation.

The result, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age, is not a book about the history of animation in general, but on the history of character animation. "At issue," writes Barrier in his introduction, "was whether animated cartoons were by their nature ancillary to other arts...or a unique art form--a claim rooted not in graphics, but in the animation of their characters." This is why the majority of the book is devoted to the Disney studio and the Warner Bros studio where strides in character animation occurred, and why the Paul Terry Studio, Van Beuren Studio, the Lantz Studio, and Screen Gems are given curt treatment.

For some people, the book may be too "Disneycentric," but that's the reality of the history of animation in general. In the study of character animation, Disney played an eminent role. Barrier shines when he describes and analyzes the pioneering efforts of the animators who sought to lift 2D drawings of figures from the page and give them a reality of their very own. It began with animator Norm Ferguson granting Pluto cognizance in Playful Pluto in the now famous flypaper sequence, followed by Freddie Moore's development of "stretch and squash" in The Three Little Pigs. It reached its zenith with Bill Tytla's Grumpy, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Then as Walt was plagued by financial losses and a crippling strike in 1941, Warner Bros took the torch, peaking with two collaborations that produced classics of the animation: That of animator and director (Rod Scribner and Bob Clampett) and writer and director (Michael Maltese and Chuck Jones).

What makes the book appear to suffer at times is ultimately what distinguishes the book. Hollywood Cartoons is very much Barrier's own book. Barrier, like any good historian, is very opinionated. The book is colored with his high standards and they may be too high for the general reader. At times I found myself pausing, raising an eyebrow, and muttering to myself, "Really?" But when such disagreements occurred, it caused me to think about his arguments and ultimately think about the films themselves. Barrier is a very articulate writer and he backs up his strong opinions with explanations. It's those arguments (and those disagreements!) that distinguishes the book and is indeed its strength.

[Mike Rawlings · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thoroughly researched, exhaustively detailed, chock full of information never presented elsewhere, and yet... Nowhere near as much fun to read as Leonard Maltin's "Of Mice and Magic." Barrier does not seem to love cartoons, and damns with faint praise nearly everything except the work of Bob Clampett.

[Fazzz14 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just like someone already said: if you love or you're interested in animation, or would like to learn its history, skip this book and read OF MICE AND MAGIC. Not only it is charming and fun to read, and immerse you in the arts of animation from any point of view, but it is better even at the only things this book tries to be about: the history and the development of animation.

So, while this book is a deep description of the Golden Age of Animation history, it actually feels like a contemptuous analysis of an art that some producer told Barrier to take a look at, and so he did. Make no mistake, like any critic and historian, Barrier has only an handful of works or names that are up to his standard; everything else in the book is criticized and presented as mediocre, and not even in an interesting way.

If you are passionate about arts, cinema and animation you probably already have critical sense, and that means you'll be disagreeing with Barrier 80% of times. And I'm not even talking about tastes: sometimes you'll be wondering why he needed to remark a detail that clearly doesn't make any sense in the context. It's seems really like the book has been written by someone who doesn't get arts, but is interested in the practical aspects of it.

For any other reader though, I mean people who know absolutely nothing about the subject and just want to learn, they may be captivated by the highly technical and critical approach of the author (criticizing always gives the impression of knowledge), but I still want to give the same old advice: read OF MICE AND MAGIC. It is a more complete book about the history of the medium, it is a more fascinating book about the creative minds behind this art, and it simply is a better book to read.

[Andre · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm officially throwing in the towl on this one. It's been a month and I just can't get back into it. I'm gonna start following the words of Philip Roth, who said that if you haven't finished the book in two weeks then all is lost. I know the book is long but two weeks should be sufficient for a 600 page history and it wasn't.

Hollywood Cartoons details the history of American animation from about the early 1910s to the early 1960s. It spends quite a bit of time with Disney, from the late 1920s to the early 1940s and then jumps over to, mostly, Warner Bros. from the early 1940s to the late 1950s (never really got to read about Warner Bros, unfortunately). In between, it briefly summarizes other studios, like Fleischer, MGM, and the early days of Winsor McCay and co.

One of my big problems with the book was Barrier's attitude. He seems to dislike almost every single cartoon he mentions. He nitpicks constantly about the animation quality and storytelling chops of the likes of Disney, Tex Avery, the Fleischers, etc. Another annoying aspect was how useless a lot of the information felt, particularly with the Disney section. It just went on and on about daily meetings and who was doing what (and of course, Barrier would tell us why this person was inadequate for that position). It almost would get interesting when there'd be something like the strike at Disney but then it'd go back to the minutiae of what happened in this short and what happened in that short.

But mostly it was just plodding. The only thing I enjoyed about it, really, was an early bit where it went into some detail about how the animation worked which was really intriguing.

[Andrew Fish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Hollywood studios produced a mass of animation much of which has become iconic, whether it is the feature length animations of Walt Disney or the shorts of Warner’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Even today, five decades after Warner ceased to regularly release shorts and after Walt Disney’s death, many of the characters have remained in the public consciousness, from Bambi and Pinocchio, to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Michael Barrier’s history embraces a subject which resonates across the generations probably to a larger extent than much of Hollywood’s live action output of the same era.

Of course, the sheer scale of such a subject prevents any history being exhaustive, so there are any number of paths an author could take through the subject matter. Barrier’s approach is to explore, not the people or the characters, but the way in which both the structures of organisations and the actions of individual animators, directors and writers advanced the art. This means that not every person gets equal treatment – there’s more about Michael Maltese than Mel Blanc, for example – and not every cartoon character gets mentioned - there’s no Foghorn Leghorn or Marvin the Martian – but instead you get a feel for the key developments which propelled the industry forward, from the development of rotoscoping and cell animation, through the modulation of jokes to the way in which cheaper, more stylised backgrounds took over as the industry waned.

Superficially, this approach means that the book can seem a little lopsided. There are two whole chapters more or less dedicated to Snow White, exploring both the structuring of the teams and the approach to animation, but later films and features garner only a few words (if, indeed, they are mentioned at all). Whilst for someone less enamoured of Disney than Warner, this might seem to make the book less interesting, it actually builds a shorthand which allows the reader to readily understand the significance of later developments without becoming repetitive. Some elements, such as music or voice acting, get relatively short shrift, but these are justifiable choices in whittling down the size of the task. Equally, not every studio is covered in the same depth: Warner and Disney get much more coverage than MGM, for example, but the manner in which Barrier chooses his focus gives a strong narrative and there’s no reason someone couldn’t write a dedicated history of Tom and Jerry if they chose.

One thing that’s a little jarring is the unusual degree of critique. One wouldn’t expect a biography of the Beatles to harp on Paul’s slightly dodgy harmony on I’ll Be Back, but here the author doesn’t shy away from slaughtering sacred cows, picking out the rushed work finishing Snow White, the poor integration between characters and background in What’s Opera Doc or the inconsistent personality of Hook in Peter Pan. It does show the pressures the studios were frequently under, but it gives the impression that the author is more of a critic than a fan, putting him at odds with his audience. Additionally, towards the end of the book, it feels as if the author is belittling the burgeoning television animation market, dismissing the likes of Yogi Bear, in order to serve the idea of an industry in decline in time for the death of Walt Disney in 1966. Perhaps to a professional eye the cartoons of the 1960s and 70s don’t merit the inclusion as part of the golden age, but for those of us who grew up as much with Scooby Doo as Bugs Bunny, it is less apparent why such a distinction should be drawn.

Ultimately, Barrier has succeeded in creating a coherent overview of a very large subject. Arguably it is only one man’s view and may not please all readers, but it serves as a good starting point whilst leaving space for other writers to fill in the gaps.

[Eliska Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished reading Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age by Michael Barrier also for my history of early animation class. This book offers an in-depth look at the golden age of American animation, focusing on the 1930s to the 1950s. Barrier’s detailed accounts of studios like Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM, along with insights into iconic characters and animators, make it a fascinating read.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why do I get the feeling Michael Barrier really hated cartoons?

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book at a leisurely pace over a long period; the technology of these weird times allowed me to, with either my DVD collection or YouTube, watch every cartoon he talked about extensively as I went along, adding immeasurably to the lessons of the book, which is beautifully written, passionate, and remarkably detailed. It makes me wish Barrier would write a book about movies in general, or pretty much any other subject. (His biography of Walt Disney, The Animated Man, is out this spring.)

You’ll get a good idea of the tone of the book from Barrier’s website, which features regular commentary on the history of cartoons and the industry as it stands today. Barrier, you’ll notice, doesn’t care much for TV cartoons, for a lot of Pixar’s output, for nearly all of the other CG films currently being generated, and perhaps most adamantly, for the work the Disney Company has done since Walt’s death. Although I may disagree about the cinematic value of specific films, in regard to their contributions to animation he’s undoubtedly right. The phenomenon he calls “literal animation” has taken over, beginning in the early ’60s and perhaps before. Even my favorite animated feature, WATERSHIP DOWN, employs quite a bit of it; I think it’s important to note here that I can appreciate a number of the movies he has dismissed as movies… as cartoons they leave a bit more to be desired, the gist being that animation directors and their staffers have nearly given up on the true potential of cartoons as a medium, and they started doing so not long after WWII.

This brings us to the book, which is a critical and immaculately researched history of American animation, touching on all major studios, films, and changes from the silent era to Walt Disney’s death in 1966. Barrier is necessarily serious-minded and specific, coming across as someone with obvious passion for his subject but also someone who is writing a book and knows his material from back to front. There is no sense at any point, even talking about films like PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA, that Barrier is overawed; he concentrates heavily on each short and feature’s use of character animation, and thus PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA come off as narrow and unsophisticated compared to SNOW WHITE or DUMBO (however much, in cinematic terms, the opposite may seem to be true). Again, he’s spot-on with every assessment; he doesn’t allow anything to be approached or dismissed in a simplistic way. Some of his detractors complain that he doesn’t let a single film escape criticism. To me, that’s the mark of someone with the greatest possible interest in his subject. (The same is true of Phillip Norman’s book Shout; if a book like this is just a valentine, what’s the point? It will explore and reveal nothing.) He’s not just a gigantic fan of cartoons, he’s an admirer of them, he seeks to understand them, he discovers a higher level in them and, inevitably, must notice when that level is absent. The result is a book as consistently surprising and insightful (stunningly insightful) as it is informative.

Informative it certainly is, lighting up much-needed detail on the intricate world of cartoon-making in the ’30s and ’40s, uncovering each personality and the ins and outs of every studio in gripping narrative fashion.

I was enamored enough with the book that, almost as an extension of my use of newfound technological capabilities while reading it, I was immediately able to communicate with him in a way I probably couldn’t have fifteen years ago. I sent him an e-mail, saying in much shorter form many of the same things I said here, and he answered with this:

Thanks, Nathan, I very much appreciate your message. I wrote Hollywood Cartoons for people like you, and I’m delighted that you’ve read it and enjoyed it. I was particularly pleased by your use of “passionate,” because passion is exactly what I brought to the writing of the book. Some of my critics seem to think that real passion is inconsistent with an effort to achieve precision in both language and facts, but I’ve always felt that the opposite is true, that genuine passion reveals itself in a scrupulous attention to detail. Thanks again, and I hope you find The Animated Man just as enjoyable as Hollywood Cartoons.

Mike Barrier

There is an excitement in Hollywood Cartoons, a sense of discovery and of depth, that’s been absent from everything else I’ve read about cartoons, even from capable writers like Jerry Beck and great ones like Leonard Maltin and John Canemaker. More than in any other passage, I sense this in Barrier’s chapter on SNOW WHITE, a film that clearly means as much to him (though, being a great nonfiction writer and not a composer of amazon.com reviews or livejournal analyses, he doesn’t let on) as PINOCCHIO does to me.

[Gijs Grob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boek over de ontwikkelingen in animatie tussen ca. 1930 en 1955. Barrier focust op animatie, dat wil zeggen, de techniek die tekeningen doet bewegen - andere zaken, als lay-out, story development, backgrounds, direction, of simpelweg de geschiedenis van studio's worden wel besproken, maar zijn duidelijk veel minder belangrijk.

Dit geeft Barriers boek een hele andere focus dan die van Norman M. Kleins 'Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon', dat veel meer op vorm en onderwerp gericht is. Barrier houdt duidelijk van zijn onderwerp, maar hij is niettemin enorm kritisch. Er zijn eigenlijk bijna geen animatoren die zijn toets der kritiek kunnen doorstaan en alleen Bill Tytla (in een bepaalde periode), Bob Clampett (in een bepaalde periode) en Chuck Jones (in een bepaalde periode) lijken er wel mee door te kunnen.

Sommige studio's vindt hij zó oninteressant dat hij er weinig tot geen woorden aan vuil maakt, en eigenlijk is het boek sowieso voor 60% gevuld met Disney, 30% met Warner Brothers en dan nog een deeltje MGM en UPA. Fleischer, Van Beuren, Columbia, Terrytoons en Famous worden wel aangestipt, maar snel en met leesbare opluchting weer verlaten.

Barrier is inzichtrijk in zijn analyse van de verschillende types van animatie en hun impact, maar deze überkritiek maakt het boek ook wat zeurderig en betweterig. In een boek als 'Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons; Revised and Updated', toch ook niet kritiekloos, zit veel meer bewondering en plezier.

[Nathan Dehoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book looks at the history of animation from its early days up through the sixties, when cartoon studios were focusing more on television than on theatrical releases. There’s obviously a lot of attention paid to Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM. The Fleischers and Paramount receive some coverage as well, and interestingly there’s also a chapter on UPA, a lesser-known studio responsible for Mister Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing. I was struck by how much seemed to be trial-and-error in the early days, even on a big-budget picture like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and by how much turnaround there was with the animators. There was some discussion on the working atmosphere in the different studios, and on how they all tried to outdo each other. While I knew the Fleischers did a Gulliver’s Travels cartoon, I wasn’t aware that it was a feature-length picture released not long after Disney’s Snow White. I find the Flesicher style of animation pretty interesting, with the characters constantly in motion and a gag in every scene. Disney eventually developed into their more realistic sort of animation, but that wasn’t always the case. One constant, however, seems to be that Walt Disney was a very difficult guy to work for. Barrier is quite knowledgeable about the subject, and can be quite a harsh critic at times, especially regarding the Disney features. The book is definitely something I’d recommend for anyone interested in cartoons.

[Tim Kadlec · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barrrier's book is an extremely well researched and well written look at American cartoon animation from the 30's to 50's. While, understandably, Disney gets the most attention, he does discuss the work produced by places such as Warner Bros, Terrytoons, Hanna-Barbera and UPA. That's really where the book flourishes. Seeing how ideas and techniques spread from studio to studio and being able to compare and contrast their different approaches is fascinating.

Barrier doesn't pull punches. Nobody in this book is free from criticism: their miscues are highlighted just as much as their successes. In fact, he's quite critical of all the studio's and their work. While I don't necessarily agree with a few of his critiques of some of the cartoons (his opinion on the impact of Noble & Jones combined work couldn't be farther from my own), it's interesting to hear his thoughts on them nonetheless.

[Vimacone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Barrier has done wonders with providing us a book on the history of American animation. While it attempts to cover all the animation studios, most of it naturally covers the Disney studio (since they have the best track record for preserving their history than any other studio), there are some well covered section on Warner Bros, MGM, and UPA. Most of the information comes from first hand interviews, studio records, and other primary sources. Barrier has said that the finished book is only a fraction of what he wanted to include. One can only wonder what other information he has found. Check out his website for complete transcripts of his interviews with some animation legends.

[Joyce M. Tice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is pretty dry, but totally interesting and incredibly detailed. The content carries it even though the style does not. One gets a sense of the incredible tedium of producing something that to the viewer is a fast moving presentation. I am really enjoying this book on the history of cartoons and the people who created them.

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot, a lot of detail here. There was a lot of research.

The problem is that the meat of the book is aesthetic judgments by the author of something that should really be shown and not just described. Barrier makes all kinds of conclusions about whether cartoons were artistically successful or not, which feels kind of ex cathedra without the examples.

[Keilan Mann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this book a bit ago and forgot to add it to my goodreads page. It was a bit boring I picked this book thinking I was gonna learn how to animate things like this and I was wrong, but not completely