Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America

by Karl F. Cohen

How the slightly risqu gags in some silent cartoons were replaced by rigid standards in the sound film era, the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in many early cartoons, the censorship of television cartoons, and the many animators who were blacklisted from the industry in the 1950s for alleged sympathies with the Communist Party are the subjects of this book.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

230 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1997

Reviews

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did you know that Timon and Pumbaa are really gay? Or that showing a cow's udders is incredibly immoral and indecent? Or that cartoons promote bestiality?

At least that is what conservative groups who have lodged these complaints would have you believe. In this book, Cohen takes an intelligent, insightful, and humorous approach in demonstrating just how ludicrous censorship can be. Well worth the read.

[R. Reddebrek · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a series of examples of censorship in American animation loosely broken up by topics and follows a rough chronology. It's not an easy book to open and start reading, I think its strength is as a reference book, exhausting details of even minor examples of censorship are found here.

The last chapter is dedicated to union busting and HUAC blacklisting of animators, subjects that are overlooked in labour history apart from the 1941 Walt Disney strike. And includes some information on a similar move to remove suspected communists in the Canadian National Film Board in 1945 which I had heard nothing about.

Lots of information, wish the version I read was OCR friendly to help me look up entries.

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 1 out of 5]

Have you ever read a book that gave you the impression of someone just not trying? This thin but laborious study of controversy in the animation field is recklessly unfocused, impersonal, and flat-out poorly written. It often reads like an extended Wikipedia entry, which sentences leading to other sentences only in the most stilted, artificial manner. If the author has any real interest in his subject (see below), it doesn’t show; the only time he seems to inject any personal effort into the work comes in his “conclusion,” which is that “While researching this book I grew to feel that most censorship is simply stupid.” Wow! What a stunning discovery!

I looked forward greatly to reading this book, having been drawn in by Cohen’s liner notes to Home Vision’s DVD of one of my favorite animated features, the Batchelor/Halas studio’s ANIMAL FARM, which was in 2004 discovered to have been partially funded by the CIA. Unfortunately, Cohen does not mention that film in his book, nor does he offer much perspective on any of the subjects he does investigate. Moreover, the whole exercise seems pointless because there is so little connection between the various detours. An entire chapter is devoted to broadcast standards and practices. Another to racial stereotypes. Another to theatrical censorship. Yet another wastes space with the rather boring (in my opinion) subject of “uncensored” animation, the likes of Bakshi and Japanese anime. The vast majority of what’s covered in the book is not “Forbidden Animation.” I doubt anyone who picks up a book of this title really cares that certain regional theaters didn’t like cow udders to be shown in cartoons of the 1930s. Or that Bart Simpson is allowed to show his ass on TV. So what?

Here are a few more telltale excerpts:
Animation archivist Glen Pitts has documented an unusual way of getting material past the censors. Pitts, a licensed amateur radio operator, discovered a questionable message in Morse code in one Warner Bros. cartoon and messages to ham operators in two other films. He says that in “Plane Dippy,” a remote-control airplane receives commands by way of Morse code. The section of the soundtrack that was clear enough for him to transcribe reads “K, KA, KA, BM, SOS…” In “The Lone Stranger and Porky,” Porky sends a radio message for help to the Lone Stranger. The message actually says “HI HAMS, QSL PORKY.” QSL is ham jargon that means, “Write me.” In “Porky’s Railroad,” he found “QST, QSL, LEON SCHLESINGER, HOLLYWOOD, FOR PICTURE OF PORKY.” QST means bulletin. Pitts suspects Schlesinger was a radio operator.

Again, so what!?

John Kricfalusi reacted with great enthusiasm to the first fan letter for “The Ren and Stimpy Show.” Two days after the first program aired on Nickelodeon in August 1991, the studio received a letter from a fan named Anthony who invited Ren and Stimpy to visit him the next time they were in America. Kricfalusi was so pleased that he not only invited Anthony to visit him in Hollywood for a grand tour that included a day at Disneyland, but also developed a script for an episode called “Visit to Anthony.” Kricfalusi recorded the soundtrack for the show using Anthony’s voice for the part of the boy. He also had publicity photos made of the new star.

As if Kricfalusi needed to seem any creepier. That is part of a page-long rambling session about viewer comments, which includes an equally pointless personal ancedote. But the rules in these two snippets hold true for the rest of the book: Cohen runs off down odd tangents and presents completely useless, irrelevant information, I assume to pad the page count?

The book almost completely avoids what should be its central concern, the wartime propaganda shorts (which are generally ignored save in the chapter about stereotypes) and cartoons that actually continue to be considered questionable, such as “Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs” (mentioned once), or material that has become victimized by PC concerns about not so much sex or violence but scaring children (the early Disney features, WATERSHIP DOWN, etc). Cohen is much more concerned with very specific matters of censorship: what words can or cannot be said, etc., which takes him away from spending time with the basic nature of the “rules” about what’s acceptable in cartoons.

To be fair, the major failing of the book is not what it omits so much as its failure to connect its dangling strings together. The compartmentalization is crippling. One never gets a sense of a driving theme or cumulative purpose to the described censorship or, in fact, to the book itself. And this is symptomatic of Cohen’s seeming inability to put forward what should be the central idea of a book of this sort: that there is a shocking prejudice against animation in the film industry, that it is considered unacceptable that cartoons might not necessarily be “kids stuff” or “adult stuff” but possibly as universal as movies themselves, that all of the censorship of cartoons is driven by this nannyism and by the inability to see cartoons as anything but a medium for children. (And the turgid, appalling quality of most supposed “adult animation” doesn’t help.)

Cohen manages in the last chapter to make a subject as fertile as the Hollywood blacklist boring, in part because, as with the rest of the book, he drifts away from cartoons far too easily. Most of the content of the book applies as much to the film industry as a whole as it does to animation, which raises the question, why write the book? And that’s just another one that Cohen fails to properly answer. Skip this one.

[Eli Galjan · Rating 4 out of 5]

DNFed at the section with blacklisted animators bc it was basically all mccarthyism, but very important book for anyone in the animation industry