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Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaw268

1945-2314

Christopher J. Smith,

Cinema and Media Studies

Nicholas Sammond's study provides a detailed, thoughtful, exhaustively researched examination of the process by which the early animation studios cast about for technical and semiotic models to inform their new art form and drew upon the complex and conflicted vocabulary of blackface minstrelsy to do so. Though Birth of an Industry's subtitle specifies blackface, the book's wider topic is the processes by which early animation studios moved from a “craft”-based to a production line–based approach. Sammond's best material provides sophisticated semiotic readings of the tension between the public image of the “artistic” animator; the factory-style animation house where production was systematized and depersonalized; and the resistance that he finds in neo-blackface push back by animators' characters. When Goofy the dog (Walt Disney), Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay), and Felix the Cat (Otto Messmer) defy expectations, even as the creator draws the character on the animated page, Sammond sees a pantomime of resistance in which the subaltern (the animation worker, expressed through the minstrel “mask” of the animated character) pushes back against the pressure for conformity, consistency, and efficiency.