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Ub Iwerks' (Multi)Plain Cinema

School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech; 3780 West Cooper Lake Drive, Smyrna, GA 30082, USA jay.telotte{at}lcc.gatech.edu

While pioneer animator Ub Iwerks has often been praised as a driving force behind the early success of the Walt Disney Company, his independent work has received scant attention. That relative omission from animation history seems curious given two key features of his cartoon work: an emphasis on gags involving protean, transformative effects – a characteristic often linked to avant-garde filmmaking; and his pioneering work on a multiplane camera – a device that would become crucial to a developing realist aesthetic in American animation. This article examines these features to situate his work in terms of American animation's shifting aesthetic in the 1930s. It suggests that we see Iwerks' cartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period between the avant-garde and an emerging realism, closely linked to the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema, and the relative failure of his films as indicative of an inability to negotiate between these different pulls.

Key Words: animation • avant-garde • depth • Fleischer Brothers • Mickey Mouse • multiplane camera • realism • Sergei Eisenstein • Ub Iwerks • Walt Disne

References

• Barrier, Michael (1999) Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
• Iwerks, Leslie and Kenworthy, John (2001) The Hand Behind the Mouse. New York: Disney Editions .
• Kozlenko, William (1979[1936]) ‘The Animated Cartoon and Walt Disney’, in Lewis Jacobs (ed.) The Emergence of Film Art, 2nd edn. New York: Norton .
• Leslie, Esther (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso .
• Maltin, Leonard (1980) Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New York: New American Library .
• Merritt, Russell and Kaufman, J.B. (1993) Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press .
• Thomas, Frank and Johnston, Ollie (1995) The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. Rev. edn. New York: Disney Editions .
• Virilio, Paul (1994) The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press .
• Watts, Steven (1997) The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Columbia: University of Missouri Press .

Animation, Vol. 1, No. 1, 9-24 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1746847706065838


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This Article Abstract Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Telotte, J. P. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?