Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science [Paperback]

How twentieth-century developments in science influenced the aesthetics of the burgeoning American cartoon


What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opusFantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent scientific models and ideas about nature were an important inspiration for Disney’s groundbreaking animated realism. InDrawn to Nature,Colin Williamson presents a vivid portrait of how developments in biology, physics, and geology between 1900 and the long 1960s influenced not just Disney but the American cartoon industry as a whole.

Drawing on original research on the scientific appetites of animators and studios such as Winsor McCay, the Fleischer Brothers, Walt Disney, and United Productions of America, Williamson opens new avenues for understanding the history and aesthetics of cartoons. Interrogating the differences between art and science and reconsidering the realms of dream, magic, and fantasy as they pertain to pop culture, he yields novel proposals for bridging longstanding divides between animation, live-action cinema, and the history of science.

Drawn to Naturenot only illuminates the extent to which animators have drawn on scientific insights, it also considers seriously how commercial animations themselves participate in scientific discourse. It revises and revitalizes our existing narratives about the history of American animation to uncover the many ways science informs our collective cultural imagination.

Colin Williamson is assistant professor of cinema studies at the University of Oregon, author ofHidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema,and associate editor ofAnimation: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Contents

Introduction: A Skirmish with Nature

1. Anxious Dreams: Winsor McCays Natural History

2. Inky Origins: Visions of Science in the FlelóÂ