Where Can Buy Animation A World History Volume II The Birth of A Style The Three Markets 1st Edition Giannalberto Bendazzi Ebook With Cheap Price

Download the full version of the textbook now at textbookfull.
com
Animation A World History Volume II The Birth

of a Style The Three Markets 1st Edition
Giannalberto Bendazzi
https://textbookfull.com/product/animation-a-
world-history-volume-ii-the-birth-of-a-style-the-
three-markets-1st-edition-giannalberto-bendazzi/
Explore and download more textbook at https://textbookfull.com

Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.
Twice the First Quirino Cristiani and the Animated Feature

Film 1st Edition Giannalberto Bendazzi
https://textbookfull.com/product/twice-the-first-quirino-cristiani-
and-the-animated-feature-film-1st-edition-giannalberto-bendazzi/
textbookfull.com
A History of Wine in Europe, 19th to 20th Centuries,

Volume II: Markets, Trade and Regulation of Quality Silvia
A. Conca Messina
https://textbookfull.com/product/a-history-of-wine-in-europe-19th-
to-20th-centuries-volume-ii-markets-trade-and-regulation-of-quality-
silvia-a-conca-messina/
textbookfull.com
Sapiens A Graphic History The Birth of Humankind 2020th

Edition David Vandermeulen
https://textbookfull.com/product/sapiens-a-graphic-history-the-birth-
of-humankind-2020th-edition-david-vandermeulen/
textbookfull.com
The Regulation of Mobile Money: Law and Practice in Sub-

Saharan Africa Sunduzwayo Madise
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-regulation-of-mobile-money-law-
and-practice-in-sub-saharan-africa-sunduzwayo-madise/
textbookfull.com
Asia Africa Growth Corridor Development and Cooperation in
Indo Pacific Sachin Chaturvedi
https://textbookfull.com/product/asia-africa-growth-corridor-
development-and-cooperation-in-indo-pacific-sachin-chaturvedi/
textbookfull.com
Love Your Neighbor Honeys of Hunterville 2 1st Edition

Sloane Mckenzie
https://textbookfull.com/product/love-your-neighbor-honeys-of-
hunterville-2-1st-edition-sloane-mckenzie/
textbookfull.com
Security and Privacy in Communication Networks 16th EAI

International Conference SecureComm 2020 Washington DC USA
October 21 23 2020 Proceedings Part I Noseong Park
https://textbookfull.com/product/security-and-privacy-in-
communication-networks-16th-eai-international-conference-
securecomm-2020-washington-dc-usa-october-21-23-2020-proceedings-part-
i-noseong-park/
textbookfull.com
Systemic lupus erythematosus 1 Reprint Edition Gordon
https://textbookfull.com/product/systemic-lupus-
erythematosus-1-reprint-edition-gordon/
textbookfull.com
Service Business Model Innovation in Healthcare and

Hospital Management Models Strategies Tools 1st Edition
Mario A. Pfannstiel
https://textbookfull.com/product/service-business-model-innovation-in-
healthcare-and-hospital-management-models-strategies-tools-1st-
edition-mario-a-pfannstiel/
textbookfull.com
Cantilever Architecture Kyoung Sun Moon
https://textbookfull.com/product/cantilever-architecture-kyoung-sun-
moon/
textbookfull.com
ANIMATION: A WORLD
HISTORY, VOLUME II
A continuation of 1994’s groundbreaking Cartoons, Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Animation: A World History is the largest, deep-
est, most comprehensive text of its kind, based on the idea that animation is an art form that deserves its own place in
scholarship. Bendazzi delves beyond just Disney, offering readers glimpses into the animation of Russia, Africa, Latin
America, and other often-neglected areas and introducing over fifty previously undiscovered artists. Full of firsthand,
never-before-investigated, and elsewhere unavailable information, Animation: A World History encompasses the history of
animation production on every continent over the span of three centuries.
Features include:
• Over 200 high-quality head shots and film stills to add visual reference to your research
• Detailed information on hundreds of never-before-researched animators and films
• Coverage of animation from more than ninety countries and every major region of the world
• Chronological and geographical organization for quick access to the information you’re looking for
Volume II delves into the decades following the Golden Age, an uncertain time when television series were overshadowing
feature films, art was heavily influenced by the Cold War, and new technologies began to emerge that threatened the tradi-
tional methods of animation. Take part in the turmoil of the 1950s through the 1990s as American animation began to lose
its momentum and the advent of television created a global interest in the art form. With a wealth of new research, hundreds
of photographs and film stills, and an easy-to-navigate organization, this book is essential reading for all serious students of
animation history.
A former professor at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore and the Università degli Studi of Milan,
Italian-born Giannalberto Bendazzi has been thoroughly investigating the history of animation for more than forty
years. A founding member of the Society for Animation Studies, he authored or edited various classics in a number of
languages, and has lectured extensively on every continent.
‘Giannalberto Bendazzi is a highly gifted historian, scholar, observer, teacher, and most of all, lover of animation in all
of its many forms. His painstaking and detailed research, as well as his social and cultural observations about the various
times during which many animated pieces were produced, give his writing an authenticity rarely seen in other books on
the subject. I cannot think of anything better than to curl up with one of his books and have him tell me the world history
of the animation medium I love.’
Eric Goldberg, Animator and Director,
Walt Disney Animation Studios
‘Giannalberto Bendazzi’s book gives us the complete overview of how the art of animation developed around the world
in the last one hundred years. It is a book global in scope for an art form now global in appeal and being created around
the world. This work is an essential addition to the library of any serious scholar of cinema.’
Tom Sito, Chair of Animation,
University of Southern California
‘A staple of any animation library, this encyclopedic book covers the far reaches of production worldwide, throughout
history. It is an incredible resource from one of the animation world’s leading scholars.’
Maureen Furniss, Director of the Program in
Experimental Animation at CalArts
‘Giannalberto Bendazzi is one of the world’s finest historians and scholars of the art of animation. We are indeed fortu-
nate that his thorough research, cogent perceptions, and eloquent writing is now in this ... acclaimed masterly tome on
world animation.’
John Canemaker, Oscar winning independent Animator,
Animation Historian, Author, and Professor
‘I feel that one looks into Giannalberto Bendazzi’s exhaustive book as one does into a mirror – it is the whole history of the
animated film and all its creators... In taking up such a grand endeavor, Bendazzi has shown a determination, a predispo-
sition, and above all, a talent comparable to that of the finest filmmakers... With this talent Giannalberto Bendazzi gives
meaning to our work. To our creativity and volition, to both the ability to withstand hard work and the temperamental
nature of a creative spirit, to study, to our artistic caprices, to accuracy, and to our eccentricities, creative perfection and
human imperfection, expectations and improvisations, passions and doubts, successes and failures...This is a book that has
long been anticipated by professionals and enthusiasts of animation from all over the world.’
Jerzy Kucia, Director, Poland
‘Giannalberto Bendazzi is the greatest animation historian I have ever met.’

Priit Pärn, Director, Estonia
‘I am extremely proud that Giannalberto Bendazzi, at the beginning of my career, was my first official biographer. And I
like to believe that I was the flame that led him to become one of the world’s top experts in the field of animation.’
Bruno Bozzetto, Director, Italy
‘I don’t know any historian of animation more reliable than Giannalberto Bendazzi.’
Yamamura Koji, Director, Japan
‘I have been anxiously waiting for this sum total on animation...Giannalberto Bendazzi monitored, saw, and noted every-
thing and met everyone in the world of my beloved profession – and for so long, way before it was fashionable. Wherever
I went – to both festivals and meetings throughout continents - he was there. Welcome to the monumental book that takes
into account a great art and the whole planet.’
Michel Ocelot, Director, France
ANIMATION: A WORLD
HISTORY
Volume II: The Birth of a Style—
The Three Markets
Giannalberto Bendazzi
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
CRC Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Giannalberto Bendazzi
This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly

regarded sources. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable
data and information, but the author and publisher cannot assume
responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of their
use. The authors and publishers have attempted to trace the copyright
holders of all material reproduced in this publication and apologize
to copyright holders if permission to publish in this form has not been
obtained. If any copyright material has not been acknowledged please
write and let us know so we may rectify in any future reprint.
Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this

book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any
form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
written permission from the publishers.
For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this

work, please access www.copyright.com (http://www.copyright.com/)
or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood
Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit
organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of
users. For organizations that have been granted a photocopy license by
the CCC, a separate system of payment has been arranged.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A calalog record for this title has been requested.
ISBN: 978-1-138-85481-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-72075-3 (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-94307-0 (pack)
Typeset in Baskerville and Optima

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com

and the CRC Press Web site at http://www.crcpress.com
Contents
Contributors and Collaborators xi Bunin’s Puppets 22

Television 10122
The Fourth Period TV and American Animation 23
Jay Ward23
The Fourth Period is short and runs from 1951
TV and Animated Commercials 23
(the date of projection of the UPA short Ger-
The West Coast Experimental
ald McBoing Boing) to 1960, the date of the first
Film Movement 24
international animation film festival (Annecy,
Jordan Belson 24
France). It is characterized by indecision. Dis-
Harry Smith, Heaven and
ney and his imitators lost momentum, the UPA
Earth Magician 27
proposed a new style, the television age began
The Enigma of Hy Hirsh 28
and an original animation output was born in
The Canadian Phenomenon 29
Europe. We’ll christen it ‘The Birth of a Style
Norman McLaren 30
(1951–1960)’.
More About It 36
1 America 3 2 Western Europe 41
After the Long Telegram 3 Great Britain 41
Culture4 John David Wilson 42
Almighty and Suspicious 4 John Halas and Joy Batchelor 42
Gerald McBoing Boing5 France45
UPA6 Grimault and the Stories
Pete Burness 8 from the Front 45
Robert Cannon 9 Ladislas Starewitch and the
John Hubley 10 Feature Film46
Theory from Practice 10 Germany48
The Galaxy 11 Federal Republic of Germany 48
Walt Disney 12 Austria49
Warner Bros.12 Switzerland50
Friz Freleng 13 Denmark50
Chuck Jones14 Kaj Pindal 51
Michael Maltese 19 Bent Barfod 52
The Resurgence of Norway54
Terrytoons20 Finland55
Walter Lantz’s Oasis 20 Greece55
MGM’s Cat and Mouse 21 Italy56
From Fleischer to Famous 21 Portugal56
vi Contents
3 Eastern Europe 57 changes within the market (in the field of tel-
evision or advertising) and within technology
Poland57
(e.g. computers), it is substantially uniform, as
Czechoslovakia and Puppets 57
it obeys the political and economic division of
Hermína Týrlová 59
the world into two major areas: one influenced
Karel Zeman60
by the liberal United States and one influenced
Jiří Trnka62
by the communist Soviet Union. This period is
The Music of the Puppets 67
called ‘The Three Markets (1960–1991)’.
Hungary68
Yugoslavia: The First Stage 8 The Three Markets (1960–1991) 99
of the Zagreb School 68 Global Stability 99
Croatia68 It Seemed Such an Easy Game 99
Bulgaria71 Animation Forks100
Romania71
More About It 1 71 9 America 102
More About It 2 74 On the Big Screen – Shorts 102
4 Soviet Union 76 On the Big Screen – Feature Films 103
Stephen Bosustow 104
Russia76 A Cat in the Heavy Traffic 105
Ivan Ivanov-Vano 79 Ray Harryhausen 106
Lithuania83 On the Small Screen 107
Georgia83 Weston Woods, from Book
5 Asia 85 to Film109
Independent Filmmakers 110
Japan85
Ernest Pintoff 111
Toei Doga’s Start-Up 85
Jane Aaron112
Praiseworthy People 87
John Canemaker 113
Mori Yasuji 87
George Griffin 114
Otogi Pro88
Those Talented Inventive
Experiments88
People117
China89
John and Faith Hubley 118
6 Latin America 91 Will Vinton 120
Fine Artists for Animation 123
Mexico91
Jules Engel123
Venezuela91
Robert Breer128
Brazil92
John Whitney 129
Argentina92
James Whitney 130
7 Africa 94 Lawrence Jordan 132
South African Republic 94 People Not to Overlook 133
Stan Van der Beek 134
The Fifth Period Canada136
The National Film Board
The Fifth Period begins with the blooming of Goes to Heaven 136
the television series and auteur animation and Pierre Hébert 138
ends with the conclusion of the Cold War. Vancouver & Co.140
Although it is varied and subjected to strong Caroline Leaf 142
Contents vii
Ishu Patel144 Jan Lenica 194

Frédéric Back145 Austria195
More About It 1 146 Switzerland197
More About It 2 147 Denmark201
More About It 3 148 Lejf Marcussen 203
More About It 4 150 Jannik Hastrup 204
Sweden: Growth 205
10 Western Europe 152
Norway209
Cartoon EU152 Finland: Reserved and Serene 211
Clusters of Studios 153 Iceland213
New Technologies 153 Greece214
The Pre-Production 153 Italy: Allegro non Troppo 215
Cartoon Forum154 Bruno Bozzetto 216
The Cartoon d’Or 154 Gianini and Luzzati 217
Cartoon Movie154 Osvaldo Cavandoli 220
Great Britain: The Good Years 155 Guido Manuli 220
Alison De Vere 156 Manfredo Manfredi 221
The Quay Brothers 157 Cioni Carpi222
Young Aardman & Co. 164 Spain223
George Dunning 166 Francisco Macián 224
Yellow Submarine 166 The Entertainment Companies 224
Richard Williams 167 The Independents 227
Bob Godfrey 168 Portugal228
Ireland169 Artur Correia 228
Aidan Hickey 170 Ricardo Neto229
Jimmy Murakami 170 More Talents 229
France: From Craftsmanship More About It 1 231
to Ambition 172 More About It 2 231
Other French Animators 173 More About It 3 232
Jean-François Laguionie 175 More About It 4 233
Piotr Kamler 177 More About It 5 235
Walerian Borowczyk 178
Peter Földes 179
11 Eastern Europe 236
The Roaring 1980s 180
Belgium181 German Democratic Republic 236
Raoul Servais 182 Underground Animation Films 240
The Netherlands 185 Poland: The Poetry of Pessimism 242
Børge Ring187 Mirosław Kijowicz 242
Paul Driessen 188 Daniel Szczechura 243
West Germany (Federal Republic Stefan Schabenbeck 243
of Germany) 190 Ryszard Czekała 244
Wolfgang Urchs190 Experiments, Craftsmanship and
Helmut Herbst 191 Sarcasm244
Franz Winzentsen 192 Czechoslovakia: Trnka’s Heirs 246
The 1980s192 Jiří Brdečka 247
Curt Linda193 The Horse Opera 248
viii Contents
Břetislav Pojar249 Gennady Sokolsky 288

Jan Švankmajer 251 Leonid Nosyrev 289
Besides the Masters 255 Stanislav Sokolov 289
Slovakia257 Ideya Garanina 290
Hungary257 Nina Shorina 291
Yugoslavia: The New Zagreb School 262 And Many, Many More 292
Tomica Simovic´, Animating the Multtelefilm, Soyuzmultfilm’s
Orchestra262 Competitor293
Nedeljko Dragic´ 264 Aida Zyabliakova 293
Zlatko Grgic´265 Anatoly Solin294
Borivoj Dovnikovic´ 265 Fedor Khitruk 294
Igor Savin, Animating Eduard Nazarov 297
the Synthesizer 268 Garri Bardin 297
Zlatko Bourek 269 Andrei Khrzhanovsky 298
Ante Zaninovic´ 269 Yuri Norstein 301
Marks and Jutriša 270 Francesca Yarbusova 304
Pavao Štalter 270 The Old and the New 306
Zdenko Gašparovic´ 271 Perestroika306
Joško Marušic´ 272 More About It 309
Other Artists 272
13 Soviet Union II 312
Beyond Zagreb 273
Slovenia273 Estonia312
Serbia273 Latvia314
Bosnia and Herzegovina 273 Arnolds Burovs 314
Macedonia274 More Puppeteers 316
Bulgaria274 Starting from Cut-Outs 316
Romania276 Šmerlis317
Albania278 Lithuania317
More About It 279 Belarus318
Moldova319
12 Soviet Union I 280
Ukraine319
Russia280 1960–1963 the Stage of Formation 319
Thaw280 1964–1967 Creative Searches 319
Acclaim280 1968–1984 Creative Upraise 320
Stagnation281 1985–1991 Perestroika
The Best Animation Ever 281 (the Rebuilding) 320
Stagnation after Stagnation 284 Georgia321
Quality Hatches at Soyuzmultfilm 284 Armenia323
Anatoly Karanovich 284 Azerbaijan327
Roman Kachanov 285 Kazakhstan328
At Long Last Cheburashka 285 Amen Khaidarov 328
Anatoly Petrov 286 Uzbekistan328
Boris Stepantsev 287 The Puppets of the 1960s 329
Nikolay Serebriakov 287 One Decade Later 329
Ivan Ufimtsev 288 The Heyday 329
Vadim Kurchevsky 288 Kyrgyzstan330
Contents ix
Trial of Strength (1977–1980) 331 The Crisis of the Mid-1980s 372

Art-Houses and Akira and the End of the Decade 373
Fairy Tales (1981–1987) 331 Israel374
The Triumph of Art-Houses Turkey374
(1987–1990)332 Iraq376
Tajikistan333 And Sesame Opened 376
Turkmenistan334 Iran378
Mongolia379
14 Asia 335
North Korea379
Japan335 South Korea381
Japanese Television 335 China385
Astro Boy and the Beginning Taiwan386
of TV Animation 336 Hong Kong387
Tezuka Osamu337 India387
Mushi Productions 339 The Films Division 387
Tezuka Productions 341 Limited Animation 388
Studio Tatsunoko 343 The Private Studios 389
A Production/Shin’ei Doga 345 Animation Education 390
Toei’s Fortunes 346 Personal Films390
Animēshon Sannin no Kai 347 The Black Decade 390
Kuri Yoji348 Sri Lanka391
Animation vs Art Video 353 Vietnam391
Puppet Animation 355 Thailand391
Kawamoto Kihachiro 357 Malaysia392
The Tokusatsu Factor 360 Singapore393
The Anime Boom in the West 361 Indonesia394
Before the Anime Boom 362 The Philippines 394
The Boom in Europe and Its
15 Africa 396
Appendix in the United States 363
In Europe 363 Algeria396
In the United States 364 Tunisia397
The Ten Champions 364 Egypt397
UFO Robo Grendizer 365 Mali399
Mazinger Z 365 Niger399
Uchu Senkan Yamato 366 Senegal400
Kagaku Ninja Tai Gatchaman 366 Liberia400
Uchu Kaizoku Captain Harlock 366 Ivory Coast400
Candy Candy 367 Ghana400
Kido Senshi Gundam 367 Togo400
Versailles No Bara 367 Burkina Faso400
Urusei Yatsura 368 Cameroon401
Captain Tsubasa 368 Zaire401
Anime369 Burundi401
Otaku371 Zambia401
The Original Anime Video 372 Mozambique401
Collaborations372 Mauritius402
Visit https://textbookfull.com
now to explore a rich
collection of eBooks, textbook
and enjoy exciting offers!
x Contents
South African Republic 402 Peru415

The SABC Animation Unit 402 Brazil417
Alternative Animation Bolivia421
Commissioned for Jesús Pérez422
South African Television Chile424
(1976–1988)404 Argentina424
Dave McKey Animation Uruguay425
Services404
17 Oceania 427
Annie-Mation Studios 405
Glenn Coppens Australia427
Cartoons405 Yoram Gross429
More About It 1 406 Independent Filmmakers 431
More About It 2 406 Comics432
More About It 3 407 Avant-Garde Animation 432
Harry Reade434
16 Latin America 408
New Zealand 435
Mexico408
18 Issues 438
Cuba410
Nicaragua412 Computers and Animation 438
Costa Rica412 Those Masters’ Voices 445
Colombia412
Venezuela414 Index 449
Contributors and Collaborators
Supervising Collaborators Ramolini, Thomas Renoldner, Alberto Rigoni, Emilio

de la Rosa, Federico Rossin, Giovanni Russo, Jaan Ruus,
Cinzia Bottini and Paolo Parmiggiani
Shanaz Shapurjee Hampson, Elena Shupik, Charles
Contributors Solomon, Vibeke Sorensen, Gunnar Strøm, Enis Tahsin
Özgür, Ieva Viese, Hans Walther, Ulrich Wegenast,
Fabia Abati, Midhat Ajanovic, Ricardo Arce, Rolf
Jumana Al-Yasiri, and Ran Zhang.
Bächler, Laura Buono, Stefania Carini, Alessandro
Cavaleri, Joe Chang, Camilo Cogua, Olivier Cotte, Columnists
Rolando José Rodríguez De León, Janeann Dill, David
Ehrlich, Raúl Rivera Escobar, Dizseri Eszter, Shoyista Gianluca Aicardi, Anna Antonini, Marianna Aslanyan,
Ganikhanova, Mohamed Ghazala, Silvano Ghiringhelli, Marianna Busacca, Adam De Beer, Nobuaki Doi, Sara
George Griffin, Francesca Guatteri, Mikhail Gurevich, Fumagalli, Maureen Furniss, Dina Goder, Tommaso
Orosz Anna Ida, Marcel Jean, Corinne Jenart, Heikki Iannini, George Khoury, Clare Kitson, Jónas Knútsson,
Jokinen, Mariam Kandelaki, Annemette Karpen, Mihai Mitrică, Michela Morselli, Tsvetomira Nikolova,
Antonina Karpilova, Elena Kasavina, John Lent, Marcos C. Jay Shih, Georges Sifianos, Gulbara Tolomushova,
Magalhães, Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato, Philippe and Paul Wells.
Moins, Hassan Muthalib, Ebele Okoye, Tsvika Oren,
Editors
Irena Paulus, Marco Pellitteri, Valentina Pezzi, Francesca
Pirotta, Igor Prassel, Liliana de la Quintana, Maddalena Ray Kosarin and Andrew Osmond
This page intentionally left blank
THE FOURTH PERIOD
The Fourth Period is short and runs from 1951 (the date of projection of the UPA short Gerald McBoing Boing) to 1960, the
date of the first international animation film festival (Annecy, France). It is characterized by indecision. Disney and his
imitators lost momentum, the UPA proposed a new style, the television age began and an original animation output was
born in Europe. We’ll christen it ‘The Birth of a Style (1951–1960)’.
This page intentionally left blank
1
AMERICA
After the Long Telegram Former US enemies such as Japan, Germany and Italy
were hurriedly backed up and pushed to recovery and
On 2 September 1945, Japan signed the official surren- reconstruction (although not rearmed), in order to serve as
der to the United States and the Second World War was anti-communist allies.
over. Almost immediately (although both the USA and the In February 1945, at the Yalta conference, Winston
USSR heavily demobilized), the Cold War started. Churchill had snarled: ‘While there is life in my body,
In February 1946, the US State Department carefully no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.1 Six
read the ‘long telegram’ of the American chargé d’affaires months later, on 26 July 1945, the electorate voted him
in Moscow, George F. Kennan. The Soviets, Kennan said, out of his Prime Minister’s chair. His Labour Party succes-
were aiming at eroding the capitalist nations and imposing sor, Clement Attlee, did all he could to decolonize. India
their ideological rule on the world, and they were doing so in became independent in 1947, and India was the hub
order to justify their internal power in the face of their popu- around which the British Empire revolved. In a couple of
lation’s sacrifices. On 12 March 1947, President Harry Tru- decades, most of the former colonies became independent
man addressed a speech to the Congress, declaring that the states.
USA, as the leader of the Free World, would support every- Not the British colonies only. The Netherlands tried to
where democracy against communism (Truman Doctrine). resist, but had to let her own empire go. France resisted
In 1948, Czechoslovakia fell last into the group of the strongly and fought in Indochina and northern Africa, but
‘satellite’ European states of the Soviet Union, along with was defeated. By the early 1960s, residual colonies were
Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia small and few, with the exception of some Portuguese ter-
and the eastern section of Germany. The continent was polit- ritories that would become independent ten years later.
ically split into two different areas, separated by the so-called On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin suddenly died in Mos-
Iron Curtain. In 1949, the communist People’s Republic of cow. Most of his compatriots both worshipped him and
China was proclaimed, under Mao Zedong’s leadership. were terror-stricken by him, so his demise left in the Soviet
In the same year, the Soviet Union showed that it, too, Union an immense empty space, which lasted for three
was equipped with atomic bombs. This meant that the years, until the very different figure of Nikita Khrushchev
Cold War could not become a hot one, but at the high took over.
price of the end of humankind. The two superpowers On 18–24 April 1955, about twenty-five representatives
would always carefully handle any regional crisis (the main of newly independent states from Asia and Africa gath-
ones being the Korean War, 1950–53, the Cuban Missile ered in Bandung, Indonesia. Indonesia’s Sukarno, China’s
Crisis of 1962 and the Vietnam War, which involved the Zhou Enlai, India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Cambodia’s
US in the 1960s and early 1970s) in order to avoid the trig- Sihanouk, Ghana’s Nkrumah and Cyprus archbishop
gering of an atomic confrontation. Makarios were among the participants.
1
Entry in Admiral William D. Leahy’s diary, quoted in Terry H. Anderson, The United States, Great Britain and the Cold War 1944–1947,
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1981.
4 Chapter 1: After the Long Telegram
The policy and myth of the Third World2 were actu- 1951, Julian Beck and Judith Malina founded the Living
ally born there, along with the practice of nonalignment. Theatre. In 1952, Ernest Hemingway published The Old
Young, tolerant, pacific, purged of the White nations’ vice, Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck East of Eden, architect
the Third World countries shone. The Third Worldism Le Corbusier completed in Marseilles the building of the
pleased the young intellectuals of various nations just as, Cité Radieuse. On 5 January 1953, in Paris, Samuel Beck-
in the nineteenth century, the proletariat had been seen as ett’s Waiting for Godot premiered; in the same year sculptor
the example of moral excellence. Henry Moore created King and Queen, Jacques Tati directed
Actual events would prove less romantic. Many out of Les vacances de M. Hulot and Mizoguchi Kenji Ugetsu Mono-
those young nations became dictatorships, and the Third gatari (Ugetsu); and James D. Watson and Francis H. Crick
World as a whole played an ambiguous and complex inter- discovered the double helix of DNA. In 1954, Ilya Ehren-
national role of stratagems, alliances/reversals of alliances burg published The Thaw. In 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien com-
with the Superpowers. Often it was the battlefield in case pleted the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Vladimir
of tiny, hot ‘wars by proxy’ that the Cold War allowed Nabokov Lolita (in Paris), Claude Lévi-Strauss Sad Tropics,
itself. Satyajit Ray directed Aparajito (The Unvanquished). In
1956, John Osborne published Look Back in Anger, Allen
Ginsberg Howl and Other Poems, Tanizaki Junichiro The Key;
Culture the Free Cinema movement was born in London, Ingmar
Bergman directed The Seventh Seal and Ichikawa Kon The
World War II shocked the world culture no less than the Burma Harp. In 1957, Boris Pasternak published (in Italy)
world politics and the world economy. In Western Europe Doctor Zhivago, Jack Kerouac On the Road, Vance Packard
the main problem, for some decades, was ‘should an The Hidden Persuaders and the Nouvelle Vague took shape in
intellectual be committed?’ ‘Committed’ meant ‘work- Paris. In 1959, Raymond Queneau published Zazie in the
ing within the actual political situation’ and forgetting the Metro, Eugène Ionesco Rhinoceros; Charles P. Snow gave the
ivory tower. In most cases it meant to be a leftist, which controversial lecture The Two Cultures; Frank Lloyd Wright
meant to be a full-fledged communist or (in political jar- built the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Alain Res-
gon) a ‘fellow traveller’ or a ‘useful idiot’. Mountains of nais directed Hiroshima mon amour and Federico Fellini La
pages and billions of neurons were spent on this theme dolce vita. In 1960, the New American Cinema was born
and this practice, on the ground that communism was the and American Pop Art took shape.
only real alternative to Fascism/Nazism. For the United States, and for the many nations that
Actually, writers, artists, musicians and philosophers imitated her, a novel of 1951 was indelible: J. D. Salinger’s
didn’t produce anything meant to be stable. They were The Catcher in the Rye. It told, with adolescent language,
rebellious and uncertain. adolescent alienation, confusion, rebellion. Independently
In 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre founded in Paris the journal from its literary value, it depicted the themes and the times
Les Temps modernes, starting to build his role as Europe’s cul- of a whole generation that was supposed to be happy, and
tural and political leading opinion maker, and Jean Dubuf- became synonymous with it.
fet opened his first one-man exhibition. In 1946, 1948,
1949, 1951 and 1958, William Carlos Williams published
the five volumes of Paterson. In 1946, Jackson Pollock aban-
doned the brush and inaugurated the technique of squeez-
Almighty and Suspicious
ing, pouring, dribbling paint on canvas that would lead to The fifteen years from 1945 to 1960 were a contradictory
the Action Painting. In 1947, Albert Camus’s The Plague, time for the United States. Victory in the war, together with
Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Anna Frank’s Diary and an extraordinary economic expansion and the simultane-
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire were published. ous collapse of the traditional world powers (UK, France,
In 1949, Jorge Luis Borges published The Aleph, George The Netherlands, Japan), gave the US a position of planet
Orwell 1984, Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman, Konrad leadership. To the rest of the world, America presented a
Lorenz King Solomon’s Ring and Margaret Mead Male and picture of prosperity, generosity and optimism – an image
Female. In 1950, Kurosawa Akira directed Rashomon. In reinforced by American financial aid, particularly to Europe.
2
The First World being the capitalist West, and the Second the totalitarian, communist East.
Chapter 1: After the Long Telegram 5
Such splendour, however, was not faultless. The Cold and painter Jackson Pollock were all heralds of a marginal
War against the Soviet Union hid psychological disquiet world and the bearers of stylistically overflowing, rebellious
and phobia, which materialized in the ‘McCarthyist’ per- ideas. Initially, what they all wanted was to detach them-
secution of the Left. Cinema replaced the portrayal of the selves from the mainstream of American culture; inevi-
bold American – naïve, perhaps, but always inexhaustible – tably, they were absorbed and embraced by the market
with new characters and new actors (from Montgomery (especially Pollock and his colleagues of Action Painting).
Clift to Marlon Brando, James Dean and Anthony Per- Hollywood animation shared the fate of the film indus-
kins) who expressed anxiety, uneasiness and neurosis. Juve- try in general; as its most frail branch, it was the first to dry
nile crime increased, and the large American middle class out. Animated shorts, which had always been regarded as
gradually became aware of its sociocultural fragmentation. fillers, were eliminated without being really missed as costs
Beatnik communities arose to propose an autonomous rose. Studios shrank and gradually closed. Very few young
counterculture. The consumer age broke out with the pop- artists joined studio staffs. Disney was the first to reduce
ularization of television and modified decades-old patterns the production of shorts, concentrating on feature films
of thought and behaviour. and, later on, other projects such as live-action features
It was precisely television that helped precipitate the cri- for children, documentaries on the wonders of nature and
sis of cinema. Starting in 1946, the sale of television sets the very successful amusement parks. In the meanwhile,
increased dramatically; shortly afterward, the networks avant-garde groups collected the spiritual inheritance of
began broadcasting in colour. This new kind of home Mary Ellen Bute and Oskar Fischinger and gave rise to
entertainment kept huge numbers of spectators away from new, rich productions of abstract animation, which per-
the theatres. Then, in 1948, with a decision which ended fectly complemented the stylistic and linguistic research of
years of litigation, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling in off-Hollywood filmmakers.
the United States vs. Paramount et al. trial, involving all major Traditional, round-shaped drawings (‘O-style’) could no
California movie companies, pursuant to the antitrust law. longer compare with the drawings of comic-strip artists,
From that time on, the three components of production, fashionable cartoonists and advertisers. American anima-
distribution and exhibition were to be separated. The ver- tion was born from popular comics and their inevitably
dict terminated the companies’ monopoly over the audi- poor drawings had flourished in the caricature/children’s
ence and ended the lifestyle and work methods that had book style of Walt Disney; now, for the first time, it would
characterized the entertainment field. In short, it marked join the group of the major commercial arts. Animators
the end of legendary Hollywood. found themselves looking with awe at the style of artists,
Comedy evolved. Deprived of artists such as Capra, such as the New Yorker cartoonists James Thurber and Saul
Lubitsch and Stevens, it survived through the work of Steinberg, and at the subversive humour of the corrosive
craftspeople and through the caustic films of Billy Wilder. New York magazine, Mad. For the first time, American
In the late 1950s, causticity became a rule outside cin- animation would follow the national and international
ema, with the ‘sick comedians’ – educated entertainers, trend, and would even contribute to set it. This was a
well versed in quick political gags and dirty words, who vital boost, if also a temporary one: after some years, that
addressed students and intellectuals in the thousands of approach, too, would fall irremediably out of fashion. In
night clubs which spread like mushrooms after the war. other words, for animation this was a time of indecision,
Their favourite topic: the American malaise. The group, incertitude and even opacity in the USA and the rest of
which included Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Dick Greg- the world as well.
ory, exerted its influence for years, spawning artists such as
Woody Allen. In contrast, the old slapstick comedy, with
its absurd pyrotechnics, was dismissed as being definitively
naïve, as the inheritance of a ‘childish’ age; Jerry Lewis
Gerald McBoing Boing
and Bob Hope, who partially hearken back to it, became Released on 25 January 1951 and winner of the first UPA
isolated phenomena. Academy Award on 29 March 1951, Gerald McBoing Boing
In music, alongside the concert-hall experiments of the was the epitome of the stylistic gospel that would change
likes of John Cage, bebop reigned; a form of jazz born in again, and forever, the accepted approach to animated
the black ghetto, it was, by its own definition, the expres- films.
sion of an ‘alternative’ culture. Artists such as jazz musician Cahiers du cinéma commented from Paris: ‘The work of
Charlie Parker, writer Jack Kerouac, poet Allen Ginsberg Mr Bosustow and Mr Cannon contains such a blasting
charge that we can’t but compare it to the one that long ago physician are. Bobe Cannon had fluidity as an animator
exploded the silent cinema and gave birth to the sound film’.3 and conveyed it into his directorial style. His metamorpho-
Based on a story by Dr Seuss,4 written by Bill Scott and ses are an example: he loved to keep the character on the
Phil Eastman and directed by Bobe Cannon, Gerald McBo- screen, while dissolving the background in such a way that
ing Boing tells the story of a child who can’t speak words, the story continues without edges and interruptions, flow-
but speaks in sound effects instead. Rejected by the school, ing delicately ahead.
spurned by other children and even rebuffed by his father, Limited animation and two-dimensional design would
Gerald runs away from home and sets about becoming a become, in the following decade(s), the young frontier of
tramp; but just as he’s trying to catch a departing train, quality animation all over the world.
a radio producer hires him. In a very happy ending, he
becomes famous coast-to-coast as a one-man sound-effects
department.
Although strictly traditional in its values, the scenario
UPA
itself has something new: no gags. Gerald McBoing Boing is In 1943, Stephen Bosustow,5 David Hilberman,6 and Zach-
a little moral play about a handicapped person who can, ary ‘Zack’ Schwartz,7 three former employees of Disney,
nonetheless, climb the ladder of success. Funny, of course, formed Industrial Film and Poster Service. One year later, the
but not in the traditional, slapstick way. United Auto Workers hired them to make a film to endorse
Second: the drawings. Sharp, angular outlines around Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reelection: Hell Bent for Election.
the distinctly bidimensional characters and objects: an ‘I’ The short was designed by Zachary Schwartz and directed –
style instead of the volumetric ‘O’ style championed by for one single dollar – by moonlighting Charles M. (Chuck)
Disney. Jones. Another film for the United Auto Workers, Brotherhood
Third: the colours. Casually thrown within the outline of Man (1946), was directed by Robert Cannon.
of an armchair or of a carpet, just to suggest that that On 1 May 1944, the company’s name was changed to
piece of furniture is red or brown. United Film Productions and, on 31 December 1945, to
Fourth: the music. Gail Kubik (1914–1984) was not a United Productions of America (UPA). In July 1946, Hil-
popular-song strummer, but an important American com- berman and Schwartz withdrew from the enterprise, and
poser, who would win the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Stephen Bosustow remained as the only executive producer.8
and who produced an innovative score. Bosustow9 had a complex, contradictory personality.
Fifth, and most important: the limited animation. In Born in Canada, he moved to California years before his
one of the first frames we see Gerald’s mother embroider- debut at MGM in 1931. A good scriptwriter, he worked
ing; her arm, only, is in motion. The doctor comes to visit for Ub Iwerks and for Walter Lantz before joining Dis-
the child; he’s a very dignified, stiff-necked gentleman, and ney in 1934. Once at Disney, he collaborated on a Mickey
only his legs are in motion – a very mechanical motion. Mouse series and on films such as Snow White, Bambi and
Disney’s full animation, personality animation and plau- Fantasia. He was dismissed on 20 May 1941, eight days
sible impossible are gone. Instead, a bold, simple concise- before the Disney strike, along with twenty other employ-
ness has told us a lot about who the housewife and the ees.10 As the leader of UPA, he demonstrated respect for
3
Francois Chalais, ‘Le fil à couper Disney’, Cahiers du cinéma, No. 6, Octobre–Novembre 1951, Paris.
4
Pseudonym of children’s writer and cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904–1991).
5
Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, on 6 November 1911, he died in Los Angeles, California, on 4 July 1981.
6
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 18 December 1911, he died in Palo Alto, California, on 5 July 2007.
7
Born in New York on 6 March 1913, he died in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 12 January 2003.
8
Hilberman and Schwartz moved to New York and founded the Tempo Animation Studio to produce commercials. Both leftists, they
were suspected during the most brutal period of the United States’s witch hunt. In 1947, during a hearing of the HUAC (House Un-
American Activities Committee), Walt Disney himself openly accused Hilberman of being a communist. In 1953, ‘the FBI announced
there would be an investigation, and Tempo’s clients soon broke off all contact. The FBI never followed through, but Tempo closed
its doors, laying off 150 artists (Tom Sito, Drawing the Line [Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2006]). Zack Schwartz
devoted himself to teaching; Dave Hilberman freelanced in Europe and then back home in the States, eventually becoming a university
professor, too.
9
The name, which suggests Slavic roots, is actually from Cornwall.
10
He would be among the strike leaders.
Figure 1.1 Stephen Bosustow.
the talent and culture of his collaborators,11 great energy, The innovative research that would characterize the
and, above all, a vision: not to make money, but to make years to come was largely due to a newly hired staff of
quality films. At times, he was naïve and tactless. Basically scene designers and layout experts (John Hubley, Paul
a shy man, he often blamed himself retrospectively for Julian [by birth name Paul Hull Husted, Terre Haute,
making wrong decisions and for having been weak. With Indiana, 25 June 1914–Van Nuys, California, 5 Septem-
uncommon modesty, he also downplayed his artistic tal- ber 1995], Jules Engel, Bill Hurtz [1919–2000] and Herb
ent. He did not teach anything to his filmmakers, he said, Klynn [1917–99]), directors (John Hubley again, Bobe
but left them free to express their intellectual needs; he Cannon, Pete Burness) and screenwriters (Phil Eastman,
dismantled the assembly-line system and supported the 1909–86; Bill Scott, 1920–85).
forming of small, spontaneous teams of animators.12 This The fortunes of the newly founded company turned for
is the appreciation of Adam Abraham, the UPA historian: the better when Columbia, which was now ready to ter-
‘The most complaisant of managers, Bosustow gave his minate its contract with Screen Gems, agreed to become
employees extraordinary freedom as he presided over that a distributor for UPA shorts. Robin Hoodlum (1948) and The
rare anomaly: a for-profit company dedicated to Art’.13 Magic Fluke (1949) still featured the same characters (the
11
Just an example: although, according to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ regulations, the Oscar for the animated
short subject was presented to the producer, Bosustow let the winning shorts’ directors go to the ceremony and collect the statuette.
12
Personal communications from Stephen Bosustow to the author (1973).
13
Adam Abraham, When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012, Intro-
duction, p. x.
Visit https://textbookfull.com
now to explore a rich
collection of eBooks, textbook
and enjoy exciting offers!
Fox and the Crow) most recently used by Screen Gems.

The films were cleverly spectacular. Characterized by years, he abandoned USC before graduating14 to
an original, thoughtful comicality and by already quite leave for the East Coast and become an animator
stylized drawings, they were less furious than traditional at the Fleischer Studios – where he attended to
comic Hollywood cartoons. (Years later, the filmmakers at Betty Boop as a Grim Natwick assistant. There is
Disney remembered Robin Hoodlum when they made their evidence of him working later, in 1933, at the Van
feature film, Robin Hood.) Beuren studios. In those times, the Burness family
Still in 1949, Mr. Magoo, who became UPA’s most lived in Connecticut, near New York City.
famous character and a sort of new-generation Mickey Somewhere around 1939, Pete Burness went
Mouse, made his debut in Ragtime Bear. The short featured back to California to work for MGM and animated
Magoo (still without a name), his nephew and a friendly the very first Tom and Jerry short film, Puss Gets the
bear. The legend goes that Columbia proposed a series Boot, released on 10 February 1940. The popularity
based on the bear, and UPA was adamant about a series of the cat-and-mouse duo caught by surprise the
based on the old man. movie theatre operators, who put a lot of pressure
Magoo was a novelty. He was human rather than zoo- on MGM to produce more Tom and Jerry cartoons.
morphic and an adult rather than a child. Moreover, his MGM could not find enough talented animators in
psychological and physical traits were far from the typi- the Los Angeles area, but did find a good pool of
cal Hollywood glamour. With his scratchy delivery (due to them in Mexico City. Pete Burness had learned to
actor and writer Jim Backus, 1913–89), shabby aspect and speak Spanish in school so, in 1943, MGM sent him
baldness, Magoo was a hard-headed grouch, appealing to Mexico City to manage the local Tom and Jerry
only because of his naïveté and incurable nearsightedness. artists. Eventually the logistics got to be too big a
His adventures developed into a ten-year series – the only problem and, one year later, MGM gave up on the
one produced by UPA, which preferred individual shorts. idea. The last Tom and Jerry that Burness animated
Directed at first by John Hubley, Magoo’s cartoons were was The Mouse Comes to Dinner (1945).
later entrusted to Pete Burness. In the five following years, Burness went to work
for Walter Lantz and possibly Terrytoons. In 1948,
he worked at Warner Brothers, animating Bugs
Bunny. He left Warner Brothers in 1950 to go
to UPA.
Pete Burness Shortly after arriving at UPA, he was asked to
One of the least acknowledged of the great Ameri- be the director of the Mr. Magoo series. This was
can animators, David Petrie Burness Jr. was born the first directing opportunity of his long anima-
in Los Angeles on 16 June 1904. His lifelong tion career. He debuted with Trouble Indemnity, the
nickname, ‘Pete’, was bestowed upon him by his third Mr. Magoo film. It was nominated for an
youngest sister Ruth. He died in Pasadena on 21 Academy Award, but so was UPA’s Gerald McBoing
July 1969. Boing, which was the winner.15 Pete Burness got his
A graduate from Manual Arts High School, Academy Award in 1955 for When Magoo Flew, and
as a teenager he nursed the ambition to have his repeated the performance in 1956 with Magoo’s Pud-
own cartoon strip in the daily newspapers. While dle Jumper. In all, Pete Burness directed thirty-five
attending the University of Southern California Mr. Magoo shorts.
(USC), he was heavily involved with the campus Burness’s style is clear, dry, without frills, and
humour magazine. However, after about three based on a perfect timing. Had he been a slapstick
14
However, he did receive an honorary diploma from USC many years later because of the two Oscars he won for Mr. Magoo animated
short subjects.
15
Bruce Burness, Pete Burness’s son, wrote: ‘In many conversations with my father it was clear that he felt Trouble Indemnity was the best
film of his entire career; but he was thrilled that Bobe got the Academy Award. My father held Bobe Cannon in the highest regard. The
Cannon family and the Burness family got together socially many times over the years at either our house or the Cannon Ranch’ (e-mail
message to author, 26 February 2010).
(Alliance, Ohio, 16 July 1909–Northridge, California, 8

comedian, he would have been a Buster Keaton or June 1964). A strong but taciturn man, he was poorly fit
a Stan Laurel instead of a Charlie Chaplin. to rise to fame. He first stepped into the limelight as an
His last work for UPA was the feature film A animator in the Chuck Jones team at Schlesinger’s (his ani-
Thousand and One Arabian Nights, which started in mation for the short The Dover Boys at Pimento University – Or
1957 and was released in 1959. He didn’t finish it, The Rivals of Roquefort Hall, 1942, is memorable), then made
instead handing the directorship off to Jack Kinney his director’s debut in 1949 with the already mentioned
and leaving the company.16 anti-racist short Brotherhood of Man. Although basically
After UPA, Pete Burness moved from studio to stu- interested in one-shot cartoons, under audience pressure
dio on a regular basis, and during this freelance period, he directed a good three sequels of Gerald McBoing Boing.18
created a couple of cartoon characters that are still Among other Cannon’s hits, Willie the Kid (1952), Madeline
well-known in America. The first one was a lounging (1952, from a book by children’s writer Ludwig Bemel-
bird that would choose to sit on the tail of a Western mans), Fudget’s Budget (1954, humorous and very brilliantly
Airlines airplane when he travelled, instead of fly- designed), The Jaywalker (his swan song, 1956) are worth
ing himself. The second one was Captain Crunch, mentioning. Another problematic child who came out of
who appeared on a cereal box. Captain Crunch also Cannon’s imagination was Christopher Crumpet (1953), the
appeared in many television commercials. neurotic only son of a suburban couple, who transforms
Pete Burness’s last work was for Jay Ward on the himself into a chicken when annoyed. The one sequel,
Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He was responsible for the Christopher Crumpet’s Playmate (1955), was good, too: the kid
Boris Badenov and Natasha episodes and also the has an elephant for an imaginary friend and his father’s
Dudley Do-Right segments. rival takes the boss to the Crumpets, to show how badly
A master of UPA’s ‘limited animation’, he was never he was brought up . . . but the boss himself had an imagi-
comfortable with the ‘partial animation’ demands of nary friend when he was a child – a hyena. Bobe Cannon
producing a new show on a weekly basis for television. directed a couple of Mr. Magoo shorts in 1958 before leav-
Eventually he accepted ‘partial animation’ (e.g. hands ing the sinking UPA boat. He freelanced making various
and feet animated separately from a held character) as commercials before suddenly dying of a heart attack at 55.
the only viable way to produce a weekly show. His directing style was based on ellipses and sugges-
Pete Burness was still working hard when he was tions, the transition from one scene to another could
diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Jay Ward kept him be done with a metamorphosis (Gerald is standing on a
on the payroll until after he had died, on 21 July 1969. kitchen stool, which becomes a scooter to play in the park),
the scenery can show how fictional it is (in Willie the Kid
the courtyard has become a Painted Desert for the play-
ing children, but when Willie has to talk to his mother, a
Robert Cannon slot opens in the rock wall and she appears). It’s the realm
Another great – but little-known and barely investigated – of unbridled graphic-animated imagination, happily
American animation director was Robert ‘Bobe’17 Cannon implausible.
16
Pete Burness’s son Bruce wrote: ‘My father really struggled with the idea of doing a feature-length Mr. Magoo. As the film progressed he
became more and more distressed by what he felt was the overcommercialization of Mr. Magoo. Directing and nurturing this Mr. Magoo
character had been the pinnacle of his career. My father had agonized over how to develop and present Mr. Magoo’s identity since the
day he arrived at UPA. He could not bear what he felt was the complete corruption of Mr. Magoo’s identity’ (e-mail message to author,
26 February 2010).
17
In the filmographies he’s variously credited as ‘Robert’, ‘Bob’ or ‘Bobe’. Friends also called him ‘Bobo’.
18
Gerald McBoing Boing’s Symphony (1953) was the simple story of Gerald asked to substitute for a whole orchestra, with a seemingly disas-
trous result but an eventual success (some scenes of Gerald wandering in the middle of a transparent, anonymous crowd set a fashion).
How Now McBoing Boing (1954) was meant to put an end to the saga: Gerald’s parents take him to the greatest specialist in the world, and
he eventually discovers the boy just has an upside-down larynx (some scenes of people running as if they had wheels instead of legs set
a fashion). The fourth, tacked-on instalment, Gerald McBoing! Boing! on Planet Moo (1956), brought the kid into space, with the result of
convincing aliens that on planet Earth people didn’t speak words, but went ‘boing, boing’ instead (and here the only interesting point is
the original graphics).
John Hubley
The real directing star at UPA was not self-effacing Bobe
Theory from Practice
Cannon, but dashing, outgoing John Hubley. This great In July 1946, John Hubley and Zachary Schwartz
filmmaker had joined Disney’s in 1935 at twenty-one, had published an interesting – as much as unnoticed –
participated until the 1941 strike, and had left in 1941 essay: ‘Animation Learns a New Language’ (Hol-
for Screen Gems, where he had been promoted from lay- lywood Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4).20 After both having
out man to director. In 1942 he joined the army and was substantially worked on animated army educa-
assigned to the Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit; tional films, they wanted to share the lesson they
then, in 1944, was back to civilian duties and was hired had drawn.
by Bosustow. He directed three Fox and Crow films (Robin They wrote:
Hoodlum, 1948; The Magic Fluke, 1949; Punchy de Leon, 1950)
and the already mentioned, and fundamental, Ragtime Six months before America entered World War
Bear. II, the animated motion picture industry of Hol-
Rooty-Toot-Toot (1951) is a funny, rhythmic, ironic ver- lywood was engaged in the production of the
sion of the traditional ballad of Frankie and Johnny. The following films: 1 feature-length cartoon about
title comes from the fifth stanza of the ballad, where a deer; 16 short subjects about a duck; 12 short
it has mere onomatopœic value. Betrayed by Johnny, subjects about rabbits; 7 short subjects of a cat
Frankie kills him. She is acquitted but, after the trial, chasing a mouse; 5 short subjects with pigs; 3
she kills her lawyer, again out of jealousy. No subject short subjects with a demented woodpecker;
for children at all; the ballad, moreover, belongs to the 10 short subjects with assorted animals; 1 short
adult-only rhymes most suitable for a tavern or brothel. technical subject on the process of flush riveting.
Brilliant and disenchanted, the short musical confirmed Since that time, the lone educational short,
the innovative UPA use of drawings and colours. The dubbed by the industry a ‘nuts and bolts’ film,
drawings are purposely flat, two-dimensional, with has been augmented by hundreds of thousands
oblong or angular shapes, and the limited animation of feet of animated educational film. Because of
contrasts with the continuum mobile of the style which was wartime necessity, pigs and bunnies have collid-
considered ‘classical’ at that time. Strongly antirealistic ed with nuts and bolts. [. . .] Many professional
backgrounds are here often limited to a few sketches studios producing educational films of infinitely
or to large areas of solid colour. Everything is clearly, varied subjects soon discovered that, within the
deliberately dominated by a visual culture influenced by medium of film, animation provided the only
Matisse, Picasso and Klee: no longer animated comic means of portraying many complex aspects of
drawings or films with drawn actors. These were the a complex society. Through animated drawings
works of cultivated art directors who gave drawing and artists were able to visualize areas of life and
painting a major role. thought which photography was incapable of
It is said that Warner Bros. director Friz Freleng once showing.
declared: ‘When I die, I don’t want to go to Paradise. [. . .] We must [therefore] examine the basic
I want to go to UPA’. But even UPA was this side of Para- difference between animation and photographed
dise, and the witch hunt was scaring the hell out of the action. [. . .] A drawing’s range of expression, its
United States. John Hubley refused to cooperate with area of vision, is wider than that of the photo-
investigators looking for supposed communists, and pres- graph, since the camera records but a particular
sure was placed on UPA. On 31 May 1952, John Hubley aspect of reality in a single perspective from a
was forced to leave.19
19
Sadly, he was not the only one. The victory over UPA, the leftist, heavily unionized studio, was a triumph for McCarthyites. For
deeper insight, see Karl Cohen, Forbidden Animation – Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America, Jefferson, NC, and London:
McFarland, 1997.
20
Now published by the University of California Press, Stable URL; http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209495.
The staff included star voice actor James Mason, direc-

fixed position. In short, while the film records tor Ted Parmelee (1912–1964), scriptwriter Bill Scott and
what we see, the drawing can record also what especially scene designer Paul Julian, one of the best of
we know. The photograph records a specific ob- American animation ever.
ject; the drawing represents an object, specific or By the mid-1950s, UPA’s life began to dim and success
general. basically came from the episodes of the Mr. Magoo series.
[. . .] We have found that the medium of ani- Bosustow insisted in the approach he had devised since
mation has become a new language. [. . .] We the beginning: no once-and-for-all fixed teams, but flex-
have found that line, shape, color, and symbols ible groups according to the project. This open-minded
in movement can represent the essence of an recipe would be the one that all auteurs of animation
idea, can express it humorously, with force, with would apply in the next six decades. Also, he let talented
clarity. The method is only dependent upon the people, who never had directed a film, try: Ted Parmelee,
idea to be expressed. And a suitable form can be T. Hee,21 Paul Julian, Art Babbitt and Aurelius Battag-
found for any idea. lia. Other contributors to UPA included Bill Meléndez22
abstract animator John Whitney, the young Ernest Pint-
This was the sharpest out of the few essays writ- off, Jimmy Teru Murakami, George Dunning and Gene
ten on animation, in Northern America, in the first Deitch. Nevertheless, the ones who left were more than the
half of the twentieth century. It was the only one ones who came in.
that was based on the actual nature of animation – People at UPA were aware that television was the ter-
without any attempt at co-opting animation into ritory of the future, as scary as it could be. Their most
the aristocracy of Fine Arts as just the youngest of ambitious project was a TV programme entitled The Ger-
them and out of intellectual condescension. ald McBoing Boing Show, produced by Bobe Cannon and
emceed by Gerald in person. It was a combination of old
theatrical shorts, new entertainment footage and a good
dose of didactic sequences. CBS broadcast the show from
The Galaxy 16 December 1956 to 24 March 1957 – four months. Dis-
Two other important films were released by UPA in 1953. neyland and its sequel The Mickey Mouse Club lasted from
Bill Hurtz’s A Unicorn in the Garden was an adaptation of a 1954 to 1959 and The Woody Woodpecker Show was syndi-
bittersweet tale by James Thurber, rendered in the style of cated from 1958 to 1966. Against rave critics’ reviews, the
the humorist’s own drawings. A compact and clever work, audience turned its back. Too sophisticated.
it was Bill Hurtz’s directorial debut and probably the most In 1958, the New York and London branches closed.
highbrow American cartoon released until then to general In December 1959, 1001 Arabian Nights, the Mr. Magoo
audiences. feature film directed by Jack Kinney – after Pete Burness’
The Tell-Tale Heart was innovative by virtue of being a withdrawal – flopped, thereby precipitating a crisis. By
noncomical cartoon. Illustrating a work by Edgar Allan early 1960, Stephen Bosustow sold UPA to TV producer
Poe, it emphasized the nightmarish qualities of the story Henry Saperstein and put an end to the artistic trajectory
and was a first example of an animated horror movie. of the company.23
21
The real name of this quick-witted (and underestimated) screenwriter and gagman was Thornton Garfield (1911–1988). Animation
director Bob Kurtz wrote: ‘About my mentor and writing partner T. Hee [. . .] His closest friend throughout his career was Marc Davis
and he didn’t know Tee’s abandoned given last name. Tee’s name reflected his gentle spirit and his view of life. I don’t know if Tee hated
Garfield as much as it didn’t fit him. T. Hee fit him well’. (E-mailed letter to the author, 3 February 2009)
22
José Cuauhtémoc ‘Bill’ Meléndez was born in Hermosillo, Sonora State, Mexico, on 15 November 1916, and was brought up in Ari-
zona and California. He joined Disney in 1938, Leon Schlesinger/Warner Bros. in 1941 and UPA in 1949. He established Bill Meléndez
Productions in 1964, becoming famous with his cinematic renditions of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts and Jim Davis’s Garfield the Cat.
He died in Santa Monica on 2 September 2008.
23
Saperstein (1918–1998) produced dozens of hurried TV Mr. Magoo cartoons, plus the TV series The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo,
in which the character starred in adaptations of classics from world literature. Abe Levitow (1922–1975) directed both the series and the
feature-length theatrical film Gay Purr-ee (1962), which unsuccessfully aimed at catching the attention of the cultivated audience.
12 Chapter 1: Walt Disney
It is necessary here to discredit an endlessly repeated rather forgotten feature The Reluctant Dragon (1941) and its
legend: that limited animation was adopted in order to segment Baby Weems, which actually is nothing else than a
save money. It wasn’t. Most of the UPA shorts were over filmed storyboard. Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (directed by
budget – money was never a priority for Stephen Bosus- Ward Kimball and Charles A. Nichols in 1954) looked just
tow, who cared for quality – and in 1960 the studio was like a UPA production and, despite initial scepticism, was
heavily indebted to Columbia. UPA limited animation awarded an Oscar.24
should better be called stylized animation, necessary to The late 1940s/early 1950s were difficult years for
match stylized drawings. Disney animation. Mary Browne Robinson Blair (1911–
Not everybody properly used the recipe. Some applied it 1978), an exquisite watercolourist from Oklahoma, was
to old slapstick comedy, hoping to reduce work, but missed the one who didn’t let its artistic look lose its shine. She set
the implications of stylized animation. Others heavily her mark into such films as Saludos Amigos, The Three Cabal-
applied it to TV series, where actually work and money leros, Make Mine Music and Melody Time, and then Cinderella
had to be saved, and rejected criticism on the ground that and Alice in Wonderland up to Peter Pan, with her bidimen-
the highly praised UPA films had used it, too. In UPA’s sional, modernist, faux-naïf ‘inspirational paintings’ based
productions, on the contrary, precise correlations existed on sharp chromatic contrasts. Mary Blair took her leave
between humour, drawings and animation. The conse- of Mickey Mouse’s father in 1953, but was called back ten
quences of this style must be considered over an extended years later to create It’s a Small World, an ‘attraction’ for
period of time. When Bobe Cannon let colour overlap the the 1964 New York’s World Fair that was later moved to
contours of his characters and considered both lines and Disneyland in California.
colours as one plastic whole obeying pictorial rather than Walt Disney was not actually a conservative, as far as art
narrative laws, he claimed his right to a specific language. was concerned, and even enrolled undisciplined surrealist
In other words, and on a minor scale, he did what Jackson painter Salvador Dalí to make a short for him.25 Neverthe-
Pollock had initiated some time before in paintings with less, theatrical animation – especially theatrical animated
his ‘unfinished’, incidental style. shorts – weren’t his cup of tea anymore, and the anima-
Without exaggeration, it can be inferred that the very tion department of the company gradually grew smaller
idea of animation as an art form, in the United States and smaller.
as well as in other countries, became commonplace with Out of the animated feature films produced in the
UPA. Entertainment animation left the exclusive realm of 1950s, none was bad, but none was really good, either.
comedy and became the foundation for graphic and picto- They were formulaic. Cinderella (1950, directed by Clyde
rial research as well as for diverse styles, themes and ‘gen- Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson) still had some Snow White
res’. In short, it became a medium for the greatest freedom charm and some charming characters and villains. Sleep-
of expression. ing Beauty (1959, supervising director Clyde Geronimi) is
It should be added that the audiences did not always rather original in its look, as artist and illustrator Eyvind
adapt to the new language. Those who loved tradition Earle (1916–2000) was given – or took – the full respon-
criticized stylization as poor drawing, and segmented ani- sibility for colours and design. Its shining and flat chro-
mation as a sign of incompetence. Full animation was later matism reminds us of the illuminated manuscripts of the
re-evaluated, and today, the two schools still vie for the Middle Age in which the story is set.
favour of the public.
Warner Bros.
Walt Disney Warner Bros. lost one of its best directors in 1946, when
As strange as it may seem, the roots of the UPA approach Bob Clampett left to work at Screen Gems and, subse-
sink into the Disney production: it’s sufficient to watch the quently, to devote himself to hand-animated puppets for
24
Contrary to expectations, evidence exists that both Walt and Roy Disney admired UPA’s output.
25
Dalí worked more devotedly than anybody would have expected for eight months, between 1945 and 1946, along with writer and layout
man John Hench (1908–2004). Due to economic difficulties, the production was discontinued. A short by the title of Destino was released
in 2003, under the auspices of Roy Edward Disney. It was produced by Baker Bloodworth and directed by Frenchman Dominique Mon-
féry, on the basis of the original storyboards and paintings.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
find itself beside this same oak, the natural heat of whose germ will
draw it up and make it a particle of the whole oak.
"In this manner all these four elements return to the same state
they had left some days earlier; and in the same way a man has in
him everything necessary to make up a tree, and there is in a tree
everything necessary to make up a man. Finally, in this way all
things are met with in all things, but we lack a Prometheus to draw
from the bosom of Nature and make sensible to us that which I wish
to call 'primary matter'."
These are approximately the things with which we passed the time,
and truly this little Spaniard had a pretty wit. Our conversation took
place only at night, because from six o'clock in the morning until the
evening, the crowds of people who came to look at us in our lodging
prevented it. Some threw stones at us, some nuts, some grass;
there was no talk but of the King's beasts. They fed us every day at
regular hours and the King and Queen themselves often were
pleased to touch my belly to find out if I were not pregnant, for they
burned with an extraordinary desire to have a race of these little
animals. I do not know whether I was more attentive to their
grimaces and intonations than my male, but I learned to understand
their language and to use it a little. Immediately the news ran
through the whole kingdom that there had been found two wild
men, smaller than others because of the poor nourishment solitude
had furnished us with, who from some defect in their fathers' seed
possessed fore-legs too weak to walk upon.
This belief would have taken root by circulating had not the priests
of the country opposed it, saying this was a horrible impiety to
believe that not only beasts but monsters were of their species.
"It is far more likely", proceeded the least impassioned, "that our
domestic animals should share the privilege of humanity and
consequently of immortality, since they are born in our land, than a
monstrous beast which says it was born somewhere in the Moon.
Then consider the difference to be noted between us and them: we
walk on four feet because God did not wish to confide so precious a
thing to a position less firm, He feared some accident might happen
to man; that is why He Himself took the trouble to set man upon
four columns, so that he should not fall, but disdaining to interfere in
the construction of these two beasts He abandoned them to the
caprice of Nature, who, not considering the loss of so slight a thing,
set them upon two feet only.
"The very birds", they said, "were not so badly treated as these, for
at least they have received feathers to make up for the weakness of
their feet and to cast themselves into the air when we turn them out
of our houses; but by taking two feet from these monsters Nature
has put them in the position of being unable to escape our justice.
"Moreover, observe how their heads are turned up towards Heaven!
They are placed in this position through the scarcity of all things
which God has imposed upon them, for this posture of supplication
shows that they seek Heaven to complain to Him who created them
and to ask His permission to make shift with our scraps. But we have
our heads turned downwards to contemplate the good things
whereof we are lords and as having nothing in Heaven for our happy
condition to envy."
Every day in my lodging I heard the priests make up these or similar
tales. At length they so directed the people's conscience in the
matter that it was decreed I should at best be held for nothing more
than a plucked parrot; and they confirmed those already persuaded
by the fact that I had only two feet like a bird. I was put in a cage
by a special order of the upper council.
There the Queen's falconer came every day to whistle to me as we
do with starlings. I was happy in that my cage did not lack food; and
from the follies with which the spectators deafened my ears I
learned to speak like them.
When I understood the idiom sufficiently to express the greater part
of my conceptions I showed them how I could talk. Already in
gatherings people were speaking of nothing but the prettiness of my
jests; and the esteem for my wit grew to such a point that the
Clergy were forced to publish a decree forbidding any one to believe
that I possessed reason, with a very strict command to all persons of
whatever rank and condition they might be to believe that any
intellectual thing I did was only through instinct.
However, the definition of what I was divided the Town into two
factions; the party which took sides in my favour increased every
day. At length in spite of the anathema and the excommunication of
the Prophets who tried in this way to terrify the people, my
supporters demanded an assembly of the Estates of the realm to
resolve this religious hitch. It was a long time before they could
agree on the choice of judges, but the arbitrators pacified animosity
by making the judges consist of an equal number from each party.
They carried me openly to the court of justice, where I was severely
treated by the examiners. Among other things they asked me my
philosophy. In all good faith I showed them what I had formerly
been taught by my Master, but they had no difficulty in refuting me
with numerous reasons, which were in truth very convincing. When I
found myself wholly refuted, so that I could not reply, as a last
refuge I alleged the Principles of Aristotle, which were no more
useful to me than his Sophisms, for they showed me their falsity in a
few words.
"Aristotle", said they, "fitted principles to his philosophy instead of
fitting his philosophy to principles. And at least he ought to have
proved these principles to be more reasonable than those of other
sects, which he could not do. For this reason the good man must not
complain if we agree to differ from him."
At last when they saw that I kept bawling this and nothing else, save
that they were not more learned than Aristotle, and that I had been
forbidden to argue with those who denied his Principles, they
concluded with one accord that I was not a man but perhaps some
sort of ostrich, seeing I carried my head upright like that bird; and
so the falconer was ordered to take me back to the cage. I passed
my time amusingly enough, for my possessing correctly their
language was a cause that the whole Court diverted itself by making
me chatter. Among others the Queen's ladies-in-waiting always
thrust some scraps of food into my basket, and the prettiest of them
all conceived a certain friendship for me. Once when we were alone
I discovered to her the mysteries of our religion and I discoursed
principally of our bells and our relics; she was so transported with
joy that she vowed with tears in her eyes that if ever I were able to
fly back to our world she would gladly follow me.
One day I woke up early with a start and saw her tapping against
the bars of my cage. "I have good news for you!" said she,
"yesterday the council declared for war against the great King
; and I hope, with the bustle of preparation and the
departure of our Monarch and his subjects, to find an opportunity to
set you free."
"War!" I interrupted immediately, "do the Princes of this world
quarrel among themselves like those of ours? Tell me, I beseech
you, how they fight."
"The Umpires elected by the consent of both parties", she replied,
"fix the time allowed for arming, the time of marching, the number
of combatants, the day and place of the battle; all with such
impartiality that neither army has a single man more than the other.
On each side the maimed soldiers are enrolled in one company and
on the day of battle the Generals are careful to send them against
the maimed soldiers on the other side. The giants are opposed by
the colossi, the fencers by the nimble, the valiant by the courageous,
the weak by the feeble, the unhealthy by the sick, the robust by the
strong; and if someone should strike any but his prescribed enemy
he is found guilty of cowardice unless he can clear himself by
showing it was a mistake. After the battle they count the wounded,
the dead and the prisoners, for none is ever seen to run away. If the
losses are equal on each side they draw lots as to who shall be
proclaimed the victor. But although a King may have defeated his
enemy in open war he has achieved little; there are other less
numerous armies of men of wit and learning, upon whose disputes
depends wholly the real triumph or servitude of States. A man of
learning is opposed to another, men of wit and judgment are set
against their like; and the triumph gained by a State in this way is
considered equal to three victories of brute force. When a nation is
proclaimed victorious, they break up the assembly and the
conquering people chooses for its King either their own or that of
their enemies."
I could not forbear laughing at this scrupulous manner of making
war and as an example of a far stronger policy I alleged the customs
of our Europe, where the Monarch takes care to omit no opportunity
of conquest; and she answered me in this way:
"Tell me", said she, "do your Princes justify their arms by anything
save the right of force?"
"Yes indeed", replied I, "with the justice of their cause."
"Why then", she continued, "do not they choose arbitrators above
suspicion to reconcile them? And if there is as much right on the one
side as on the other let them stay as they were or let them play a
hundred up at piquet for the Town or Province about which they are
disputing. And yet, while they are the cause that more than four
millions of better men than themselves get broken heads, they are in
their cabinets joking over the circumstances of the massacre of
these poor boobies. But I am wrong to blame the courage of your
brave subjects; they do well to die for their country; 'tis an affair of
importance, a matter of being the vassal of a King who wears a ruff
or of a King who wears falling bands."
"But", I replied, "why all these circumstances in your manner of
fighting? Is it not enough for armies to be equal in numbers?"
"Your judgment is all astray", she replied. "On your faith now, do you
think that if you overcome your enemy in the field face to face, that
you have beaten him in fair warfare if you wear mail and he does
not? If he has only a dagger and you a rapier? Finally, if he is one-
armed and you have both your arms? Yet with all the equality you
recommend so much to your gladiators, they never fight on equal
terms; one will be tall, another short; one skilful, the other will never
have handled a sword; one will be strong, the other weak. And even
if these proportions are equalised, if they are equally tall, equally
nimble and equally strong, they will still not be on an equal footing,
for one of the two will perhaps be more courageous than the other.
And because a brutal fellow will not consider the peril, will be bilious
and will have more blood, will have a heart more set with the
qualities which make for courage (as if this were not an arm his
enemy does not possess, just like a sword!), he will rush violently
upon his adversary, terrify him and deprive of life a poor man who
saw the danger, whose vital heat was stifled in phlegm and whose
heart is too large to collect the spirits necessary to get rid of that ice
we call poltroonery. So you praise a man for having killed his enemy
when he had him at an advantage, and by praising his boldness you
praise him for a sin against Nature, since boldness tends to its own
destruction.[47]
"You must know that a few years ago a Remonstrance was sent up
to the council of war, demanding a more circumspect and more
conscientious regulation of combats. The philosopher who sent up
the notice spoke in these words:
"'You imagine, gentlemen, that you have equalised two combatants
when you have chosen them both hardy, both tall, both active, both
courageous, but this still is not enough; the conqueror must win by
skill, by force or by chance. If it were by skill, he has doubtless
struck his adversary in a place he has not expected, or more quickly
than seemed likely; or, feigning to attack him on one side, he paid
him home on the other. This is finesse, deceiving, betraying. And
such finesse, such deceit, such treason should not contribute to the
fair fame of a true gentleman. If he has triumphed by force, will you
consider his enemy beaten because he has been overwhelmed? No,
doubtless; any more than you would say that a man had lost the
victory if he should be overwhelmed by the fall of a mountain, since
it was not in his power to gain it. Moreover he has not been
overcome, because at that moment he was not disposed to be able
to resist the violence of his adversary. And if he has beaten his
enemy by chance, you should crown Fortune, not him, for he has
contributed nothing; and the loser is no more to be blamed than a
dice-player who sees eighteen thrown when he has cast seventeen.'"
It was admitted that he was right, but that it was impossible in all
human probability to remedy it and that it was better to yield to one
small inconvenience than to give way to a thousand of greater
importance.
She did not say any more on that occasion, because she was afraid
to be found alone with me at so early an hour. In that country
unchastity is no crime; on the contrary, except for condemned
criminals any man may take any woman, and similarly a woman may
cite a man before the law-courts if he has refused her. But she dared
not frequent me publicly, according to her own account, because at
the last sacrifice the priests had declared that the women chiefly
reported I was a man to hide under this pretext the execrable desire
which burned them to mingle with beasts and to commit
shamelessly sins against Nature with me. For this reason I remained
a long time without seeing her or any of her sex.
Somebody must have re-lighted the quarrels about the definition of
what I was, for just as I was resigned to die in my cage they came
for me again to examine me. I was interrogated in the presence of a
number of courtiers on several points in physics, but I do not think
my responses were satisfactory; since the president of the court in a
manner the reverse of dogmatic gave me at length his opinions on
the structure of the world. They seemed to me ingenious and I
should have found his philosophy much more reasonable than ours
had he not gone back to the origin of the world, which he
maintained was eternal. As soon as I heard him support a fantasy so
contrary to what faith teaches us, I asked him what he could reply to
the authority of Moses and that this great patriarch expressly
declares that God created the world in six days. Instead of
answering me the ignorant fellow only laughed. I could not prevent
myself from saying then that since he took this attitude I began to
think their world was only a Moon.
"But", said they all, "you see here earth, forests, rivers, seas; what is
all that?"
"No matter", I replied, "Aristotle asserts that it is only the Moon; and
if you had asserted the contrary in the classes where I made my
studies, you would have been hissed."
At this there was a great shout of laughter. No need to ask whether
it were the result of their ignorance! And I was taken back to my
cage. The priests were told, however, that I had dared to say the
Moon whence I came was a World and theirs was only a Moon. They
believed this furnished them with a sufficient pretext for having me
condemned to the water (which is their method of exterminating
atheists); and with this purpose they went in a body to complain to
the King, who promised them justice. It was ordered that I should
be interrogated once more.
For the third time I was taken out of my cage and the Great Pontiff
himself spoke against me. I do not remember his speech, because I
was too frightened to receive the expressions of the voice without
disorder and also because in declaiming he made use of an
instrument whose noise deafened me; it was a trumpet which he
had chosen on purpose so that the violence of its martial tone
should heat up their minds for my death and by this emotion prevent
reason from performing its office; as in our own armies, where the
clamour of trumpets and drums prevents the soldier from reflecting
on the importance of his life.
When he had spoken, I got up to defend my cause, but I was freed
from this trouble by the occurrence you are about to hear. As I
opened my mouth, a man who had forced his way with great
difficulty through the crowd fell at the King's feet and for a long time
lay on his back. This action did not surprise me; I had long known
that they assumed this posture when they desired to discourse in
public. I simply pocketed my speech and here is the one we had
from him:
"Just judges, hear me! You cannot condemn this Man, this Monkey
or this Parrot for having said that the Moon is a World whence he
came. If he is a man; even though he did not come from the Moon,
every man is free and is he not free to imagine what he wishes?
What! Can you force him to have no fancies but yours? You may
easily compel him to say he believes the Moon is not a World,
nevertheless he will not believe it; for, in order to believe something,
there must be presented to his imagination certain possibilities
leaning rather to the Yes than to the No of this thing. So unless you
furnish him with this probability or unless it spontaneously offers
itself to his mind he may say he believes it, but for all that he will
not believe it.
"I have now to prove to you that he should not be condemned if you
put him in the category of beasts. Admitted that he is an animal
without reason—then what reason have you yourselves to accuse
him for having sinned against reason? He has said that the Moon is
a World. Well, brute beasts act only by Nature's instinct; therefore it
is Nature says it, not he. To believe that this wise Nature who made
the Moon and this World does not know herself what it is, while you,
who know nothing save what you get from her, should know it more
certainly, would be very ridiculous. But even if passion should make
you abandon your first principles and you should suppose that
Nature does not direct animals, blush at least at the uneasiness
caused you by the whimsies of a beast. Truly, gentlemen, if you met
a man of ripe age who devoted himself to policing an ant-hill, giving
a blow to one ant who had made his companion fall, imprisoning
another for stealing a grain of corn from his neighbour, prosecuting
another for abandoning its eggs, would you not consider such a man
senseless to attend to things too much beneath him and to desire to
subject to reason animals which do not use it? Venerable Pontiffs,
what should you call the interest that you take in the whimsies of
this little animal? Just judges, I have spoken."
As soon as he had finished a loud music of applause echoed through
the hall; and after the opinions had been discussed for a long
quarter of an hour, the King pronounced the following sentence:
"That henceforth I should be considered a man; as such set at
liberty, and that the punishment of being drowned should be
modified into making a 'shameful amends' (for there is no
'honourable amends' in that land), in which amends I should publicly
disavow having taught that the Moon was a World, and this on
account of the scandal the novelty of the opinion might have caused
the souls of the weaker brethren."
When this sentence was pronounced I was taken out of the Palace.
As a mark of ignominy I was dressed very magnificently; I was
borne along on the seat of a superb chariot; and I was drawn by
four Princes, who were attached to the pole and at every crossroads
in the town I was obliged to declare as follows:
"People, I declare to you that this Moon is not a Moon, but a World;
and that World is not a World but a Moon. For your priests think
good that you should believe this."
After I had cried the same thing in the five principal squares of the
city, I perceived my defender holding out his hand to help me to get
down. I was vastly surprised to recognise him when I looked in his
face, for he was my demon. We embraced each other for an hour.
"Come away home with me", said he, "for if you return to Court you
will be frowned upon after a shameful amends. Moreover I must tell
you that you would still be with the Monkeys, like your friend the
Spaniard, if I had not published abroad the vigour and strength of
your wit and secured in your favour the protection of the nobles
against the prophets."
I had barely finished thanking him when we reached his lodging.
Before our meal he told me of the wheels he had set in motion to
force the priests to let me be heard, in spite of all the specious
scruples with which they had wheedled the people's conscience. We
sat before a large fire, because the weather was cold, and I think he
was going on to tell me what he had done during the time I had not
seen him, when they came to inform us that supper was ready.
"I have invited", he went on, "two professors from the academy of
this town to eat with us this evening. I will bring them round to the
subject of the philosophy taught in this world. You will also see my
host's son. I have never met a young man so full of wit and he
would be a second Socrates if he could regulate his knowledge and
not stifle in vice the grace with which God continually visits him and
cease to affect impiety out of mere ostentation. I have taken up my
lodging here to find some occasion for instructing him."
He was silent as if to give me an opportunity of speaking in my turn;
then he made a sign that they should divest me of the shameful
ornaments with which I was still brilliant. Almost at the same time
the two professors we were waiting for entered and we all four went
off to the dining-room, where we found the young man he had
spoken of already eating. They made him profound bows and
treated him with a respect as deep as that of a slave for his lord. I
asked my demon the reason of this, and he replied that it was on
account of his age, because in that world the old render every
deference and honour to the young. And more: the fathers obey
their children, as soon as the latter have attained the age of reason
in the opinion of the Senate of philosophers.
"You are surprised", he continued, "at a custom so contrary to that
of your country? But there is nothing contrary to right reason in it
for, tell me on your conscience, when a warm young fellow is most
apt to imagine, to judge and to execute, is he not more capable of
governing a family than an infirm man of sixty? The poor dullard,
whose imagination is frozen by the snow of sixty winters, acts from
the experience of fortunate successes, yet it was not he but his
fortune which made them so, against all the rules and the whole
management of human prudence.
"As to judgment he has just as little, although the common opinion
of your world makes it a prerogative of old age. To remove this error,
it must be known that what in an old man is called prudence is
simply a panic apprehension, a mad fear of undertaking anything,
which becomes an obsession. And so, my son, when he has not
risked a danger by which a young man has been ruined, it was not
because he foresaw the catastrophe but because he lacked fire to
kindle those noble ardours which make us dare; and in that young
man boldness was, as it were, a pledge of the success of his plan,
because that spirit which gives promptitude and facility of execution
is precisely that which urged him to undertake it.
"As to his carrying things out, I should be wronging your wit did I
labour to convince it by proofs. You know that youth alone is fit for
action; and if you are not fully persuaded of this, tell me, I beg you,
when you respect a brave man is it not because he can avenge you
upon your enemies or your oppressors? Why then should you still
consider him such, except from habit, when a battalion of seventy
Januaries has frozen his blood and killed with cold all the noble
enthusiasms which inflame young persons in the cause of justice?
When you defer to the strong man is it not in order that he may be
obliged to you for a victory which you could not dispute? Why then
should you submit to him, when idleness has melted his muscles,
weakened his arteries, evaporated his spirits and sucked the marrow
from his bones?
"If you adore a woman, is it not because of her beauty? Why then
continue your genuflections when old age has made her a phantom
menacing the living with death? In fine, when you honour a witty
man it is because through the liveliness of his genius he grasps a
tangled affair and unravels it, because he delights the most
distinguished assembly with his talk, because he digests the sciences
into a single thought, and a noble soul will never form a more violent
desire than to resemble him; and yet you continue to pay homage to
him when his outworn organs render his head imbecile and heavy
and his silence in company makes him rather like the statue of a
Household God than a man capable of reason. Resolve yourself, my
son, it is better that young men should be given the control of
families than old men. Certainly, you would be very weak to think
that Hercules, Achilles, Epaminondas, Alexander and Caesar, who all
died before they were forty, were persons to whom one would owe
no more than ordinary courtesies, while bringing incense to a doting
old fool simply because the Sun had ninety times looked upon his
harvest.
"'But', you will say, 'all the laws of our world are careful to repeat
this respect which we owe to the aged.' It is true. But all who
introduced these laws were old men and they were afraid the young
men would dispossess them of the authority they had usurped; and
so, like the legislators of false religions, they made a mystery of
what they could not prove.
"'Yes but,' you will say, 'this old man is my father and Heaven
promises me a long life if I honour him.'
"My son, if your father commands nothing contrary to the
inspirations of the Most High, I grant it. If not; tread upon the belly
of the father who engendered you, stamp on the bosom of the
mother who conceived you, for I see no likelihood that your
supposing this cowardly respect wrenched from your weakness by
vicious parents would be agreeable to Heaven will lengthen the
thread of your life.
"What! That doffing your hat, which so tickles and nourishes your
father's pride, will it break an abscess you have in your side, will it
renew your radical moisture, will it cure a rapier wound in your
stomach, will it disperse a stone in your bladder? If this is so,
doctors are grievously wrong. Instead of the infernal potions with
which they poison men's lives, let them prescribe for smallpox with
'three congees fasting', four 'humble thanks' after dinner and twelve
'good night, father and mother', before going to bed. You will retort
that without him you would not be at all. It is true, but he himself
would never have been without your grandfather, nor your
grandfather without your great-grandfather, and without you your
father could not have a grandson. When Nature brought him forth it
was on condition that he should return that which she lent him; so
when he begot you he gave you nothing, he merely paid a debt!
Moreover I should very much like to know if your parents were
thinking of you when they begot you? Alas, not at all! And yet you
think yourself obliged to them for a present they made you without
thinking!
"What, because your father was so lascivious he could not resist the
charms of some baggage, because he made a bargain to satisfy his
desire and you were the masonry which resulted from their
puddling, you are to revere this sensual fellow as one of the seven
wise men of Greece? What, because a miser purchased the rich
goods of his wife by means of a child, must that child only speak to
him on its knees? In this way your father acted well when he was
bawdy and the other when he drove a hard bargain, for otherwise
neither of you children would ever have been; but I should like to
know whether he would not have pulled the trigger just the same, if
he had been certain that his pistol would miss fire? Good God! What
the people in your world can be made to believe.
"My son, your body alone comes from your mortal architect, your
soul came from Heaven and might just as well have been sheathed
in some other scabbard. Your father might have been born your son
as you were born his. How do you know even that he did not
prevent you from inheriting a crown? Perhaps your spirit set out
from Heaven with the purpose of animating the King of the Romans
in the Empress's womb; on the way it chanced to meet your embryo
and to shorten the journey took up its abode there. No, no, God
would not have blotted you from the sum He had made of men if
your father had died as a little boy. But who knows whether you
might not have been to-day the work of some valiant captain who
would have shared with you his glory as well as his goods! So you
are perhaps no more beholden to your father for the life he gave you
than you would be to a pirate who had put you in irons because he
fed you. And suppose he had begotten you a King—a present loses
its merit when it is made without consulting the person who receives
it. Caesar was given death; it was given likewise to Cassius; but
Cassius was under an obligation to the slave from whom he obtained
it, but not Caesar to his murderers because they forced him to take
it. When your father embraced your mother did he consult your
wishes? Did he ask you if you thought it good to see this century or
to wait for another? If you were content to be the son of a fool or if
you had the ambition to proceed from an honest man? Alas! in a
matter which concerned you alone, you were the only person whose
opinion was not consulted! Perhaps if you had then been enclosed
somewhere in the womb of Nature's ideas and it had been in your
power to control your birth, you might have said to Fate: 'My dear
lady, take someone else's life spindle. I have been in nothingness for
a very long time and I prefer to remain another hundred years
without existing than to exist to-day and to repent it to-morrow.'
However you had to endure it; you might whimper as you would to
return to the long black house from which you had been torn, they
simply pretended to think you were asking to suckle.
"My son, these are approximately the reasons for the respect which
fathers give their children. I know I have leaned to the children's
side more than justice asks and that I have argued in their favour a
little against my conscience. But I desired to correct that insolent
pride with which fathers insult over the weakness of their offspring,
and therefore I was obliged to act like those who straighten a
crooked tree; they pull it to the other side so that between the two
twistings it grows straight again. In the same way I have made the
fathers pay that tyrannical deference they had usurped from others
and I took from them much which is due them, so that hereafter
they should be content with what they really deserve. I know my
apology will have shocked all old men, but let them remember that
they were sons before they were fathers and that I must have
spoken to their advantage too, since they were not found under a
gooseberry bush. But whatever happens, even if my enemies attack
me, I shall be safe because I have served all men and injured only
half of them."
With these words he ceased speaking and our host's son began as
follows:
"Permit me", said he, "since by your care I am informed of the
Origin, History, Customs and Philosophy of this little man's world, to
add something to what you have said and to prove that children are
under no obligation to their fathers for being begotten because their
fathers were conscientiously obliged to beget them.
"The narrowest Philosophy of their world admits that it is more
desirable to die than not to have been, because one must have lived
in order to die. Well, if I do not give being to this nothing, I place it
in a worse state than death, and in not producing it I am more guilty
than if I killed it. You would think, my little man, you had committed
an unpardonable parricide if you had throttled your son. Truly, it
would be an enormity; however it is more execrable not to give
being to that which could receive it, for the child you deprive of light
has nevertheless had the satisfaction of enjoying it a certain time.
Moreover we know that it is only deprived of light for a few
centuries; but there are forty poor little nothings, which you might
make into forty good soldiers for your King, and you maliciously
prevent them from seeing the daylight, letting them grow corrupt in
your loins at the risk of being stifled by an apoplexy.
"Do not answer me with panegyrics of virginity. This virtue is only a
smoke, for all the respect with which it is commonly idolised is, even
among you, merely an advice, not to kill, but to refrain from making,
one's son; and hence to make him more unfortunate than a dead
man. It is a commandment; but since in the world whence you come
chastity is considered so preferable to carnal propagation I marvel
that God did not cause you to be born like mushrooms from the dew
of May, or, at least, like crocodiles from thick mud heated by the sun.
Yet it is only by accident that He sends eunuchs among you and He
does not tear the genitals from your monks, your priests or your
cardinals. You will say these were bestowed on them by Nature. Yes,
but He is Nature's Master and if He had recognised that this piece
was harmful to their salvation He would have ordered them to cut it
off, as by the old law He commanded the Jews to cut off their
foreskins. But these fancies are too ridiculous. On your honour, is
there any part of your body more sacred or more profane than
another? Why should I be a sin when I touch my centre-piece and
not when I touch my ear or my heel? Is it because there is a tickling
sensation? Why then I should not purge myself in the privy, for that
cannot be done without some sort of pleasure; and pious men
should not raise themselves to the contemplation of God, since
thereby they enjoy a great pleasure in the imagination. Truly, seeing
how much the religion of your country is contrary to Nature and how
jealous it is of man's enjoyments, I am surprised your priests have
not made it a crime to scratch oneself, on account of the agreeable
sensation one feels from it. On the other hand I have noticed that
far-seeing Nature has made all great, valiant and witty persons lean
towards the delicate pleasures of love, as, for example, Samson,
David, Hercules, Caesar, Hannibal and Charlemagne. Was this done
for them to reap this organ of pleasure with a blow from a sickle?
Alas, even in a tub Nature found out and debauched Diogenes, thin,
ugly, and lousy; and forced him to make the breath that cooled his
carrots into sighs for Lais. Doubtless Nature acted in this way for
fear lest honest men should cease in the world. Let us conclude from
this that your father was conscientiously obliged to set you free to
the light and, when he imagines you are greatly obliged to him for
his having made you by tickling himself, he actually has only given
you what an ordinary bull gives his calves ten times every day for his
amusement."
"You are wrong", interrupted my demon, "to try to regulate God's
wisdom. It is true that He has forbidden us excess in this pleasure,
but how do you know that He has not so willed it in order that the
difficulties we find in compassing this passion may fit us for the glory
He is preparing for us? How do you know that it was not to sharpen
appetite by forbidding it? How do you know that He did not foresee
that if youth gave itself up to the impetuosities of the flesh, too
frequent enjoyment would enfeeble their seed and bring about the
end of the world at the grandsons of the first man? How do you
know He did not wish to prevent too many hungry generations from
finding the fertility of the earth insufficient for their needs? Finally,
how do you know He has not willed to act against all appearance of
reason in order to reward fully those who have believed in His word
against all appearance of reason?"
It seemed to me that this reply did not satisfy our young host, for he
shook his head two or three times; but our mutual instructor was
silent, because the meal was about to be carried in. We stretched
ourselves out upon very soft mattresses covered with wide
embroideries, where the vapours came to us as they had done
before at the inn. A young servant took the elder of our two
philosophers and led him into another little room. "Come back to us
here", cried my instructor, "as soon as you have eaten." He promised
to do so.
This fantasy of eating alone gave me the curiosity to ask the reason.
"He does not taste", said he, "the odour of meat or even of herbs
unless they have died naturally, because he thinks them capable of
pain."
"I am not greatly surprised", I replied, "that he should abstain from
flesh and everything which has a sensitive life. In our world the
Pythagoreans and even certain holy Anchorites observed this
regime. But it seems to me altogether ridiculous not to cut a
cabbage, for example, for fear of hurting it."
"For my part", replied my demon, "I see a good deal of probability in
his opinion. Is not the cabbage you speak of as much a creation of
God as yourself? Have you not both equally God and want for father
and mother? Has not God's intellect been occupied from all eternity
with its birth as well as yours? Moreover it seems He has provided
more necessarily for the birth of vegetable than of reasonable life,
since He has committed the generation of man to the caprice of his
father, who can beget or not beget at his pleasure. But God has not
treated the cabbage with such rigour, for He seems to have been
more concerned lest the race of cabbages should perish than the
race of men, and instead of permitting the father the option of
begetting the son He forces them willy-nilly to give birth to others.
And while men can at most beget a score in their lifetime, cabbages
produce four hundred thousand a head. And to say that God loves
man more than a cabbage is to tickle ourselves to make ourselves
laugh; He is incapable of passion and therefore cannot love or hate
anybody; and if He were capable of love He would rather feel
tenderness for the cabbage you are holding (which cannot offend
Him) than for a man when He already has before His eyes the
wrongs the man is fated to commit. Add to this that a man cannot
be born without sin, for he is a part of the first man who rendered
him guilty, but we know very well that the first cabbage did not
offend its Creator in the Earthly Paradise. Will it be said that we are
made in the image of the Sovereign Being and that cabbages are
not? Suppose that were true, by polluting in ourselves the soul
whereby we resembled Him we have effaced the resemblance, for
nothing is more contrary to God than sin. Then if our soul is no
longer His portrait, we no more resemble Him through our hands,
our feet, our mouth, our forehead and ears than a cabbage through
its leaves, its flowers, its stalk, its heart and its head. If this poor
plant could speak when you cut it do you not think it would say:
"'Man, my dear brother, what have I done to you to merit death? I
grow only in your gardens, I am never found in wild places where I
should live safely; I scorn to be the work of any hands but yours and
I have scarcely left them when I lift myself from the ground to
return to them. I spread out, I hold out my arms to you, I offer you
the seeds my children, and to reward my courtesy you have my
head cut off!'
"This is what a cabbage would say if it could express itself, and,
because it cannot complain, does that mean that we have the right
to do it all the ill it cannot prevent? If I find a wretch in fetters am I
guiltless if I kill him, merely because he cannot defend himself? On
the contrary, my cruelty is rendered worse by his weakness;
however poor, however lacking in all advantages this hapless
cabbage may be, it does not merit death on that account. What! Of
all the goods of life it has none but that of vegetating and we
deprive it of this? The sin of murdering a man is not so great as to
cut a cabbage and to deprive it of life, because one day the man will
live again while the cabbage has no other life to hope for. By killing a
cabbage you annihilate its soul; but by killing a man you simply
make him change his domicile. And I go further. Since God, the
common Father of all things, cherishes equally all His works, is it not
reasonable that He should have shared His benefits equally between
us and plants? True, we were born first, but in God's family there is
no right of primogeniture. If then cabbages did not share with us the
fief of immortality, doubtless they received some other advantage,
the briefness of whose existence is compensated for by its grandeur.
This may be an universal intellect, a perfect knowledge of all things
in their causes; for this reason it may be that the wise Contriver did
not fashion them organs like ours, whose effect is only a simple,
weak and often deceitful reasoning, but gave them organs that are
stronger, more numerous and more skilfully elaborated to serve the
purposes of their speculative conversations? Perhaps you will ask me
why they have never communicated these great thoughts to us? But
tell me, have you ever been taught by the Angels any more than by
them? Since there is no proportion, no relation and no harmony
between man's imbecile faculties and those of these divine
creatures, these intellectual cabbages may try their best to make us
understand the hidden cause of all miraculous events, we still lack
senses capable of perceiving these fine points.
"Moses, the greatest of all philosophers, since according to what you
say he gathered his knowledge of Nature from the source of Nature
itself, indicated this truth when he spoke of the Tree of Knowledge.
Under this enigma he wished to teach us that plants possess perfect
philosophy. Remember then, O proudest of all animals, that although
the cabbage you cut says not a word, it thinks none the less. The
poor vegetable has no organs like ours to howl, to wriggle and to
weep, but it has others to complain of the trick we play upon it, to
draw down upon us the vengeance of Heaven. And if you ask me
how I know that cabbages have these fine thoughts I ask you how
you know that they do not have them? And how do you know that
they do not say at night when they close up, in imitation of you:
'Master Curly-cabbage, I am your most humble servant, Savoy-
Cabbage.'"
He was at this point of his discourse when the young man who had
carried off our philosopher brought him back. "What! Already
dined?" exclaimed my demon. He answered that he had, except for
dessert, as the Physionome had permitted him to taste ours. Our
young host did not wait for me to ask him the explanation of this
mystery.
"I perceive", said he, "that this manner of living astonishes you.
Know then that although health is regulated more carelessly in your
world, the regime in this is not to be scorned. In every house there
is a Physionome supported by the state who is approximately what
would be called with you a doctor, except that he only treats healthy
people and that he decides upon the different methods of treating
us from the proportion, shape and symmetry of our limbs, from the
features of the face, the colour of the flesh, the delicacy of the skin,
the agility of the whole body, the sound of the voice, the
complexion, the strength and hardness of the hair. Did you not
notice just now a rather short man who gazed at you so long? He
was the Physionome of this house. Be sure that he has varied the
fumes of your dinner according to his observation of your
appearance. Notice how far from our beds he placed the mattress
for you to lie on. No doubt he decided your constitution was very
different from ours, since he was afraid the odour which flows from
these little taps under your nose should spread to us or that ours
should smoke in your direction. To-night you will see he chooses the
flowers for your bed with the same precautions."
While he was speaking I signed to my host to try to bring these
philosophers on to speaking about some part of the science which
they professed. He was too much my friend not to create an
opportunity at once. I will not tell you the talk or the requests which
were the ambassador to this treaty, the transition from the ridiculous
to the serious was too imperceptible to be imitated. The last-comer
of these doctors, after touching on other matters continued thus:
"It remains for me to prove to you that there are infinite worlds in an
infinite world. Conceive, then, the Universe as a large animal, the
stars (which are Worlds) as other animals within it, which in turn
serve as worlds to other creatures, like ourselves, horses and
elephants; in our turn we are also the worlds of certain yet smaller
creatures, like boils, lice, worms, and mites. And these are the earth
of other imperceptibles, just as we appear a great world to these
little things. Perhaps our flesh, our blood and our vital principles are
nothing but a texture of little animals holding together, lending us
movement from their own and blindly allowing our will to drive them
like a coachman, yet drive us too and all together produce that
action we call life. Tell me, I beseech you, is it very hard to believe
that a louse takes your body for a World, and that when one of them
has travelled from one of your ears to the other, his companions
should say of him that he has been to the ends of the world or that
he has passed from one pole to the other? Yes, no doubt this little
nation takes your hair for the forests of its country, the pores full of
moisture for fountains, pimples for lakes and ponds, abscesses for
seas, fluxions for deluges; and when you comb your hair backwards
and forwards they take this movement for the ebb and flow of the
ocean. Does not itching prove what I say? Is the mite which
produces it anything but one of these little animals which has
detached itself from civil society to set itself up as a tyrant in its
country? If you ask me how it is that they are larger than other little
imperceptibles, I ask you why elephants are larger than we are, and
Irishmen than Spaniards? As to the breaking-out and the scabs,
whose cause you do not know, they must happen either from the
corruption of the bodies of enemies massacred by these little giants,
or because the plague produced by the scarcity of food which these
rebels have devoured has left heaps of bodies decaying in the
country, or because the tyrant, having driven away from him his
companions, whose bodies stopped up the pores of our body, has
thus opened a passage to the moisture which has become corrupted
by extravasation from the sphere of the circulation of our blood.
Perhaps you will ask me why one mite produces a hundred others.
That is not difficult to understand, for, as one revolt awakens
another, so each of these little creatures, urged by the bad example
of their rebellious companions, aspires to rule, and kindles
everywhere war, slaughter and famine. But, you will say, some
persons are much less subject to itch than others, yet each of us is
equally filled with these animals if, as you declare, they make life. It
is true, as we perceive, that phlegmatic subjects are less liable to the
itch than those of a bilious temperament, because this people
sympathises with the climate it inhabits and is more sluggish in a
cold body than another which is heated by the temperature of its
region, ferments, moves about and cannot remain in one place.
Thus, a bilious man is more delicate than a phlegmatic, because he
is stimulated in many more parts, and as the soul is only the action
of these little beasts, he is able to feel in every place where these
cattle are moving, while the phlegmatic is only hot enough to make
them act in a few places. And to prove this universal mitedom you
have only to consider how the blood flows to a gash when you are
wounded. Your doctors say that it is guided by far-seeing Nature,
who wishes to succour damaged parts. But this is chimerical. For
there would have to be besides Soul and Spirit a third intellectual
substance in us with its own functions and organs. It is much more
probable that these little animals, feeling themselves attacked, send
to their neighbours for help; they pour in from all sides: the country
cannot contain so many people, and so they die stifled in the throng,
or of hunger. This mortality happens when the abscess is ripe. To
show that these animals of life are then extinguished, notice that
corrupted flesh becomes insensible; and if cupping, which is ordered
for the purpose of averting the fluxion, is successful, the reason is
that these little animals have had heavy casualties in trying to close
this opening, and therefore refuse to assist their allies, having only a
mean strength to defend themselves."
He ceased speaking and when the second philosopher perceived our
eyes were directed upon his and were urging him to speak in his
turn, he said:
"Men, I see you are anxious to teach this little animal, who
resembles us, something of the science we profess. I am at present
dictating a treatise which I should be very glad to show him because
of the light it throws upon the understanding of our physics. It is an
explanation of the eternal origin of the world, but I am in a hurry to
work my bellows; for to-morrow without fail the Town moves off.
You will excuse me this time if I promise that as soon as the Town
arrives at its destination, I will satisfy you."
At these words the host's son called for his father, and when he
came the company asked him the time; the goodman answered that
it was eight o'clock. His son then said in a rage:
"Hey! Come hither, varlet, did I not order you to warn us at seven?
You know that the houses are going to-morrow, that the walls have
already left, and yet your idleness even locks up your mouth."
"Sir", replied the goodman, "it has just been announced, while you
were at table, that it is strictly forbidden to start until after to-
morrow."
"No matter", replied he, lending him a buffet, "you should obey
blindly, not try to understand my orders, but simply remember what
I have bidden you. Quick, go and get your effigy."
When he had brought it, the young man seized it by the arm and
whipped it for a long quarter of an hour.
"Now, rascal", he continued, "as a punishment for your disobedience
you shall be a laughing stock to everybody for the rest of the day
and so I order you to walk on two feet only all day."
The poor old man went out very mournfully and his son continued:
"Gentlemen, I beseech you to excuse the rogueries of this hot-head.
I hoped to make something good of him, but he takes advantage of
my kindness. For my part I think the rogue will be the death of me;
indeed on more than ten occasions I have been on the point of
giving him my malediction."
Although I bit my lips I had great difficulty to keep myself from
laughing at this world upside down. To break off this burlesque
pedagogy, which no doubt would have made me burst forth in the
end, I begged him to tell me what he meant by the journey of the
Town he had just spoken of, whether the houses and the walls could
move. He replied:
"My dear friend, our cities are divided into the mobile and the
sedentary. The mobile, like that in which we are now, are
constructed as follows: the architect builds each palace, as you see,
of very light wood and inserts four wheels underneath it. In the
thickness of one of the walls he places large and numerous bellows,
whose nozzles pass in a horizontal line through the upper story from
one gable to the other. When it is desired to move the town
somewhere (for we change our air at every season), each one hangs
out a number of large sails from one side of his house in front of the
bellows; then he winds up a spring to make them play and in less
than eight days the continuous blasts vomited by these windy
monsters against the sails carry their houses, if they wish, more than
a hundred leagues.
"The architecture of the second kind, which we call sedentary, is as
follows: the houses are almost like your towers, except that they are
made of wood and that in the middle they have a large strong screw
which goes from the cellar to the roof to raise or lower them at will.
Well, the earth underneath is hollowed out as deep as the building is
high, and the whole thing is constructed in this manner so that when
the frosts begin to fall cold from the sky, they can lower their houses
to the bottom of the hole by turning them; and then they cover the
tower and the hollow part about it with large skins and so shelter
themselves from the inclemency of the air. But as soon as the soft
breath of Spring makes the air milder, they return to the daylight by
means of the large screw of which I spoke."
I think he wished to stop speaking there, but I began thus:
"Faith, sir, I should never have thought so expert a mason could be a
philosopher, did I not have you as witness. For this reason, since we
are not going to-day, you will have plenty of leisure to explain to us
this eternal origin of the world with which you entertained us just
now. In recompense, I promise you that as soon as I return to the
Moon, whence my instructor"—I pointed to my demon—"will prove
to you that I came, I will disseminate your fame by relating the fine
things you tell me. I see that you laugh at this promise, because you
do not believe the Moon is a world and still less that I am one of its
inhabitants. But I can assure you that the people of that World take
this one for a Moon and will laugh at me when I say their Moon is a
World, that it has fields and inhabitants."
He only replied by a smile, and then he began to speak as follows:
"When we try to go back to the origin of this Great All we are forced
to run into three or four absurdities, and so it is reasonable to take
the path which makes us stumble least. The first obstacle that stops
us is the Eternity of the World. Men's minds are not strong enough
to conceive it and, because they are not able to imagine that so
vast, so beautiful, so well regulated an Universe could have made
itself, they take refuge in Creation. But, like one who plunges into a
river for fear of being wet with rain, they run from the arms of a
dwarf to the pity of a giant; and they do not even escape the
difficulty, for they give to God the eternity they took from the world
because they could not understand it. As if it were easier to imagine
it in the one than in the other! This absurdity, then, or this giant of
which I spoke, is Creation; for, tell me truly, has it ever been
conceived how something could be made from nothing? Alas! There
are such infinite differences between Nothing and one single atom
that the acutest brain could not penetrate them. To escape this
inexplicable labyrinth you must admit a Matter co-eternal with God,
and then it is unnecessary to admit a God, since the World could
have existed without Him. But, you will say, even if I grant you this
Eternal Matter, how did this chaos become order of itself? Well, I
shall explain it to you.
"My little Animal, after you have mentally separated each little visible
body into an infinity of little invisible bodies, you are to imagine that
the infinite Universe is composed of nothing but these infinite atoms
which are very solid, very incorruptible, and very simple. Some are
cubes, some parallelograms, some angular, some round, some
pointed, some pyramidal, some hexagonal, some oval, and all act
differently according to their shape. And to prove this, place a very
round ivory ball upon a very smooth surface; and at the slightest
movement you give it, it will be a half-quarter of an hour before it
stops; to which I add that if it were as perfectly round as some of
the atoms of which I speak, it would never stop. Then if art is
capable of inclining a body to perpetual motion, why should we not
believe that Nature can do it? It is the same with other shapes; one,
like the square, demands perpetual rest; others, a movement
sideways; others, a half-movement like palpitation. When the round,
whose nature is to move, joins with the pyramidal, it perhaps makes
what we call fire, because fire not only moves without resting but
pierces and penetrates easily. Moreover, fire produces different
effects according to the size and quantity of the angles where the
round shape is joined; the fire of pepper is different from the fire of
sugar, the fire of sugar from that of cinnamon, the fire of cinnamon
from that of cloves, and this in turn from the fire of a faggot. Well
then, fire, which is the constructor and destructor of the parts and of
the whole of the Universe, gathers into an oak the quantity of
shapes necessary for the composition of that oak. But, you will say,
how could mere chance collect in one place all the things necessary
to produce this oak? I reply that it is not extraordinary that matter
so placed should make an oak, but it would have been very much
more marvellous if an oak had not been formed when matter was
thus disposed. Had there been a little less of certain shapes, it would
have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, an elder-tree, heather or
moss; a little more of certain other shapes and it would have been a
sensitive plant, an oyster in a shell, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow,
a monkey, a man. When you throw three dice on the table and they
all turn up twos; or three, four, five; or two sixes and a one; do you
say: 'What a miracle! each die has turned up the same number,
when so many other numbers might be turned up; what a miracle!
Three dice have turned up three successive numbers; what a
miracle! Two sixes and the opposite of the other six has turned up!' I
am certain that a man of wit like you would not make these
exclamations, for since there are only a certain quantity of numbers
on the dice, it is impossible but that one of them should turn up. You
are surprised that this matter, mixed up pell-mell by chance, should
have built up a man, since so many things are necessary to the
construction of his being. But you do not know that this matter,
moving towards the design of a man, has stopped a hundred million
times on the way to form sometimes a stone, sometimes lead,
sometimes coral, sometimes a flower, sometimes a comet, according
to the excess or deficiency of certain shapes necessary or
unnecessary to compose a man. It is not marvellous that an infinite
quantity of matter changing and moving continually should have met
together to make the few animals, vegetables and minerals which
we see, any more than it is marvellous for a royal pair to turn up in a
hundred throws of the dice; and it is impossible but that something
should be made from this movement. This thing will always be
wondered at by a scatterbrain who will not comprehend how nearly
it was not made at all. When the large river turns a mill,
moves the works of a clock, and the little rivulet does

nothing but run and sometimes overflow, you will not say the river
has intelligence, because you know it has met with things so placed
as to cause all these masterpieces. If a mill had not been placed in
its path, it would not have ground the corn; if it had not met the
clock it would not have marked the hours; and if the rivulet I spoke
of had met the same things it would have performed the same
miracles. It is the same with fire, which moves by itself; for when it
found organs proper for the agitation necessary to reason, it
reasoned; when it found those proper to feel only, it felt; when it
found those proper to vegetation, it vegetated. And to prove this,
tear out the eyes of a man who is enabled to see by this fire or this
soul, and he will cease to see, just as our river will not mark the
hours if the clock is destroyed.
"In fine, these first and indivisible atoms make a circle upon which
the most embarrassing difficulties of physics roll without difficulty.
Even the operation of the senses, which nobody yet has been able
to understand, I explain very easily with these little bodies. Let us
begin with sight, which, as the most incomprehensible, deserves our
first attention. As I suppose, the coverings of the eye, whose
openings are like those of glass, transmit the fire-dust we call visual
rays, which is stopped by some opaque matter making it rebound;
for this fire-dust meets on the way the image of the object which
repulses it and, as this image is simply an infinite number of little
bodies continually thrown off in equal superficies from the subject
looked at, the image thrusts back the rays to our eyes.
"You will not fail to object to me that glass is an opaque and closely-
packed body; yet instead of throwing back these other little bodies it
allows them to pierce it. But I reply that the pores of glass are made
in the same shape as these atoms of fire which pass through it; and
just as a wheat-sieve is not fit to sift oats, nor an oat-sieve to sift
wheat, so a deal box thin enough to transmit sound is not
penetrable by sight and a piece of transparent crystal which allows
itself to be pierced by sight is not penetrable by hearing."
I could not prevent myself from interrupting: "But how do you
explain by these principles, sir, the fact that we are reflected in a
mirror?"
"It is very easy", he replied, "you must suppose that the rays of our
eyes pass through the glass and meet behind it a non-diaphanous
body which casts them off; they return the way they came and they
find spread out upon the mirror the little bodies that move in equal
superficies from our own and carry them back to our eyes. Our
imagination, which is hotter than the other faculties of the soul,
attracts the most subtle of them, with which it makes a reduced
portrait.
"The operation of hearing is no more difficult to understand. To be
more succinct, let us consider it only in harmony. Suppose then a
lute touched by the hands of a master of the art. You will ask me
how it happens that I perceive a thing I do not see, so far from me?
Do sponges go out of my ears to suck up this music and bring it to
me? Or does this lute player beget in my head another little player
with another little lute, who has been ordered to sing me the same
airs? No. This miracle is caused by the vibrating chord striking the
little bodies which compose the air and so driving them into my brain
and gently piercing it with these little corporeal nothings. When the
string is stretched, the sound is high, because it drives the atoms
more vigorously; and the organ so penetrated gives the fantasy
sufficient of them to make its picture. If there is not enough, our
memory does not complete its image and we are forced to repeat
the same sound to it, so that for example it may take from the
materials given it by the strains of a saraband enough to complete
the portrait of that saraband. But this operation is almost nothing.
The wonderful thing is that by this means we are moved sometimes
to joy, sometimes to rage, sometimes to pity, sometimes to
reflection, sometimes to pain. This happens, I imagine, when the
movement received by these little bodies meets within us other little
bodies moving in the same way or, on account of their shape,
capable of the same motion. The new-comers excite their hosts to
move with them and so, when a violent tune meets the fire of our
blood (which is disposed to the same movement) it incites this fire to
thrust its way out. This is what we call the ardour of courage. If a
sound is gentler and has only strength enough to raise a slighter,
more wavering flame (because the matter is more volatile), it moves
along the nerves, membranes and channels of our flesh and excites
the tickling we call joy. The ebullition of the other passions happens
in the same way according to whether the little bodies are thrown
against us more or less violently, whether they receive movement by
meeting other vibrations, and according to what they find to move
within us.
"The demonstration of touch is not more difficult. There is a
perpetual emission of little bodies from all palpable matter; the more
we touch it the more they are evaporated, because we squeeze
them out of the object we handle like water from a sponge when we
compress it. Hard bodies report to the organ their solidity; supple
bodies, their softness; the rough, their harshness; the burning, their
heat; the frozen, their cold. And as a proof of this, observe that
hands hardened by labour are not so sensitive in discerning by the
touch, and this is because of the thickness of the callus, which is
neither porous nor animated and therefore transmits with great
difficulty these fumes of matter. Some will desire to know where the

Where Can Buy Animation A World History Volume II The Birth of A Style The Three Markets 1st Edition Giannalberto Bendazzi Ebook With Cheap Price

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Where Can Buy Animation A World History Volume II The Birth of A Style The Three Markets 1st Edition Giannalberto Bendazzi Ebook With Cheap Price

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Where Can Buy Animation A World History Volume II The Birth of A Style The Three Markets 1st Edition Giannalberto Bendazzi Ebook With Cheap Price

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Download the full version of the textbook now at textbookfull.

Animation A World History Volume II The Birth

Explore and download more textbook at https://textbookfull.com

Twice the First Quirino Cristiani and the Animated Feature

A History of Wine in Europe, 19th to 20th Centuries,

Sapiens A Graphic History The Birth of Humankind 2020th

The Regulation of Mobile Money: Law and Practice in Sub-

Love Your Neighbor Honeys of Hunterville 2 1st Edition

Security and Privacy in Communication Networks 16th EAI

Systemic lupus erythematosus 1 Reprint Edition Gordon

Service Business Model Innovation in Healthcare and

‘Giannalberto Bendazzi is the greatest animation historian I have ever met.’

© 2016 Giannalberto Bendazzi

This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly

Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this

For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-138-85481-9 (hbk)

Typeset in Baskerville and Optima

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com

Contributors and Collaborators xi Bunin’s Puppets 22

Ishu Patel144 Jan Lenica 194

Břetislav Pojar249 Gennady Sokolsky 288

Trial of Strength (1977–1980) 331 The Crisis of the Mid-1980s 372

South African Republic 402 Peru415

Supervising Collaborators Ramolini, Thomas Renoldner, Alberto Rigoni, Emilio

Figure 1.1 Stephen Bosustow.

Fox and the Crow) most recently used by Screen Gems.

(Alliance, Ohio, 16 July 1909–Northridge, California, 8

The staff included star voice actor James Mason, direc-

moves the works of a clock, and the little rivulet does

You might also like

Contributors and Collaborators xi Bunin’s Puppets 22

Ishu Patel144 Jan Lenica 194

Břetislav Pojar249 Gennady Sokolsky 288

Trial of Strength (1977–1980) 331 The Crisis of the Mid-1980s 372

South African Republic 402 Peru415