Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation

by Reid Mitenbuler

Overview

The vivid and untold story of the Golden Age of classic animation and the often larger-than-life artists who created some of the most iconic cartoon characters of the twentieth century

In 1911, famed cartoonist Winsor McCay debuted one of the first animated cartoons, based on his sophisticated newspaper strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland," itself inspired by Freud's recent research on dreams. McCay is largely forgotten today, but he unleashed an art form, and the creative energy of artists from Otto Messmer and Max Fleischer to Walt Disney and Warner Bros.' Chuck Jones. Their origin stories, rivalries, and sheer genius, as Reid Mitenbuler skillfully relates, were as colorful and subversive as their creations—from Felix the Cat to Bugs Bunny to feature films such as Fantasia—which became an integral part and reflection of American culture over the next five decades.

Pre-television, animated cartoons were aimed squarely at adults; comic preludes to movies, they were often "little hand grenades of social and political satire." Early Betty Boop cartoons included nudity; Popeye stories contained sly references to the injustices of unchecked capitalism. "During its first half-century," Mitenbuler writes, "animation was an important part of the culture wars about free speech, censorship, the appropriate boundaries of humor, and the influence of art and media on society." During WWII it also played a significant role in propaganda. The Golden Age of animation ended with the advent of television, when cartoons were sanitized to appeal to children and help advertisers sell sugary breakfast cereals.

Wild Minds is an ode to our colorful past and to the creative energy that later inspired The Simpsons, South Park, and BoJack Horseman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802159144
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/07/2021
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	1,046,084
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Reid Mitenbuler is the author of Bourbon Empire. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, Slate,Quartz, Salon, and other publications. He lives with his wife in Los Angeles.

reidmitenbuler.com

@ReidMitenbuler

Table of Contents

Prologue: "Make Us Another" xiii

Chapter 1 "Slumberland" 1

Chapter 2 "Fantasmagorie" 10

Chapter 3 "The Artist's Dream" 20

Chapter 4 "The Camera Fiend" 26

Chapter 5 "Cherubs That Actually Fly" 34

Chapter 6 "This Place Is Full of Sharks" 42

Chapter 7 "How to Fire a Lewis Machine Gun" 51

Chapter 8 "Being Famous Is Hard Work" 62

Chapter 9 "I Love Beans" 67

Chapter 10 "Bad Luck!" 80

Chapter 11 "Giddyap!" 85

Chapter 12 "That's Money over the Barrelhead" 89

Chapter 13 "It Became the Rage" 97

Chapter 14 "I Have Become a Ghost" 107

Chapter 15 "The Formula" 117

Chapter 16 "Looks Like You're Having Fun" 127

Chapter 17 "Are You a Sailor?" 138

Chapter 18 "You Can't Top Pigs with Pigs" 150

Chapter 19 "Max Fleischer Killed Dan Glass" 166

Chapter 20 "I'll Make Money" 177

Chapter 21 "That Goddam Holy Grail" 191

Chapter 22 "We Can Do Better Than That with Our Second String" 200

Chapter 23 "Highbrowski by Stokowski" 206

Chapter 24 "Law of the Jungle" 222

Chapter 25 "Okay, Go Ahead" 230

Chapter 26 "That Horse's Ass!" 243

Chapter 27 "A Tough Little Stinker" 251

Chapter 28 "Greetings, America!" 261

Chapter 29 "How Is It Spelled?" 272

Chapter 30 "They Can Kill You, but They're Not Allowed to Eat You" 289

Chapter 31 "And It's Going to Be Clean!" 301

Chapter 32 "Silly Rabbit …" 312

Chapter 33 "Flesher" 326

Chapter 34 "Well, Kid, This Is the End I Guess" 337

A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments 345

Selected Bibliography 347

Image Credits 352

Notes 353

Index 395

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Wild Minds:

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"[A] lively history of the first half-century of animation . . . In his prologue, Mitenbuler suggests the story he's about to tell will go from rude to rarefied, but one of the most fascinating things about the history he recounts is that animation, like so much of American culture, continually scrambled all sorts of categories and expectations. The arc of Wild Minds is appropriately weird, full of high-flown aspirations and zany anecdotes." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

"Wild Minds assembles its history with love and a sense of occasion . . . The book's governing idea lies in its heroes' collective intuition that animated films could be a vehicle for grownup expression—erotic, political, and even scientific—rather than the trailing diminutive form they mostly became . . . All art aspires to the condition of music, a wise man said once, and perhaps all cultural history aspires to the condition of a cartoon: a seeming fluidity of movement, made up of countless small stops and starts." —Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

"Wild Minds is a colorful chronology of the first 50 years of American animated film. Juicy tales abound about the films and the wildly imaginative people who made them. Mr. Mitenbuler tells their stories with relish and clarity." —John Canemaker, Wall Street Journal

"Superficially, Wild Minds is about the origins of Mickey Mouse, Popeye the Sailor and Bugs Bunny cartoons. But Mitenbuler's real target is a quintessentially American story of daring ambition, personal reinvention and the eternal tug-of-war of between art and business . . . While animation would rise again to find its place in our own era of the long-running Simpsons and the glorious works of Hayao Miyazaki, Mitenbuler's book is a gem for anyone wanting to understand animation's origin story." —Adam Frank, NPR

"A fast-moving account of the cartoonists, writers, inventors, hucksters, and hopeful moguls who constructed the firmament of American animation and filled it with constellations of talking mice, rabbits, birds, and pigs that have become more nameable than any actual stars in the sky . . . A highly readable overview . . . Generous with fun facts." —Michael Tisserand, New York Times Book Review

"Film buffs will delight in this exploration of the golden age of animation. Surveying everything from Betty Boop to Popeye, author Reid Mitenbuler argues that a number of the medium's early classics were bolder and more daring than today's animated movies. He paints a delightfully full picture of the artform and its artists." —Christian Science Monitor

"Mitenbuler shows just how renegade the pioneers of animation were . . . A journey into how animation became cultural insurgency." —Scott Thomas Anderson, San Francisco Chronicle

"A welcome return to the glory days of Little Nemo and Felix the Cat, Mickey and Donald, Betty Boop and Popeye, Porky, Daffy and Bugs and many others . . . A very enjoyable book. [Mitenbuler is] an indomitable researcher and a great storyteller . . . A refreshing, popular intro to America's cartoon classics." —Gene Walz, Winnipeg Free Press

"Entertaining history of early cartoon animation. Demonstrating impassioned research and technical know-how, Mitenbuler presents a series of historical anecdotes that, sequenced together, bring to life one of the world's most beloved art forms . . . The narrative crackles with captivating charm, adding color and nuance to a cast of familiar cartoon faces . . . Like a one-man animation department, [Mitenbuler] effortlessly renders both celluloid and background. A finely drawn history of a critical period in the history of animation." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Journalist Mitenbuler casts the creators of animated cartoons as characters themselves in this rollicking history of the first 50 years of animation . . . In snappy prose, Mitenbuler writes a history rich with personalities. This Technicolor tour de force is impossible to put down." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"While animation is often considered a children's medium, its early days were filled with social commentary, sexuality, satire, and countless creative and financial battles . . . An entertaining and revealing look into the dawn of a revolutionary art form." —Library Journal

"Wild Minds is a thoroughly captivating behind-the-scenes history of classic American animation, full of breezy stories of the great artists who went crazy making the brilliant cartoons we all know and love. A must-read for all fans of the medium." —Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama

"If the twentieth century had its court painters, they were the cartoonists and animators employed by Walt Disney and other creative wizards of pop culture. In his engrossing, entertaining, and deeply researched Wild Minds, Reid Mitenbuler recreates the world of these classic animators—the largely unsung Holbeins and Van Dycks of the Magic Kingdom and at Warner Bros., Paramount, and smaller studios. There's a direct evolutionary path, we come to realize, from the genius of Winsor McCay, a century ago, to the subversive tropes of South Park. The legacy of the animators is one we can't escape—and don't want to." —Cullen Murphy, author of Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe

"In this absorbing history of animation, Reid Mitenbuler illuminates lives both deservedly familiar (Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, Chuck Jones) and tragically forgotten (Winsor McCay, Émile Cohl). The prose is terrific, the insights frequent, and the information fascinating. Mitenbuler deepens one's understanding not only of his subject, but the world itself. It's everything you want a nonfiction book to be." —Tom Bissell, author of Creative Types and coauthor of The Disaster Artist

"An absolutely vital compendium covering all high points, low points, and pen points of the personalities who hijacked our pop culture—pioneering a now-dominant American industry, ultimately creating characters and films that have stood the test of time. A delightful read—like the cartoons themselves: buoyant, bouncy, and wonderfully entertaining." —Jerry Beck, animation historian and author

From the Publisher

…Mitenbuler's rollicking history [is] a fast-moving account of the cartoonists, writers, inventors, hucksters and hopeful moguls who constructed the firmament of American animation and filled it with constellations of talking mice, rabbits, birds and pigs that have become more nameable than any actual stars in the sky…Like the animators he celebrates, Mitenbuler…is able to sum up a character with a couple of quick strokes…Wild Minds is a highly readable overview, perhaps most useful in animation scholarship for sending readers to the memoirs and biographies it is largely based on, and of course to the cartoons themselves.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Tisserand

★ 10/26/2020

Journalist Mitenbuler (Bourbon Empire) casts the creators of animated cartoons as characters themselves in this rollicking history of the first 50 years of animation. The author tracks animation as a medium and an industry from the early 20th century to the 1960s, when cartoons moved from the theater to televisions and animation “changed almost overnight.” The book begins with the “restless” Winsor McCay, a famous New York Journal cartoonist who had a lasting impact on better-known animators (Walt Disney among them), but was “all but forgotten by the time of his death.” Meanwhile, directors Bob Clampett (who “pushed the limits of absurdity and aggressiveness”) and Chuck Jones (“sly and mischievous with a dirty sense of humor”) made up a mid-century “pirate crew” that brought such characters as Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Porky Pig to the silver screen. Household names like the Walt Disney Company get plenty of ink, but so do such edgier competitors as Fleischer Studios, formed before Disney and all but wiped out when legal trouble threatened its famed Betty Boop. In snappy prose, Mitenbuler writes a history rich with personalities. This Technicolor tour de force is impossible to put down. Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management.

Publishers Weekly

12/04/2020

While animation is often considered a children's medium, its early days were filled with social commentary, sexuality, satire, and countless creative and financial battles. The "golden age" that Mitenbuler (Bourbon Empire) refers to in his title spans from 1911 to the late 1960s. As the popularity of animated short and feature films exploded, so did the fates of the artists and their creations. Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland enchanted audiences, but John Randolph Bray patented McCay's methods and developed a successful animation studio. Otto Messmer tirelessly worked on Felix the Cat cartoons, while studio head Pat Sullivan toured the world taking credit. Eventually, the popularity and increasingly adult content of some cartoons led to the Hays code, which created strict rules about content in films of any kind, but this new censorship actually gave many cartoons a more universal appeal. The author explores dozens of artists, but the through line is the rivalry between early innovator Max Fleischer, who produced huge hits with Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman, yet endured almost constant financial and creative battles, and Walt Disney, 20 years younger but the eventual master of the medium, both artistically and financially. VERDICT An entertaining and revealing look into the dawn of a revolutionary art form.—Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

Library Journal

★ 2020-09-01
Entertaining history of early cartoon animation.

Demonstrating impassioned research and technical know-how, Mitenbuler presents a series of historical anecdotes that, sequenced together, bring to life one of the world’s most beloved art forms. When Winsor McCay, creator of the “Little Nemo” comics, debuted his first moving drawings in 1911, he jolted an entire industry to its feet. During the next few decades, a network of feuding production studios emerged, each trying to one-up the other with their inventiveness and intellectual properties. It was a cutthroat business, often leaving animators at odds with their executives. Otto Messmer, for example, the artist behind Felix the Cat, was frequently overlooked while his producer, Pat Sullivan, basked in fame and merchandising success. A rivalry brewed between Walt Disney, whose new animation studio wowed audiences with shorts like the “The Skeleton Dance” (1929), and Max Fleischer, the man behind the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons and inventor of technical marvels like the rotoscope. Mitenbuler chronicles the debut of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfsin 1937 and the unusual production of Disney’s 1940 music-animation hybrid Fantasia while also giving ample time to the rambunctious crew behind Looney Tunesand the various hijinks on the Warner Brothers lot. The narrative crackles with captivating charm, adding color and nuance to a cast of familiar cartoon faces. The author is skilled at exploring historical context and tracks how most turns in the industry were reactionary, shifts in response to not just popular trends, but to labor politics, the Great Depression, and World War II. In the words of a Disney memo on his studio’s core philosophies, “we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real unless we first know the real.” Mitenbuler, too, proves adept at this tenet and, like a one-man animation department, effortlessly renders both celluloid and background.

A finely drawn history of a critical period in the history of animation.

Kirkus Reviews