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animation: an interdisciplinary journal 9(1)

‘success’ stories of the Gundam franchise and studio Gainax overshadow the harsh reality of the
commercial fiascos out of which they actually originated; the mention of bullying inside the studio
in Chapter 5 (p. 139) is skimmed over without raising too much concern. Likewise, the excellent
portrait of the anime studios as creative ‘open spaces’ is never put in relation to actual work con-
tracts, as if ‘collaboration’ meant the same things for managers, directors or the young animators.
To be fair, this is not something the book hides completely. However, the choice to avoid any kind
of economic analysis – or thorny issues like failures, redundancies or exploitation – in an industry
whose work is articulated by the market, ultimately causes this book to miss the huge opportunity
of critically assessing the deep inequalities that lie behind the colourful and fancy façade of the
world of Japanese animation.
To sum up, this book remains an excellent resource for those interested in Japanese media cul-
ture and the animation industry more broadly. Its ethnography of the anime studios, in particular,
adds a new and welcome perspective to the field, offering important examples and case studies for
further research or debates in the classroom. Although the book works in the wake of critical cul-
ture industries studies, however, it is evident how its perspective does not go beyond a liberal com-
mentary on the creative economy and the ‘successes’ that this would allegedly generate. Many
could find this unsatisfactory, if not thoroughly ideological; it is the most evident limit of an other-
wise very interesting book.

Reference
Jenkins H (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University
Press.

Author biography
Dario Lolli is a PhD student in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck (University of London) where
he is writing a dissertation concerning the globalisation of Japanese media franchises. He combines a back-
ground in Japanese studies with research interests in media, cultural theory and political economy. In the past
years, he has regularly taught at Birkbeck as a sessional lecturer in Japanese cultural studies, and organised
several academic talks and symposia on behalf of the London Asia Pacific Cultural Studies Forum. His writ-
ings have appeared in animation: an interdisciplinary journal and Convergence: The International Journal of
Research into New Media Technologies (currently pending). Email: dario.lolli@gmail.com

Stephen Cavalier, The World History of Animation, University of California Press:

Berkeley, 2011; 416 pp.: ISBN 9780520261129

Mihaela Mihailova
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

This book’s foreword, penned by French animation director Sylvain Chomet – known for The
Triplets of Belleville (2003) and The Illusionist (2010) – assures the reader that ‘this is the kind of
book that [he] would have dreamed of finding in [his] Christmas stocking as a boy’ (p. 6). Indeed,
any book offering a comprehensive, wide-reaching world history of animation is a cause of cele-
bration for lovers of the form. Giannalberto Bendazzi’s informative encyclopedic volume Cartoons:
One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation remains a useful reference source, but its 1995 publica-
tion date leaves two decades of the most recent animation history unexplored. In the last 20 years,
the proliferation and technological advances in computer-generated imagery have drastically

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altered the animation landscape. This trend has been addressed directly in a number of excellent
recent studies on digital animation and visual effects, such as Tom Sito’s Moving Innovation: A
History of Computer Animation (2013) and Stephen Prince’s Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The
Seduction of Reality (2012), but no other English-language historical project of this magnitude has
been released in the digital era. This volume is, therefore, an ambitious undertaking which attempts
to at once illustrate (literally, in this case) a century’s worth of animation history and bring the
historical record up to date.
Cavalier himself places the book in its immediate context in the introduction, arguing that ani-
mation has come full circle: ‘in the same way that early animation was just part of the whole fair-
ground slideshow experience, CGI animation and special effects have become an integral part of
the modern blockbuster, often a roller coaster/ghost-train type experience’ (p. 10). This is not a
novel idea, having been previously developed in Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media
(2001) and Scott Bukatman’s Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century
(2003), among others. However, it provides a clear frame for Cavalier’s historical narrative and
establishes continuity between early animation and today’s moment, setting the stage for the book’s
year-by-year exploration of animation trends and developments.
The introduction is followed by a section entitled ‘Brief Histories of World Animation’. It is
here that Cavalier’s work first betrays its Western bias. The author writes that ‘American animation
is the sun around which all other animation has orbited’, grouping the entire rest of the world under
the common denominator of ‘these other planets [which] contain weird and wonderful life-forms
and mutations of their own that are worth exploring’ (p. 13). Furthermore, he provides historical
overviews for only three continents: North America, Europe (divided into Eastern and Western),
and Asia. South America, Australia, and Africa, along with ‘Nordic animation’, are grouped
together in a chart which takes up a total of two pages and lists about 20 films each. The films
chosen for each category represent almost every decade of the past hundred years, albeit only
through a couple of examples in most cases. The lists include very few female directors and tend
to focus mainly on a few countries from each region (South Africa and Egypt, Brazil and Argentina,
etc). Given the presence of the word ‘world’ in the book’s title, this marginalization of certain ani-
mation traditions (here and in the main body of the book) is puzzling and unfortunate. This omis-
sion to include even the briefest written account of animation from these continents could be
interpreted as a comment on the insignificance of their contributions to the development of the
cinematic mode. Moreover, it represents a missed opportunity to address and compensate for the
scarcity of information in English-language animation scholarship on these regions. For the vol-
ume to truly live up to its title, all continents would need to be well represented in future editions
and given the same meticulous attention that the current version dedicates to Western animation.
Still, Cavalier’s introductory section provides a solid entry into his book by offering a concise
and focused breakdown of the geographical areas he will cover for the rest of the book. His ‘brief
histories’ of North American, Western European, Russian and Eastern European, and Asian anima-
tion include good short summaries (of four pages, on average) of the historical development of the
mode in the respective regions. The author emphasizes the unique and notable contributions of
each area, such as Europe’s role as a ‘fertile area for the experimental and the avant-garde’ (p. 18)
or Canada’s recently established position as a ‘world leader in digital animation’ (p. 17). At the
same time, he singles out specific countries with prominent animation industries or traditions in
order to profile them in more detail. Thus, the brief history of UK animation includes information
about the GPO, Halas & Batchelor’s studio, the importance of Channel 4’s contribution to anima-
tion production, and Aardman Animations, succinctly expressed in just under half a page. While
this prevents the sections from being too general and adds depth to the information offered, it also
occasionally leaves very little space for other nations. Such is the case in the section on Asia, which

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is almost entirely devoted to Japan and China, leaving only a small paragraph for India, and even
less for Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Each ‘brief history’ features relevant film stills and a convenient list – separate from the main
text and outlined in yellow – of key figures and films, which can serve as a starting point for further
research. To take a case study, Eastern Europe is represented by such prominent directors as
Walerian Borowczyk, Yuri Norstein, Priit Pärn, and Jiří Trnka. The overall selection is representa-
tive and well chosen, even though there are some omissions: not a single animator from Bulgaria,
Belarus, or Slovakia is mentioned, for example. Moreover, the names of the films are only given in
the original language (also the case for Asia and Western Europe), which may pose some initial
difficulty in cross-referencing.
This shortcoming aside, Cavalier’s work offers a stunning collection of lush illustrations and
short informative sections, recalling Jerry Becks’s similarly structured edited volume Animation
Art: From Pencil to Pixel, The History of Cartoon, Anime & CGI (2004). The World History of
Animation provides an impressive range of information organized chronologically and divided into
clearly delineated and well-chosen periods in animation history: ‘the origins of animation’ (pre-
1900), ‘the era of experimentation’ (1900–1927), ‘the golden age of cartoons’ (1928–1957), ‘the
television age’ (1958–1985), and ‘the digital dawn’ (1986–2010). ‘The origins of animation’ fea-
tures a single-page account of the prehistory of animation. It touches upon the discovery of persis-
tence of vision, optical toys and devices such as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope, as well as
on Emile Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique. The following encyclopedic entries, starting from 1872,
cover several important early developments which paved the way for cinema, namely Eadweard
Muybridge’s sequential photographs, the praxinoscope, Étienne-Jules Marey’s motion photo-
graphs, the kinetoscope, and Georges Méliès’ early trick films. While short, this section offers a
solid introduction to some crucial episodes in pre-1900 film and animation history.
‘Film animation: The era of experimentation’ examines the first three decades of the 20th cen-
tury, defining the turn of the century as the moment when ‘the history of animation really became
distinguishable from the history of cinema’ (p. 46). This section focuses predominantly on
American animators and cartoonists and the beginning of the industrialization of American anima-
tion. Early pioneers from Russia, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and India are also introduced, but Cavalier
devotes less space to them. Germany’s contribution to early animation is represented through the
work of experimental filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, and Lotte Reiniger. This
part of the book also features biographical entries for Emile Cohl, Ladislaw Starewicz, Winsor
McCay, Max and Dave Fleischer, Walt Disney, Willis O’Brien, and Lotte Reiniger, which provide
good overviews of their careers and major contributions to animation. Finally, it includes a short
history of avant-garde animation and highlights key animation terms such as cel animation, roto-
scoping, cutout animation, and the multiplane camera.
‘Film animation: The golden age of cartoons’, which covers the years 1928–1957, begins by
introducing Walt Disney as the visionary the world of animation needed to ‘pull the best … artistic
and commercial ideas together’ (p. 95). Disney films (both iconic shorts such as The Old Mill and
features such as Fantasia) feature prominently in the section. Cavalier also includes entries on
Warner Bros and Fleischer studios, in addition to Walter Lantz, Hanna and Barbera, and Tex Avery.
While commercial US animation dominates this part of the book as well, important avant garde
figures such as Berthold Bartosch, Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Len Lye, and Norman
McLaren are also mentioned. Additionally, Cavalier brings attention to animators who played pio-
neering roles within their respective national traditions: Russia’s Alexander Ptushko, China’s the
Wan brothers, Japan’s Kenzo Masaoka, and the Czech Republic’s Jiří Trnka.
Despite its title, ‘The television age’ does not focus on animated TV productions, but rather
on features and shorts released during the period between the late 1950s and mid-1980s, which

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Cavalier introduces as a time when the rise of television brought about ‘a culture of limited ani-
mation [and] simplified design approach’, as well as increased use of animation in advertising
and reduced animation feature budgets (p. 170). Here, the author adheres to his established pat-
tern of mixing vibrantly illustrated short entries about important animators and films from dif-
ferent nations with biographical data and glossary inserts defining terms such as anime or clay
animation. Perhaps due to the need to save space, the biographical entries are reduced to a single
column or one page at best, which means that significant figures such as Osamu Tezuka, Ralph
Bakshi and Terry Gilliam receive comparatively little attention. On the other hand, the inclusion
of two highlighted entries entitled ‘1970s computer animation milestones’ and ‘1980s computer
animation milestones’ is an inspired choice which sets the stage for the book’s final section, ‘The
digital dawn’.
‘The digital dawn’, dated 1986–2010, features most of the milestone shorts and features one
might expect from an historical overview of the past quarter century, such as Luxo Jr (1986), Who
Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Akira (1988), Jurassic Park (1993), Toy Story (1995), The Triplets
of Belleville (2003), Waltz with Bashir (2008), etc. However, instead of focusing exclusively on
CGI and visual effects, as the heading might suggest, Cavalier covers a broader and richer spec-
trum of animation filmmaking, including Aardman Animations’ clay animation films, Adam
Elliot’s stop-motion short Harvie Krumpet (2003), Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated TV series
Samurai Jack, Piotr Dumala’s Crime and Punishment (2000), Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou and the
Sorceress (1998), etc. This section, which features some of the most extensively illustrated and
effectively laid-out pages in the book, also includes an insert on Flash and the animation boom and
‘a brief history of motion/performance capture’.
The book’s thematic periodization, along with the clear regional and time markers above every
entry, makes Cavalier’s reference source reader-friendly and easily navigable. The inclusion of
biographies of key animation figures is an excellent resource which adds to the book’s encyclope-
dic value, although the variation in length of these biographies can seem arbitrary at times (why
dedicate only a single page each to Len Lye and Norman McLaren, and three to Emile Cohl?) The
same is true of the entries dedicated to specific films: while they are informative and well written,
some of them are noticeably shorter than others (a couple of paragraphs versus a full page or even
two) leaving so much blank space on the page that one may wonder whether they could not have
been expanded.
While Cavalier’s entries are well written, carefully selected, and varied in content (MIT’s
Whirlwind computer is mentioned alongside Norman McLaren on p. 158), they suffer from occa-
sional editing and fact-checking errors. For instance, the terms ‘cel’ and ‘pixilation’ are both spelled
with double ‘l’ on p. 10 and p. 399, respectively. There are also some factual mistakes, such as
referring to animation historian Jerry Beck by the name ‘Jeff’ (p. 225), attributing the film A Wild
Hare (1940) to Chuck Jones instead of Tex Avery (p. 122), and illustrating Winsor McCay’s Gertie
the Dinosaur (1914) with an image that does not appear in the film (p. 63). It is unfortunate that
editing oversights like these partly undermine the book’s reliability as an authoritative resource and
may diminish its appeal to scholars.
The final section of the volume, entitled ‘Resources’, features a glossary of animation terms, a
list of Academy Award winners in the ‘Animated Feature’ and ‘Animated Short’ categories, as well
as a short collection of animation book titles, ‘useful websites’, and animation colleges around the
world. The glossary contains clear, succinct definitions of key animation terms such as ‘in-between’
and ‘doubles’, as well as descriptions of various animation techniques, including direct animation,
pinscreen, and pixilation. The section dedicated to Oscar laureates is convenient and useful, but
could be improved by the addition of other award-granting institutions, particularly major anima-
tion festivals such as Annecy, Hiroshima or Ottawa. Likewise, the list of suggested animation

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112 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 9(1)

books, websites, and colleges is a good resource, but could be expanded in order to be more com-
prehensive. This is especially true of the books section, where the works of prominent animation
scholars such as Alan Cholodenko, Paul Wells, and Donald Crafton are conspicuously absent.
Some of these weaknesses are counterbalanced by the book’s value as a visual resource. With at
least one crisp, high-quality image per page, it is a delight to simply flip through. At once an anno-
tated album and an encyclopedia, The World History of Animation is a beautiful, well-designed
object with an effective layout and striking images. On its visual merits alone, it deserves a place
on any animation aficionado’s shelf. As a work of historical scholarship, however, it leaves some-
thing to be desired. While it offers an impressive range and wealth of information, the occasional
inaccuracies and strong regional bias prevent it from being a definitive chronicle of world
animation.

References
Beck J (ed.) (2004) Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, the Illustrated History of Cartoon, Anime & CGI.
London: Flame Tree Publishing.
Bendazzi G (1995) Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Bukatman S (2003) Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Manovich L (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Prince S (2012) Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Sito T (2013) Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Author biography
Mihaela Mihailova is a PhD student in the joint Film and Media Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures
program at Yale University. Her work has been published in Kino Kultura and animation: an interdiscipli-
nary journal. Her translation of Sergei Tretyakov’s ‘The industry production screenplay’ is included in
Cinema Journal 51(4), 2012. She has an essay (with John MacKay) in the forthcoming Animating Film
Theory volume, edited by Karen Beckman. Her academic interests include animation, film theory, media
studies, comic books, early Soviet cinema, Russian cinema and translation.
Email: mihaela.mihailova@yale.edu

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