Description
Book SynopsisIn Cartoon Vision Dan Bashara examines American animation alongside the modern design boom of the postwar era. Focusing especially on United Productions of America (UPA), a studio whose graphic, abstract style defined the postwar period, Bashara considers animation akin to a laboratory, exploring new models of vision and space alongside theorists and practitioners in other fields. The linkstheoretical, historical, and aestheticbetween animators, architects, designers, artists, and filmmakers reveal a specific midcentury modernism that rigorously reimagined the senses. Cartoon Vision invokes the American Bauhaus legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes and advocates for animation's pivotal role in a utopian design project of retraining the public's vision to better apprehend a rapidly changing modern world.
Trade Review"
Cartoon Vision treats animation with all the seriousness it deserves, and in so doing captures a messier modernism that rightly brings avant-garde practice into contact with a more diverse field of popular taste." * Oxford Art Journal *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 • Postwar Precisionism: Order in American Modernist Art and the Modern Cartoon
2 • Unlimited Animation: Movement in Modern Architecture and the Modern Cartoon
3 • Condensed Works: Communication in Graphic Design and the Modern Cartoon
4 • The Design Gaze: Cartoon Logic in Hollywood Cinema and the Avant-Garde
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
