Publication: Labour/Le Travail
Publication Date: 22-SEP-07
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Lawrie, Paul
Article Excerpt
Tom Sito, Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky 2006)
WRITING IN THE 1930'S the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci evoked the hyper-rationalized, atomizing character of Fordism as the singular feature of modern Americanism. Gramsci's critique was especially prescient in its highlighting of the hegemonic implications of such standardized production beyond the industrial sphere in which the Model T and Mickey Mouse ostensibly constituted two sides of the same Fordist coin. In Drawing the Line, Tom Sito, a 30-year veteran of the animation industry and past president of America's largest animation union, Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists (MPSC), Local 839, crafts an appealing analysis of the heretofore undocumented tensions resulting from the production process of one of America's most enduring cultural media.
For Sito, "animation is the strangest of art forms" in which the imperatives of mass production and the mass market combine with the vicissitudes of the creative mind to "produce dreams by the yard."(47) Certainly one could see such a process as evincing a Fordism of the imagination, in which the individual creative consciousness is deconstructed into...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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