Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Film and Media Studies
First Advisor
Gerow, Aaron
Abstract
This dissertation asserts that animated media circulating into, within, and away from Japan during the mid-20th century stand to tell us much about how such texts shaped, and were shaped by, the cultural forces of class, gender, age, and race. The four chapters traverse intersecting, albeit disparate planes. Each uses a distinct critical lens to demonstrate how understudied archival materials can help to resolve some of the most pressing questions currently raised within animation studies. Chapter 1 focuses upon issues of socioeconomic class, forging a vital link between functional animation, such as television advertisements, and working-class animators who developed their artistic careers through commissioned productions. Building upon the first chapter’s concerns with labor and authorship, chapter 2 joins in recent efforts to write the achievements of women animators back into animation history. Chapter 3 addresses the relationship between animation and children, recasting the passive child spectator as an active collaborator in the production and theorization of animation. Foregrounding an urgent issue to be unpacked by scholarship embracing the complexities of children’s media, chapter 4 examines how the media functions of blackness have defined the industrial interplay between popular animated characters in Japan and the United States. Though the 1950s play a pivotal role in all four chapters, this dissertation is not a study of postwar animation. Rather, each chapter charts a discontinuous history of the decades leading up to the advent of anime in the 1960s by calling attention to texts and events most relevant to its motivating questions. For example, the commencement of television broadcasting in 1953 figures prominently within chapter 1, whereas chapter 2 is more concerned with gendered divisions of labor within animation studios dating back to the early 1930s. What results from this approach are four thought experiments which share archives and a common interest in highlighting continuities between prewar, wartime, and postwar practices, yet are designed to be read in any order and to advance a clear argument if encountered in isolation. Uninterested in the claims to total vision underwriting the many complete histories (zenshi) populating anime studies, the structure here models instead the benefits of a deliberately incomplete approach, one more akin to tracing a map than to recording a chronicle. This project draws heavily upon Japanese-language debates and print media, but it is not a study of Japanese animation. Those in search of claims about animation as a window into a monolithic Japanese culture are advised to look elsewhere. Instead, this dissertation concerns itself with the dynamic relationships between local production contexts, regional distribution channels, and transnational networks of reception and representation. Chapter 4, for example, opens with discussion of how anti-Black rhetoric framed the release of a stop-motion puppet film imported from the Czechoslovak Republic in 1957. By dwelling with case studies implicated in interlocking systems of oppression, each chapter locates fertile sites for interdisciplinary inquiry, placing animation studies and Japan studies in closer dialogue with a range of intersecting disciplines, including childhood studies, Black studies, and feminist media history.
Recommended Citation
Douglass, Jason Cody, "Animation Before Anime" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 875.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/875
