OUAN05 - Understanding - The Golden Age of Cartoons

Snow White, 1937

'The Golden Age of American Animation', was a period in the history of U.S animation that began in 1928 with sound cartoons and continued until 1960 when theatrical shorts began to fall short to the new medium of television animation, which was becoming popular. During this period, many popular characters emerged within the animations that were shown such as, Micky Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Popeye and Tom & Jerry. During this golden age period, feature length animation also began. The first of Walt Disney's feature films were produced during this time, including and post notably; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

Perhaps the reason for calling it the 'Golden Age' is that prior to this, animation was dying out as a novelty and less that 23% of the cinemas at the time showed animated shorts. During the Golden age a lot of emphasis was on sound, despite animation being heavily swayed towards visuals. The vocal talent and sound production was important to encourage the success of a cartoon. A lot of the music was done by studio orchestras, whether they were creating original music or mixing classic songs and music.

For the history of hollywood animation, the industry didn't branch off much and it was a very exclusive industry. Animation studios almost worked solely on creating animated cartoons and animated titles for films that were released at the time. Due to the exclusivity of animation, motion picture special effects was derived in order to cater for other areas of film and the entertainment industry as a whole. An example of this would be the invention of stop motion animation. Despite them being of the same industry, hand drawn animation and stop motion animation rarely overlapped during the golden age. During the wartime era hollywood studios contributed greatly to the war effort and various cartoon studios pitched in, shorts were shown such as Popeye the sailor joining the navy to fight againt the Nazis and the Japanese army. Also, instructional films were produced by studios informing soldiers of various things.

In the year 1948, the Animation Union negotiated a 25% pay increase, making it so cartoons as a whole were much more expensive to make. After this time, there was no booking guarantee on theaters to show shorts and as a consequence, the animation business was much riskier as a whole. At the beginning of the 1960s television was beginning to gain momentum and the animation industry changed dramatically, new cartoons were introduced and characters popularised due to the popularity of Saturday morning cartoons, and there was a decline in the amount of theater-going. In order to tackle this, theaters lowered there costs but the few shorts that found there way into theaters were considered inferior to their predecessors by critics.