Watching Cartoon Network in the 1990’s was a treat, but watching in the midnight hours was like being a part of a secret club. A club where animation that didn’t look or act like anything else was the secret password. Each day and year offered different packaged anthologies and curated blocks to experience. Curated showings included Late Night Black & White which contained early 20th century American animation, ToonHeads explored the history of the golden age of American animation, and early Toonami showed off anime. But one in particular has left an outsized impact; O, Canada! This half hour block showed off a compilation of classic animated short films from the Great White North. Unbeknownst to me at the time they were all a product of the the National Film Board of Canada’s animation division, a government sponsored animation powerhouse which modestly came out of the mission to “help Canadians in all parts of Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in other parts”. You too may have seen shorts produced by the board if you attended early Spike & Mike programs or watched any International Animation Day programs. Still in operation today, the NFB’s long history is intricately important to animation, both creating works and giving space to artists across many disciplines and exposing generations of audiences the world over to the lives of experiences of Canadians.

Last November animation historian Charles Solomon, author of many fantastic animation history books, but most recently The Man Who Leapt Through Film: The Art of Mamoru Hosoda (2022) and the upcoming The Art of Cartoon Saloon: 25 Years: The Official Retrospective of the Award-Winning Irish Animation Studio behind The Secret of Kells, Wolfwalkers, and Song of the Sea (July, 2026), has published through Harry N. Abrams a thorough and explorative history of the NFB in, Animation for the People: An Illustrated History of the National Film Board of Canada.

This book is divided into seven chapters and subsequently the history of the film board into roughly decade chunks – from the creation of the NFB and first leadership by John Grierson and the creation of the animation division led by Norman McLaren in 1943, to as recent as the end of the COVID Pandemic in 2022. Each chapter explores notable films and the history of the artists who have made their presence felt through their art.

The artistic and aesthetic variation over 80 years from the NFB is simply staggering. There are so many different types of animation that it may be useful to have an internet browser open to the National Film Board’s fantastic streaming website as you read through. The work of Norman McLaren and the artists around his orbit like Evelyn Lambart, René Jodoin (who would eventually lead a French animation division for the NFB), and Grant Munro, would come to characterize the early output, but the willingness of everyone on staff to learn from what was happening across the film world, often modestly and novelly evolving the craft, became a characteristic of the organization itself. Lotte Reiniger’s presence in the 70s working on her final film, The Child and the Enchantments, is a powerful example of how renowned the board had become as a space for artists. Technology would often be integrated and explored for its artistic potential, often beating other institutions in using new methods years before others would create, like Peter Foldès using a computer in the 1974 short, Hunger. Solomon often points out how the NFB leans into using new technologies that can promote the capabilities of the individual artist, especially pointing out the unique capacities of pinscreen animation and its creators, Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker.

Another aspect that Solomon often points back to throughout the text, which ran through McLaren’s intention for the studio, was that the NFB allows and encourages artists to operate as their own independent creator – that the space the NFB created was a space with modest tools to create educational, informative, and artistic expressions that would otherwise not have been. While not opposed to group projects, the preference to give individual artists the space, through legislative governance, to create their own specific vision cannot be overlooked. The hypothetical has always existed, what if we could give artists the opportunity to create within a certain amount of freedom and eight decades of awards and nominations show us what can be accomplished.

The history of the National Film Board is complicated for many reasons – its lengthy history, the vast number of artists who helped cultivate its diverse and overwhelming output, the financial and political challenges to its structure – but Solomon does a fantastic job guiding us through the history one step at a time. The text is written letting readers piece together broader significance and applications, but doesn’t fall prey to the banal of meaningless figures and dates. We move quickly through topics as if moving through a curated hall; each page is full of photos, animated artifacts, and objects with Soloman gleefully pointing out each artist’s creation’s curiosities, uniqueness, and lineages. When important, Solomon will explore the government structures that provided the foundation for the board or political challenges, but the focus is on the myriad of fantastic animation and the people who made it.

The last two decades of the NFB have been marked by progression and instability. As Solomon explains, the constant attack from within the Canadian government has hurt the capabilities of the board, but unionization, gender parity, and new distribution models have helped bolster the ways in which the organization treats the artists that help make it what it is. What will the NFB produce in the next eight decades? If history has anything to say, then we will be shown thoughtfully animated, razor sharp, and authentically Canadian animated shorts for years to come.

Animation for the People: An Illustrated History of the National Film Board of Canada is written by Charles Solomon and is published through Harry N. Abrams and is available now.

Please dive in and enjoy the complete Animation History Bibliography section of the Cartoon Research website. See you next month with another round up of animation book news and reviews!

Writings from the Alumni and Graduate Students from the UCLA Animation Workshop.

I hope the spring weather has begun to blossom in your neck of the woods as it has here in south-western Michigan! This month’s Card Catalog is the result of polishing up one of the criticisms from the first edition of the Animation History Bibliography, mainly that I had neglected to pull out individually authored chapters in edited compilations. And this has been an area that has proved to be a lot of fun to fix. Not only are there a lot of books with chapters written by many professionals across the world and notable animation historians, but there have been quite a few student journals with a focus on animation at Universities across the United States. The most successful of those journals comes from the Animation Workshop at UCLA called Animatrix. The journal was originally founded in 1984 and has published issues all the way up until 2016 where, apparently, it has been on hiatus since. The journals are published through the print on demand service, Lulu, where their three latest issues are still available to buy. I did, so today, let’s check out those issues:

The earliest issue still available is Volume 20 published in June of 2013 and was coedited by Valerie Giuili and Kelly Lake. This issue’s theme takes an optimistic but tempered look at the future of animation and tries not to replicate the unadulterated optimism that we saw in the 1960s, the inspiration for their cover. The issue has three features. The first is a deep dive into the body of work of Lewis Klahr by Veronkia Ferdman. Ferdman zeroes in on the ways that Klahr uses stop motion and magazine clippings to have audiences contemplate some of Klahr’s larger contemplations on the passage of time and the presence of pain throughout our existence. In “Diving into the Uncanny Valley” by George Fleming, Fleming explores the history of the uncanny valley and argues how its presence in a multitude of 3D animated films throughout the last three decades are a result of attempting to reach various forms of idealized photorealism. Lastly, Alex Rosenberg looks at 13 Goofy shorts from 1940-2007 in “How To: Establishing a Star: The Goofy “How to” Shorts and the Evolution of a Character” and explores how Goofy became a stand-in for the present day everyman.

This issue shines, though, with three interviews; one with Peter de Seve by Alex Wong, another with Joe Murray by Kelly Lake, and the last with Craig Bartlett by Alex Rosenberg. In each interview each artist opens up, at length, about their own backgrounds, their methods and philosophies, and the way they see animation continue to change and evolve for the better and for the worse. Education, industry, and their personal histories are major topics throughout each interview and since this issue was published over a decade ago, it’s fascinating to see what has happened in the time since the interviews and today. As an example, Craig Bartlett explains his excitement to work on a potential new series at PBS called Dinosaur Train, and the strange ways and time it took to develop the pitch, which would not only be greenlit but would go on to have five seasons and a movie ending in 2021. Or how Murray discusses the potential and paradigm shift of the Internet’s effect on classical television distribution, even shouting out the work of then new Internet personalities like Egoraptor (Arin of GameGrumps), and the difficulties in launching a digital distribution network.

Volume 21 was released in March of 2016 and co-edited by Tenaya Anue and Graciela Sarabia. Innovation is the theme for the issue as without it we don’t have animation that continues to inspire or even to exist.

In “Mechanical Mod-sters: The Battle Between Realism and Surrealism at Fleischer Studios”, author Kynan Dias argues that the Fleischer Brothers’ relentless pursuit of mechanical innovation would result in their studio often creating stories that fit within the surrealist movement, ironic for the duo that invented the device that captures realistic movement in a very non-realistic medium. Building off of a quote of the Fleischer’s love of the surreal from Richard Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell, Dias contrasts Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the work of Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou with Fleischer’s artistic output and finds quite a few similarities between not just the art but the artists.

Other articles include Kate Isenberg giving a quick biography of Bob Kurtz, highlighting notable milestones throughout his life and the ways in which his commercials pushed the medium forward. Rebecca Olson scrutinizes five pre-Snow White Silly Symphonies and the ways in which they experiment with realistic feminine movement that would eventually result in what is seen in the feature film. “From Monte Cristo to Gankutsuou: Externalizing Essence Through the Use of Animation”, Latoya Raveneau explains how the anime and the original Alexandre Dumas novel work in tandem to both elevate each artistic work as a collective whole. Lastly, Rasoul Azadani is interviewed by Rocco Pucillo and discuss, briefly, his background in animation, the meaning of and purpose of layout, and the power and success of 2D animation over the last century – success that gave Disney the power to be as big of a corporation as it was in 2013 (and is today, too).

The last issue, hopefully just for the time being, came out in May 2016 and was edited by Zia Adsit-Metts. This time the theme is Animation for Television. Ben Greenwalk opens the issue with an exploration of the history and demise of the Saturday Morning Cartoon block, how captured young audiences and marketing opportunities that that provided while also exploring how that allowed for more creative endeavors throughout the decades. Greenwalk ends with a thought on the impact of today’s video game market and digital distribution as the final nails in the morning marathon coffin.

Four fantastic interviews are present in this issue, one by Sarah White interviewing Julia Vickerman, another by Kim Ngyuen with Richard Zimmerman, a third with Jasmin Lai by Julia Meng, and the last with Mia Resella with Van Partible. Vickerman’s interview is a great time capsule as at this point in time, Vickerman had been working on the Powerpuff Girls reboot and describes the process of pitching Twelve Forever which would eventually come out in 2019. Ngyuen’s interview with Zimmerman is super fun as it’s mostly an exploration of the way that Zimmerman animated various projects from the original Gumby series to the then new episodes of Robot Chicken. Jasmin Lai gives a background of their experience at the Rhode Island School of Design and the ways that helped get her career started. The interview ends with Lai lamenting that they’re not the greatest at background work – Lai’s most recent work was designing the backgrounds for Pixar’s Elemental. I think I enjoy every interview Partible gives. As he explains in the interview, he became a showrunner so early in life and at such a unique point in Hanna Barbera’s history that it’s hard not to find any of his answers interesting.

I really appreciate these volumes because their authors are full of excitement and hope for the future of animation and the ways it is changing. Today we know that the world these issues described is a bit more complicated with old methods changing, new technologies always redefining what has come before and what is coming next, and new institutions that are combining and redefining. But, like these journal issues point out, there are always new things born out of the old and independent and entrepreneurial enterprises are underway today that will continue to change the rules of the game in the future. Like Craig Bartlett said in his interview, the industry is constantly under revolutionary changes, distribution is a constantly changing game, but the role of the animator and storyteller stays the same.

As mentioned at the top, you can order each of these issues through Lulu, but the UCLA Animation Workshop website also has their interviews and the first ten issues available online and for free. And as always you can enjoy the complete Animation History Bibliography section of the Cartoon Research website. See you next month with another round up of animation book news and reviews!