How Golden Was the Golden Age?
Copyright (c) Mark Mayerson
From Apatoons #83
Harry McCracken asked for people's opinions on what the golden age of animation was like if you were working in it. Was it a golden age or was it an artist's nightmare? The answer is somewhere in between, but I thought I'd examine the situation on a point by point basis.
The best thing about the golden age was the quality of the films. They were excellent at the time they were released and they have stood the test of time. The Warner and MGM Avery cartoons are still entertaining audiences on a daily basis and still inspiring new films and comics. The films are still inspiring people to enter the business or to write about it. In every area (writing, direction, design, layout, animation, voices and music), the cartoons from the golden age showcase outstanding work that is still equal or superior to anything that's been done in animation. This is at the root of all our interest in animation and it has continued to sustain us through periods when contemporary animation has been mediocre.
However, we have to acknowledge that working on these cartoons was not a uniformly great experience. There were people who were well compensated and totally involved with their work. There's no question that for some people, the animation business provided them with more artistic fulfillment than anything else in their lives. However, there were other people who were indifferent or artistically brutalized and who were not
well compensated financially.
Many of the artists went into the animation business because it was the only paying work they could find during the depression. It was not a field they aspired to or had ambitions in, and many of these artists left when better opportunities came along. Gustav Tenggren and Walt Kelly come to mind.
The animation business started out without unions, and yet unions became the rule by the 1940's. There were labor actions at Fleischer, Schlesinger, Disney and Terry that I know about, so bad conditions were not restricted to one studio or one coast. They were consistent throughout the business. There was no seniority, which meant a person's job was never secure no matter how long they worked for a company. There was arbitrary and unpaid overtime, which meant that on any given day, a supervisor could randomly pick someone to work late without compensation. People who were doing the same work were not paid equally. Women were generally restricted to ink and paint and when women managed to break into other areas of production, they were routinely paid less than men who were doing the same work.
There were some working conditions that were never remedied and haven't been to this day. There were no residuals. When studios re-released their cartoons to theaters or sold them to TV, the artists received no additonal payments. Because actors and musicians had stronger unions, they get residuals on TV work, while artists still do not.
There were no creator's rights. In some cases, it was easily determined who created certain characters. The creators received no compensation beyond their paychecks for creating the characters and received no share in money gained from merchandising and other character licensing.
On top of working conditions, there were artistic limitations. Content was restricted to fairy tales and slapstick humor. If you were assigned to a particular series (Popeye, Donald Duck), the cartoons you worked on were mostly variations on a theme. There wasn't much chance of going off the beaten path. It's clear that there was artistic dissatisfaction early in the game because Frank Tashlin tried to change things at Columbia and a lot of the people who worked with him there later went on to work at UPA.
There was a house or production style that all artists had to adhere to. Regardless of an artist's individual style, it had to be subordinated to the dominant style of the film or studio so that the work would look consistent.
Animation production was on an assembly line basis. There was no chance for an artist to create a work from start to finish. The assembly line meant that almost all artwork would be touched by other artists before it reached the screen, diluting an individual artist's contribution.
Artists were anonymous. Even after screen credits, the public had no way to identify who was responsible for a particular piece of animation or a particular background.
At Disney, work was routinely discarded. Months of work by designers and animators would end up being abandoned in favor of another approach or cut from the final film. While this may have been the right thing to do from an audience standpoint, there was lots of bad feeling among the artists whose work was discarded.
It should be pointed out that after the Depression, there was an exodus out of the animation business. The late '40's saw an explosion of funny animal type comic books and several people (Ken Hultgren, Jack Bradbury) left animation because they found comic books a better place to work. Carl Barks, Hank Ketcham, Walt Kelly and Virgil Partch all left the animation business at various times to go into comic books, magazine gag cartoons and syndicated strips. Let's not forget Frank Tashlin moving into live action.
While it was next to impossible for an animation studio to get a theatrical release in the post-War years (UPA was the only one and that was as much a function of Columbia's incompetence as it was UPA's abilities), it was relatively simple to start a studio to do TV commercials. Zack Schwartz, Dave Hilberman, Jack Zander, Shamus Culhane and John Hubley did this, because it provided them with entrepreneurial and artistic opportunities that were not available in theatrical animation. Animators like Grim Natwick and Emery Hawkins moved into commercials because it provided a variety of drawing styles and allowed them to control a film from start to finish. I believe that it also paid better.
So, how golden was the golden age? The films still justify all our interest in them. Animation is still struggling to be as good as it used to be, so the golden age films will continue to command our attention from the standpoint of art and entertainment. For many of us, the films inspire continued historical inquiries. But I think we're all experienced enough in the working world to acknowledge that the golden age was not necessarily golden for the people who made the films. They unionized, they left animation, and they went into TV in order to improve their working conditions and to better satisfy their ambitions. If we're in for a flood of revisionist animation history books that delve into the darker side of the business, I'm all for it. Anything that improves our understanding of the films and how they were created is okay with me.
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