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The Changing Space of Animation: Disney's Hybrid Films of the 1940s

J.P. Telotte
Animation 2007; 2; 245
DOI: 10.1177/1746847707083419

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 article

The Changing Space of Animation: Disney’s

Hybrid Films of the 1940s
J.P. Telotte

Abstract In the early 1940s, Disney animation underwent a

critical reassessment, one in which commentators who had
previously praised Disney’s efforts, particularly for the studio’s
realistic advances, began to emphasize how, in its efforts at
realism, Disney had moved away from, even betrayed anima-
tion’s avant-garde possibilities. That seeming ‘break’ with anima-
tion’s subversive spirit, however, was hardly as definitive or
deliberate as many critics claimed. This article examines Disney’s
hybrid animation efforts of the 1940s, particularly films like The
Three Caballeros (1945), Song of the South (1946), and Fun and
Fancy Free (1947), in light of the tension between animation’s
realistic and subversive possibilities. In these films, the author
suggests, we can see the Disney studio’s interest in recouping
something of the modernist attitude with which it had earlier
been associated, or at least an effort at finding some accommo-
dation between what Disney had been and what it was becoming
as it came to dominate the American animation industry.

Keywords Anthony Vidler, cartoon, hybrid animation,

modernism, multiplane camera, realism, reflexivity,
spectatorship, technology, Walt Disney

animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com)

Copyright © 2007 SAGE (London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol 2(3): 245–258 [1746-8477(200711)]10.1177/1746847707083419

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246 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(3)

In animation, at its best, we thrill to the means of representation and not

only the representation. (Michael O’Pray, 1997: 201)

Midway through its narrative, Disney’s Fun and Fancy Free (1947)
offers its audience a most striking situation – and a revealing techni-
cal achievement. Jiminy Cricket of Pinocchio (1940) fame jumps up
on a window frame and looks out across a yard, various shrubs, and a
street to a house in the deep background, situated apparently amidst
the Hollywood hills. He then moves into and across these multiple
planes of visual detail to find himself outside that house and peering
through its picture window. While the house frame itself is animated,
the interior he glimpses is a live-action scene of a party involving a
little girl, Luana Patten, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and two of his
dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. That movement
deep into the frame – an artificial three-dimensional movement here
rendered all the more effectively by the use of the Disney multiplane
camera – stops with a real three-dimensional scene, the framed image
of the live actors (and not-so-live dummies), as if the animated scene
had somehow produced the live-action, as if the window scene were
a kind of three-dimensional movie projected for the animated two-
dimensional character, and as if our world constituted the entertain-
ment for the cartoon one. Yet, clearly the opposite is the case; this
generally pedestrian Disney post-war effort has simply inverted the
usual visual and narrative situation, combining several of the
company’s more effective technologies of illusion to help frame its two
animated stories. And that frame, as Michael O’Pray’s (1997) remark
suggests, provides us with an unexpected reflexive ‘thrill’ by fore-
grounding the very ‘means of representation’, by underscoring the
technological ‘trick’ of its hybrid technique. In the process, it also
casts in relief an interesting and unremarked complexity in the
development of Disney’s animation aesthetic in this period, particu-
larly in its approach to space.
Throughout much of its early history, Disney animation was, as
Timothy White (1992) notes, ‘almost universally praised . . . by the
public, popular journalists and critics, and even academics and
“serious” artists’ (p. 4). It was lauded for the way it broke the bound-
aries of conventional narrative and generally linked to the world of
avant-garde art, with Walt Disney himself even compared to a surreal-
ist artist like Dalí (Leslie, 2002: 102). As Esther Leslie recounts, Disney
animation was even ‘showcased’ at the First Moscow International
Film Festival in 1935 and enthusiastically supported by Sergei Eisenstein
because of its revolutionary spirit, particularly its capacity for ‘freely
reimagining’ the world ‘according to fantasy and will’ (p. 231). Yet as
Disney moved towards the development of what has been termed an
‘illusion of life’ aesthetic – and as the Disney brothers demonstrated a
rather unprogressive political stance by opposing the Teamsters’
efforts at unionizing their animators – critical opinion began to

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 Telotte Changing space of animation: Disney’s hybrid films of the 1940s 247

change. While Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was widely
embraced, both for its landmark status as a feature and for its realistic
effects, achieved with the new multiplane camera, by 1941 the critical
climate had clearly shifted. Even Siegfried Kracauer (1941), a key early
theorist of cinematic realism, criticized the Disney films for the way
they had begun to ‘imitate the technique of the realistic films’ (p. 463)
by emphasizing three-dimensional space, camera movement, and
characterization. In a declaration that suggests his support for early
animation’s avant-garde spirit (if not for its equally inherent spirit of
imitation), he argued that the cartoon should work differently, that it
should emphasize ‘the dissolution rather than the reinforcement of
conventional reality’, since ‘its function is not to draw a reality which
can better be photographed’ (p. 463). Paul Wells (2002) has recently
renewed this charge, arguing that while ‘Disney made animation a
credible art-form’, he also ‘veiled the capacity of the form to more
readily exhibit its subversive credentials’, and thus demonstrate its
complexity. The result, he suggests, was the emergence of a style that,
while ‘endorsed’ by a cross-section of American culture, clearly broke
with the transformative and self-conscious or reflexive spirit found in
earlier animation (p. 45).
Yet that ‘break’, I want to suggest, was hardly as definitive as these
commentaries imply for, during the war years and immediately follow-
ing, we find evidence of Disney repeatedly trying to regain some
balance between those realistic and subversive possibilities that, ulti-
mately, are both intrinsic to animation, as well as to create the sort of
reflexive flourishes that we see rather surprisingly foregrounded in an
otherwise conventional film like Fun and Fancy Free (1947). The
efforts of this period point to an increasing interest in recouping some-
thing of that modernist attitude, or at least finding some accommo-
dation between what Disney had been and what it was becoming.
Certainly, Fantasia (1940) hints at this ambition with its attempts to
forge a link between classical music and animation in a non-narrative
format. But that effort to retrieve an avant-garde spirit shows most
clearly in another sort of film that would, for a time, dominate Disney’s
efforts and that has, unfortunately, usually been seen in a very different
light – in fact, as but one more symptom of the studio’s realist thrust
that Kracauer and others had lamented. In the late-war and post-war
era, the studio sought, for various reasons, to combine the attractions
of its multiplane camera with one of the earliest approaches to
cartooning – hybrid animation – a combination of animation with live-
action figures, used most notably in the Fleischer brothers’ Out of the
Inkwell series, as well as in Disney’s own Alice comedies of the 1920s.1
And that combination points to a rather more complex concern with
space, certainly far more of a modernist attitude, than our critiques
have acknowledged.
We might consider the way in which a number of Disney’s hybrid
feature films directly address the issues of space bound up in their

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248 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(3)

creation, particularly the space of spectatorship that, while typically

elided from classical film narrative, is (as Leslie, 2002, notes)
commonly implicated in modernist texts. In his study of space, culture,
and architecture in the early modern era, Anthony Vidler (1992) offers
an important lead in this direction. For he describes how, along with
its insights into psychology and culture, the 20th century introduced
a new sense of space, what he terms ‘warped space’, itself a kind of
hybrid between physical and psychological notions of space that
modernist artists would try to evoke because of the way it ‘elides the
boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing
ambiguity’ (p. 11). And he suggests that this new sense of space is such
a crucial development that we might well think of it as ‘the leitmotiv
of modernity itself’ (Vidler, 2000: 5).
Drawing on the work of Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Simmel,
among others, Vidler (2000) describes how the new urban world –
that which was populated by the audience for the equally new
phenomenon of film – had taken on not only a fresh awareness of a
new dimension, that of psychological space, but also had begun to
manifest a variety of space-oriented neuroses and phobias resulting
from various processes of ‘psychological projection or introjection’
(p. 8). As part of this investment, space was no longer perceived to be
just a ‘stable container’ or objective and measurable dimension of
human experience. Rather, it was increasingly seen ‘as a product of
subjective projection’, an inconstant and shifting realm that might best
be described by the emerging vocabularies of ‘displacement and
fracture, torquing and twisting, pressure and release, void and block’
(p. 1). In fact, this new sense of space posed a fundamental challenge
for a conventional point of view because of the way it thus ‘put the
assumed stabilities of the viewing subject into question’ (pp. 4, 10).
That sense of instability obviously colors the hybrid animation of both
the Out of the Inkwell cartoons and Disney’s Alice shorts, both of
which depend on a blurring of the boundaries between the real and
the imagined and, to some extent, between the audience and the
action. But it is an effect that would resurface and wield a telling influ-
ence over Disney’s feature efforts in that vein during the 1940s by
reflexively troubling their seemingly realist bias.
Of course, in animation’s early days, the hybrid approach was
partially motivated simply by the need for various economies of
production, the most obvious of which was that, by incorporating live-
action elements, animators had to draw fewer images, thus reducing
costs and speeding up production. In the 1940s, such economies again
became attractive, particularly at Disney, since budgets had become
tighter, many skilled animators had been lost to the war effort, and the
studio had committed much of its remaining resources to producing
training and informational films for the government. In place of its
labor- and cost-intensive full-length animated features of the pre-war
years, then, Disney developed a hybrid formula that would dominate

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 Telotte Changing space of animation: Disney’s hybrid films of the 1940s 249

its production for much of the decade, resulting in such feature films
as The Three Caballeros (1945), Song of the South (1946), Fun and
Fancy Free (1947), Melody Time (1948), and So Dear to My Heart
(1949), among others. Often weakly constructed, these ‘package
pictures’, as they were known within the studio because of the way
they packaged together various short cartoons, were typically
episodic, depended heavily on musical numbers, and used live-action
scenes to link their animated sequences – or animation to link their
live-action elements. Yet, despite the live-action material, within the
studio they were never considered to be particularly realistic or
conventional efforts; rather, veteran Disney animators Frank Thomas
and Ollie Johnston (1995) recall that these projects were usually
approached as ‘a showcase for . . . experimentation’ (p. 511).
Moreover, the films were marketed in that same light, as distinctly
innovative stylistic efforts, in keeping with the studio’s growing repu-
tation for technical advances. Thus the original theatrical trailer for
The Three Caballeros (1945) described its combination of live-action
and animation as ‘the newest thing to hit the movies since talking
pictures came in’. And in an obvious publicity piece, a behind-the-
scenes article in Popular Science (1944) preceding the film’s release
referred to it as ‘another surprise from the Disney bag of tricks’
(p. 107). Certainly, there was something new to its techniques,
particularly to the creation of a three-dimensional illusion in this and
the following hybrid efforts. To create its eventual illusion, The Three
Caballeros, for example, combined three separate photographic
processes: the multiplane camera, a front-projection technique using
the multiplane apparatus, and a new rear-projection process.
In spite of that technical complexity, though, critical response
mainly focused on the situations created by its mixture of cartoon and
human characters. One critic slammed the film for its ‘impossible to
understand’ narrative (Brown, 1945: 23), while the Time (1945)
reviewer, commenting on Donald Duck’s romantic pursuits of several
live-action women, attacked its ‘alarmingly incongruous case of hot
pants’ (p. 92). Even one of the most perceptive responses, that by
Barbara Deming (1945), would quickly shift from noting that its ‘tech-
niques are mixed incongruously’ (p. 228) to suggesting that in the
narrative Disney has ‘wrought something monstrous’ (p. 226), a world
in which ‘boundaries fall apart’ (p. 229). Moreover, she reads this turn
symptomatically, as a sign of Walt Disney’s own ‘artlessness’, his
growing tendency simply to mirror the attitudes and values of his
culture, one for which boundaries and certainties of every sort had
indeed begun to disappear. Thus she reads The Three Caballeros
(1945) within the cultural context of late Second World War America,
a world wherein ‘values . . . are in conflict and in question’, and she
attributes both its stylistic and its thematic ‘incongruities’ to the ‘night-
mare of these times’ (p. 226).
Of course, Deming is correct with respect to ‘these times’. In

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250 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(3)

keeping with the cultural situation created by the war, The Three
Caballeros (1945) was conceived as a film that would encourage a new
level of inter-American friendship.2 Yet it approaches that task in a way
that surprisingly addresses the issues of space bound up in its complex
creation, particularly the space of spectatorship. In fact, The Three
Caballeros almost immediately strikes this note, as it begins with
Donald Duck opening several presents ‘from his friends in Latin
America’, the first of which contains a projector, screen, and films. As
he subsequently runs these films, Donald immediately resituates
himself from the status of a cartoon subject and inhabitant of the
conventional space of animated narrative to, like Jiminy Cricket in
Fun and Fancy Free (1947), an unconventional spectator, in fact, a
moviegoer himself. Here he looks into another world (south of the
border), as if suddenly aware of a different space that these cartoons
– or his own cartoons, for that matter – make manifest, certainly a
space of decided difference for America in the 1940s. For these films
and his new status as viewer allow the thoroughly American duck to
stake out a new territory, one in which he can unconventionally ‘meet’
his friends from South America and see, apparently for the first time,
its varied realms and some of the rara avis who inhabit them. At this
point we can begin to glimpse how the film’s key strategy, its parallel-
ing of America’s awakening to Latin America’s importance with
Donald’s discovery of his new ‘friends’, coincides with its stylistic
ambitions: its showcasing of that other, fantastic or ‘warped’ space, as
Vidler (2000) terms it, that animation exploits and makes available for
our experience here, as well as Disney’s own reawakening to the
possibilities of such cartooning.
The film’s two other main stylistic turns further develop this stylis-
tic ‘story’, first by linking Donald to a pointedly non-realistic style of
animation, and second by juxtaposing him with real humans in the
film’s showcase hybrid scenes – those on which most critical commen-
taries have focused.3 While the two brief cartoons Donald watches,
about Pablo the penguin and the Argentine boy Gauchito and his
donkey-bird, are done in the typical Disney style of the period – with
soft, rounded figures, set in a recognizably realistic context, and with
the exaggeration of specific traits or features to emphasize personality
– both are really about aberrations, departures from the norm: a
penguin who only wants to be warm and a donkey with wings, both
suggesting Latin America’s exotic nature. Those exotic stories, along
with the opening of a second box, lead away from a conventionally
realistic and ‘cute’ approach as they bring the Brazilian parrot, Joe
Carrioca, a pop-up book offering images of his country, and an invita-
tion from Joe to go with him to Brazil that immediately introduces a
shift in both style and content – as if the film were pointedly leaving
behind conventional Disney animation and especially its typical spatial
styling. For Joe suddenly and surrealistically multiplies, transforming
into a row of images recalling the popular ‘Brazilian Bombshell’,

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 Telotte Changing space of animation: Disney’s hybrid films of the 1940s 251

Carmen Miranda, all beckoning seductively to the duck and effectively

exploding the sense of conventional personality. When Donald follows
these fantastic images into the book, into a most unexpectedly ‘deep’
composition, he not only becomes a viewing subject – or tourist –
within a pointedly viewed world – that of the picture book – but the
visual style also radically changes. For as he literally hops onto a train
depicted on one page, the images become flat and hard-edged and the
color scheme over-saturated, all characteristics of Artistic Supervisor
Mary Blair’s distinctive style, which was, as John Canemaker (2003)
has observed, ‘the polar opposite of the representational “illusion of
life’’ aesthetic that had become associated with Disney in this period’
(p. ix). It is, very simply, a movement in depth where there is no
apparent depth, a strike at the conventions of representation, and a
reminder of the ways in which animation might open onto unexpected
spaces and other worlds, thereby subverting realist expectations.
That movement into a seemingly two-dimensional world rather
surprisingly opens the door to another kind of spatial experience, the
three-dimensional one of the hybrid scenes that dominate much of the
rest of the film. These scenes, which employ both the front- and rear-
projection techniques noted earlier, repeatedly involve Donald inter-
acting with live characters – Aurora Miranda, posing as a cookie seller,
a group of bathing beauties at the beach,4 the popular Mexican singer,
Dora Luz, and the dancer, Carmen Molina. In fact, the duck pursues
the human women in each of these scenes, suggesting the sort of
impossible sexual involvement that disturbed some viewers expecting
the usual Disney fare, and that precipitated several protesting reviews.
Yet those pursuits are not the ultimate point here. Donald’s repeated
and comically underlined frustrations, which were by this time part of
his well-established character, should have told audiences as much.
Rather, these encounters are all about border crossings or boundary
blurrings, about discovering the beauty, talent, and wonders of
another world, about moving out from the secure space of the conven-
tional spectator (implicitly, America’s prevailing stance towards its
‘exotic’ southern neighbors) to enter another space that beckons to
us, as Carmen Molina repeatedly does to Donald. Those encounters,
punctuated by all manner of quickly changing and reflexive images –
Dora Luz as an image in Donald’s eye, Donald transformed into the
shifting lines of a film sound track, dancing cacti taking Donald’s
shape, and all parodying Busby Berkeley’s spatially-impossible, prosce-
nium-bursting, self-conscious musical numbers – work very much in
the tradition of the avant-garde to interrogate our own space, our own
carefully bordered world, as well as our own cultural insularity. In so
doing, they pointedly emphasize one of this film’s underlying
impulses, its effort to recuperate an element of that earlier avant-garde
spirit, the seeming abandonment of which had brought much
criticism.5
Released the next year, Song of the South (1946) seems less marked

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252 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(3)

by that spirit of ‘experimentation’, less an obvious effort to recall the

avant-garde tradition, although its key focus is also on fashioning a new
vantage, in this case for young Johnny, its central character. And here
too the film’s stylistic experimentation, involving a greater emphasis on
purely live-action and nearly seamless transitional hybrid scenes, drew
less attention than its cultural content – its racially charged adaptation
of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales. While a Disney poster for
the film would describe its combination of live-action and animation as
‘An Epochal Event in Screen History’, the Time (1946) reviewer focused
largely on the Uncle Remus character, a figure ‘bound to enrage all
educated Negroes, and a number of damyankees’ (p. 101). And that
response was consistent with a marked change in critical perspective
on Disney, as post-war commentators began to shift focus from
aesthetic issues to what Eric Smoodin (1993) terms ‘broader ideo-
logical ones’ – questions interrogating Disney’s implicit attitudes
towards nationalities, gender representation, and race (p. 104). In fact,
Smoodin argues that this shift may ironically have been abetted by ‘the
inclusion of more realism – both drawn and live-action’ in the Disney
films (p. 106), as if the turn to hybrid techniques had cast these
ideological issues into relief, even made them unavoidable.6
And perhaps they were unavoidable, given the flimsy live-action
story with its separating husband and wife, and the son who turns for
consolation and guidance to Uncle Remus, a figure vaguely linked to
the grandmother’s plantation. Because it is weakly plotted, context
becomes all, and that context, particularly the sense of place, is that
of a rural plantation, peopled with servile blacks and a benevolent
white mistress, and apparently isolated from the realities of its post-
Civil War South setting. While it seems a context that the studio sought
to frame not so much nostalgically as almost abstractly, as a kind of
historical never-never land, the cultural weight of the live-action under-
cuts the appeal of its hybrid scenes and their alternative stylistic thrust.
However, the narrative pointedly frames this world as an escape from
the real, a place where Johnny and his mother go to get away from
some vaguely described unpleasantries back home in Atlanta, where
‘everybody’s mad about what Daddy writes in the newspaper.’ It seems
the family is being split because the father is challenging the status quo
and, despite his wife’s pleadings, is determined to go back and face
that situation after safely depositing his family in this country back-
water, in the safe isolation he experienced as a child. Thus Johnny finds
himself in a home that is not his home and one filled with problems
that he too cannot avoid – a bitter and overprotective mother, two
harassing neighborhood boys, and a bull that nearly kills him.
However, neither the hybrid scenes nor the animated tales of Brer
Rabbit satisfactorily resolve these concerns of place and space, bring
Johnny to an acceptable home, or link the space of the imagination,
represented by Uncle Remus’s tales, to that of the real world,
embodied in his parents’ troubles. In short, while Uncle Remus tries

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 Telotte Changing space of animation: Disney’s hybrid films of the 1940s 253

to shift the child’s way of seeing this world, and while the film suggests
our own need to change perspective, to challenge a conventional
point of view, the real world remains very much with us.
Yet, emphasizing the links between the animated and real worlds,
what we might term a reciprocality of space, seems like the film’s key
concern, as its opening and the various ‘packaged’ cartoon episodes
suggest. For Song of the South (1946) starts with an image of the
interior of Uncle Remus’s cabin, lit so that we cannot be sure if it is
real or animated, and accompanied by his voice setting out a coda for
the film:
Just ‘cause these here tales is about critters like Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox,
that don’t mean they ain’t the same like can happen to folks. So them that
can’t learn from a tale about critters just ain’t got their ears tuned for
listenin’.

It is a warning, of course, to ‘tune’ our ears – and eyes – correctly for

what follows, so that we can better appreciate the correspondences
between the animated and the real, the worlds of ‘critters’ and ‘folks’,
including the rather hazy boundaries between the two. The subse-
quent hybrid scenes, easily some of the studio’s most successful efforts
in this area, underscore that linkage in their nearly seamless nature.
When Uncle Remus walks from the background to a mid-frame fence
rail and leans on it to talk to an animated Brer Rabbit in the foreground,
it is almost impossible to tell where the real rail ends and the animated
one begins. But that blurring of boundaries was an integral part of the
film’s visual design scheme; as animators Thomas and Johnston (1995)
explain, ‘the “real” parts were only theatrical sets . . . and had been
designed with flat surfaces and simple shapes so they would match the
drawings that had to be part of the whole composition’ (pp. 524–5).
When Brer Rabbit subsequently jumps onto the mid-frame fence and
then beyond it, into the ‘real’ area occupied by Uncle Remus’s body,
he not only underscores that careful matching, but also prepares us
for the narrative exploitation of what is essentially a new sort of space,
since he then hops into the background, the area from which Uncle
Remus had emerged (thus previously testifying to its reality), and in
the process takes us into a fully animated shot, into the cartoon story
wherein, just as he determines to leave his home behind, he finds
himself caught in Brer Fox’s trap and must use his wits to escape. It
is, of course, a variation on Johnny’s own plan to run away, as Uncle
Remus’s moral underscores: ‘you can’t run away from trouble. There
ain’t no place that far.’ But just as importantly, it speaks to our situation
as well, as we find ourselves, albeit pleasurably, also caught up in a
trap, that of the film’s hybrid scheme, which has made it practically
impossible to parse out real space from animated. And within that
subtly subversive trap, we are essentially compelled to make the
connections between the realms of ‘critters’ and ‘folks’, to begin to
see our world in a very different way.

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254 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(3)

That design scheme, along with its implications, carries through the
rest of the film’s hybrid scenes, as borders constantly dissolve and the
real and animated spaces become contiguous and mutually interrogat-
ing. For instance, leading in to his tale of the Tar Baby, Uncle Remus
appears, walking from deep background into an animated foreground,
where he encounters Brer Rabbit. In fact, Brer Rabbit hops all around
him, over and under various fences, and, at one point, even from back-
ground to foreground through Uncle Remus’s legs, before Uncle Remus
stops to fish and casts his obviously animated line into an animated pond
in the foreground, a move that, with a dissolve, casts us into a fully
animated sequence wherein Brer Rabbit heads down the road and falls
into Brer Fox’s Tar Baby trap. While the introduction to the tale of the
Laughing Place is more abrupt, the link is no less pointed. In this case
when a crying Johnny comes to Uncle Remus for consolation, a close-
up of his sad face simply dissolves into the image of Brer Rabbit, also in
a sad state – tied up by Brer Fox and Brer Bear who are about to roast
him. Yet the conclusion of this tale more emphatically links the
animated and live-action worlds, as Brer Rabbit, laughing at Brer Fox
and Brer Bear, throws handfuls of leaves into the air, and, through a
dissolve, those same leaves seem to bridge worlds, as they come down
all around a similarly laughing Uncle Remus who assures his listeners,
Johnny and his friend Ginny, that they too have a ‘laughing place’ some-
where. The film ends on a similar note, as Uncle Remus, Johnny, and
Ginny walk down a road, are soon joined by a variety of animated
animals – all of whom cast realistic shadows and interact with the live
actors – and eventually move into a landscape that dissolves into a
perfectly matched animated one, recalling the opening, and complete
with the naturalistic depth effects created by the multiplane camera.
The animated world, the world of the imagination, it seems, easily
opens up new space to those willing to shift their perspective or, as
Uncle Remus says, become ‘tuned’ to it, as the concluding transform-
ation from real to animated suggests that we are by this point.
However, the film clearly offers a kind of forced jointure, one we
are cast into like Uncle Remus’s fishing line or caught up in as with
Brer Fox’s trap, something constructed by the skill of the storyteller –
Uncle Remus – as well as by Disney’s skilled animators and tech-
nicians. The reflexive dimension of the narrative is simply inescapable.
The real spaces here – of far-away and trouble-bound Atlanta, of the
grandmother’s elaborate plantation house, of the meager cabins and
campfires of the black workers, of the poor white sharecropper’s
cottage occupied by Ginny and her family – are pointedly distinct
realms, separated by physical distance, by real-world troubles, by
social taboos, even by fences. And crossing those spaces, as Johnny
does when he ducks under the fence surrounding the bull’s pasture,
only invites trouble, in fact, nearly gets him killed. Song of the South
(1946), for all of its technical accomplishments, never quite manages
to reconcile these real-world borders with the boundary-busting spirit

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 Telotte Changing space of animation: Disney’s hybrid films of the 1940s 255

of its hybrid scenes and, as a consequence, for all of its ambitions,

never escapes the ghostly anxieties bound up in the different spaces
it depicts – never escapes reality itself. And as this film’s subsequent
history tells us, the studio’s efforts at boundary-crossing only invited
troubles for it.
Still, Song of the South does seem to be working out, if somewhat
unconvincingly, the essential Disney concern of this era and one not
far removed from the modernist project: to demonstrate that there is
another, more promising, world alongside our own, if only we could
shift perspective to see it. Not simply our own ‘laughing place’, it is
the space of the imagination, inviting us, in at least a nod towards the
avant-garde tradition, to compare its topography to that in which we
live – here shown as a world of fences, economic barriers, and cultural
boundaries, all of which the film invites us to challenge. And that
project continues in a film like Fun and Fancy Free (1947), although
it is approached rather differently, almost perfunctorily, as if Disney
had by this time begun to recognize how nearly impossible it was
becoming to mix that modernist impulse with its illusion of life
aesthetic, at least within a feature context. Despite the reflexive
framing scenes we earlier described, this film is, on the whole, far less
‘experimental’ than the hybrid types preceding it. And the critical
reception only confirmed that this formula was not going to work for
a changing post-war audience. In fact, Steven Watts (1997) character-
izes the response to this film as ‘outright hostility’ (p. 250), with the
reviewer for the New Yorker seeing it as evidence that, as with the
other package films, Disney seemed to be ‘determinedly aiming at
mediocrity’ (p. 21).
However, Fun and Fancy Free hardly merits that charge of ‘medi-
ocrity’. While it packages two rather conventional – and convention-
ally realistic – cartoons, it does so with that clever reflexive twist of
the animated Jiminy Cricket looking in on the live-action human world,
prodding us to reassess the normal spectator–spectacle relationship.
In fact, the film frames much of its ‘package’ with similar effects. To
introduce the first cartoon sequence, the story of Bongo the bear,
Jiminy makes his way through an apparent jungle, actually an indoor
plant display whose nature we cannot make out because we see it
from up close, and thus lack perspective and a sense of scale. We only
recognize it when, in long shot, Jiminy catapults himself from an
animated plant leaf into a hybrid scene of a real room and a shelf of
real books, whose titles he then inspects – titles like Misery for the
Masses and Anatomy of Melancholy – prior to launching into the
narration of a very un-Melancholy cartoon about the bear who
manages to escape from the gilded prison of his life as an exploited
circus performer. Following the second cartoon segment, the story of
Mickey, Goofy, and Donald who ascend a beanstalk to find wealth,
only to be pursued by an angered giant, another sudden spatial shift
occurs. As we return to the live-action party, Edgar Bergen, Luana

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256 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(3)

Patten, Charlie McCarthy, and Mortimer Snerd discuss the story, obvi-
ously missing its subversive implications, decide that it is, after all, just
a ‘figment of the imagination’, and thus reassert a boundary between
the real and the imagined, just as the adults try to do in Song of the
South (1946). But at that point, the roof of the house – now animated
– is lifted off by Willie, the cartoon story giant, who peers in, excuses
himself, and then heads off into the landscape to continue ‘looking for
a little mouse’, as he announces. With the boundary between animated
and live worlds literally lifted away, the film then closes with an
extreme long shot of the famous Hollywood sign blinking in the back-
ground and Willie, the animated figure, continuing his search in this
‘real’ environment, leaving us with a very different perspective on our
world: not just the narrative sense of how difficult it is to find freedom
or wealth here, but, given this new sense of space and the obvious
constructions of Hollywood, a stylistic reminder of how elusive the
real is, and how illusive all that the movie culture constructs for us
is as well. Certainly a clever ending and one consistent with the other
reflexive framing scenes here, it nevertheless feels a bit like a trick
that has too little connection to the two framed stories, much like
the opening images of Jiminy Cricket. It simply catapults us into a
hybrid world, forces us to acknowledge the relationship of real and
fantastic spaces, even as it allows that such connections are part of
an increasingly cinematized world.
Yet this acknowledgement may be the most important element of the
conclusion, since it obviously foregrounds the way in which all of these
hybrid efforts, in various ways, sought to mine that underlying appeal
of animation that O’Pray (1997) notes – the ‘thrill’ bound up in their
artistry. Despite that element of self-consciousness, these films also
have another sort of fallout that might shed some light on their relatively
weak or troubled receptions. For in different ways they also subtly
undermine another pleasure of the animated spectacle by reminding
us of a problem implicit in those different spaces, one made quite
explicit in the middle of Fun and Fancy Free (1947), as the animated
viewers – Jiminy and Willie – also call into question the substance of
our own space, thereby qualifying our satisfaction in a key part of the
animation experience. For O’Pray also points out that a ‘desire for
omnipotence’ is central to animation’s satisfactions, as it demonstrates
‘that the skill and virtuosity involved in form is supreme’ (p. 200). The
reflexive impulse here, however, ultimately threatens to empty out the
whole process of representation, to show it all to be a kind of game.
While this revealing of film’s own hegemonic power does recall
something of the modernist agenda, it also points to a sort of func-
tional paradox inevitably bound up in these films that many saw simply
as new efforts at approaching the real. Thus, while Watts (1997) sees
the hybrid films as evidence of Walt Disney’s ‘desperate search for
direction’ in the post-Second World War era (p. 250), I would suggest
that they are more a revealing gauge of his efforts at working out the

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 Telotte Changing space of animation: Disney’s hybrid films of the 1940s 257

apparent contradictions between realist and avant-garde trajectories.

However, once generally committed to a more naturalistic studio style
and to feature-film production, Disney was – and despite a number of
efforts – never quite able to find a formula for recouping that experi-
mental spirit, not able to map out its quite other type of space.

Notes
1 For an extensive discussion of the Alice cartoons, see Merritt and Kaufman’s
Walt in Wonderland (1993).
2 Numerous commentaries have chronicled the story behind Disney’s South
American projects, undertaken at the behest of the Office of Inter-American
Affairs. Among the most informative of those accounts are those provided by
Smoodin (1993, see especially pp. 138–46), and by Kaufman (1997).
Smoodin (1993) particularly pinpoints the problem on which most
discussions of both The Three Caballeros (1945) and the earlier Saludos
Amigos (1943) have principally focused, the implicit notion that
Walt Disney, a representative of the United States, could tour a foreign culture, come
to understand it in just a short time, film it, and then bring it back home with him,
all with the blessing and thanks of the culture he had visited. (p. 141)

That seems a rather harsh judgment, though, particularly since the film’s
focus on Donald as spectator pointedly emphasizes his consistently naive
perspective, his general lack of real understanding. The real focus, finally, is
on celebrating the variety of different cultures, which is commensurate with
the narrative’s development of and focus on different kinds of space.
3 Watts (1997) perhaps best captures the tenor of this criticism when he
describes Donald Duck’s actions throughout the film as ‘libidinous
shenanigans’ that suggested Disney might be losing touch with his core
family audience (p. 248).
4 Actually, this action was filmed in a parking lot at the Disney Studio, with
sand trucked in to suggest an Acapulco beach and secretaries and extras
serving as the Mexican bathing beauties. For an account of this filming, see
Kaufman (1997).
5 For a discussion of the assault on Disney’s illusion of life aesthetic and a
sampling of the various critical comments on the studio’s changing style, see
Waller (1980).
6 As Watts (1997) notes, though, Disney was well aware of the potential for
controversy with the Uncle Remus tales, long before any decision had been
made to do this project as a hybrid effort. He notes that, as far back as 1938,
Disney researchers had been put to work, ‘examining not only the Joel
Chandler Harris stories themselves but a great deal of supplementary
material’ in an effort to achieve authenticity while avoiding any possible
racial disputes (p. 278).

References
Brown, John Maso (1945) ‘Mr. Disney’s Caballeros’, Saturday Review, 24
February: 22–4.

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258 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(3)

Canemaker, John (2003) The Art and Flair of Mary Blair: An Appreciation. New
York: Disney Editions.
Deming, Barbara (1945) ‘The Artlessness of Walt Disney’, Partisan Review,
Spring: 226–31.
Kaufman, J.B. (1997) ‘Norm Ferguson and the Latin American Films of Walt
Disney’, in Jayne Pilling (ed.) A Reader in Animation Studies, pp. 260–8.
Sydney: John Libby.
Kracauer, Siegfried (1941) ‘Dumbo’, The Nation, 8 November: 463.
Leslie, Esther (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the
Avant-Garde. London: Verso.
Merritt, Russell and Kaufman, J.B. (1993) Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films
of Walt Disney. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
New Yorker (1947) ‘Disney with No Improvements’, 4 October: 21.
O’Pray, Michael (1997) ‘Eisenstein and Stokes on Disney: Film Animation and
Omnipotence’, in Jayne Pilling (ed.) A Reader in Animation Studies,
pp. 195–202. Sydney: John Libby.
Popular Science (1944) ‘How Disney Combines Living Actors with His Cartoon
Characters’, September: 106–11.
Smoodin, Eric (1993) Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound
Era. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Thomas, Frank and Johnston, Ollie (1995) The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation,
rev. ed. New York: Disney Editions.
Time (1945) ‘The Three Caballeros’, 19 February: 91–2.
Time (1946) ‘Song of the South’, 18 November: 101.
Vidler, Anthony (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern
Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vidler, Anthony (2000) Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern
Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Waller, Gregory A. (1980) ‘Mickey, Walt, and Film Criticism from Steamboat Willie
to Bambi’, in Gerald Peary and Danny Peary (eds) The American Animated
Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, pp. 49–57. New York: Dutton.
Watts, Steven (1997) The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way
of Life. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Wells, Paul (2002) Animation and America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
White, Timothy R. (1992) ‘From Disney to Warner Bros: The Critical Shift’, Film
Criticism 16(3): 3–16.

J.P. Telotte is a Professor of Film Studies in the School of Literature,

Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. He co-edits the journal
Post Script and has published widely on film and media studies,
including work on Disney animation. His most recent books are The
Science Fiction Film (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Disney TV
(Wayne State University Press, 2004), and the forthcoming The Mouse
Machine: Disney and Technology (University of Illinois Press, 2008).
Address: School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia
Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332–0165, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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