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Ub Iwerks' (Multi)Plain Cinema

Ub Iwerks' (Multi)Plain Cinema While pioneer animator Ub Iwerks has often been praised as a driving force behind the early success of the Walt Disney Company, his independent work has received scant attention. That relative omission from animation history seems curious given two key features of his cartoon work: an emphasis on gags involving protean, transformative effects – a characteristic often linked to avant-garde filmmaking; and his pioneering work on a multiplane camera – a device that would become crucial to a developing realist aesthetic in American animation. This article examines these features to situate his work in terms of American animation's shifting aesthetic in the 1930s. It suggests that we see Iwerks' cartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period between the avant-garde and an emerging realism, closely linked to the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema, and the relative failure of his films as indicative of an inability to negotiate between these different pulls. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal SAGE

Ub Iwerks' (Multi)Plain Cinema

Telotte, J. P.
Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal , Volume 1 (1): 16 – Jul 1, 2006
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Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
Copyright © by SAGE Publications
ISSN
1746-8477
eISSN
1746-8485
DOI
10.1177/1746847706065838
Publisher site
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Abstract

While pioneer animator Ub Iwerks has often been praised as a driving force behind the early success of the Walt Disney Company, his independent work has received scant attention. That relative omission from animation history seems curious given two key features of his cartoon work: an emphasis on gags involving protean, transformative effects – a characteristic often linked to avant-garde filmmaking; and his pioneering work on a multiplane camera – a device that would become crucial to a developing realist aesthetic in American animation. This article examines these features to situate his work in terms of American animation's shifting aesthetic in the 1930s. It suggests that we see Iwerks' cartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period between the avant-garde and an emerging realism, closely linked to the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema, and the relative failure of his films as indicative of an inability to negotiate between these different pulls.

Journal

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal – SAGE

Published: Jul 1, 2006

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