Animating the Science Fiction Imagination

Long before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded our movie screens in the 1950s, there was already a significant but overlooked body of cinematic science fiction. Through analyses of early twentieth-century animations, comic strips, and advertising, Animating the Science Fiction Imagination unearths a significant body of cartoon science fiction from the pre-World War II era that appeared at approximately the same time the genre was itself struggling to find an identity, an audience, and even a name. In this book, author J.P. Telotte argues that these films helped sediment the genre's attitudes and motifs into a popular culture that found many of those ideas unsettling, even threatening. By binding those ideas into funny and entertaining narratives, these cartoons also made them both familiar and non-threatening, clearing a space for visions of the future, of other worlds, and of change that could be readily embraced in the post-war period.

J. P. Telotte is Professor of film and media studies at Georgia Institute of Technology, co-editor of the journal Post Script, and author of many publications, most recently Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film (Routledge, 2016).

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction: Animation, Science Fiction, and the Modernist Spirit
Chapter 2: Flights of Fantasy
Chapter 3: Robots and Artificial Beings
Chapter 4: Alien Visions
Chapter 5: Inventions, Modern Marvels, and Mad Scientists

Postscript: New SF Images for a Postwar World
A Select Filmography of Science Fiction Animation
A Science Fiction Animation Bibliography