Hollywood Flatlands Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde

With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between animation, avant-garde art and modernist criticism. Focusing on the work of aesthetic and political revolutionaries of the inter-war period, Esther Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema. She looks afresh at the links between the Soviet Constructivists and the Bauhaus, for instance, and those between Walter Benjamin and cinematic abstraction. She also provides new interpretations of the writings of Siegfried Kracauer on animation, shows how Theodor Adornors"s and Max Horkheimerrs"s film viewing affected their intellectual development, and reconsiders Sergei Eisensteinrs"s famous handshake with Mickey Mouse at Disneyrs"s Hyperion Studios in 1930.

Esther Leslie is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London.