A number of research sources have provided a variety of things to think about in my exploration of deeper levels to the fantastic. One thought provoking source was David Skal’s book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (Faber & Faber, 2001) where, among other things, he argued for a connection between horror films and Surrealism. Since I read that I have felt that this connection, as well as the influence of Surrealism in pop culture in general, is worth further exploration. I was therefore pleased to come across a book on this topic edited by Graeme Harper and Rob Stone, titled The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Wallflower Press, 2006). The contributors to this volume look at Surrealism in a variety of cinematic expressions, and one chapter that caught my eye dealt with the surrealistic influence in American animation in the early twentieth century. The chapter was authored by Van Norris of the School of Creative Arts, Film, and Media from the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. Mr. Norris spoke with me recently about the focus of his chapter, and his current PhD research.

TheoFantastique: Van, thank you for discussing your contribution to The Unsilvered Screen. How did you come to develop your interest in both American animation and Surrealism, and how did you connect the two in your research?

You’re welcome! I studied Classical animated forms during my undergraduate dissertation years back in the early 1990s, which in turn fed through the Masters programme completed in the late 1990s on animation aesthetics within American film and I’m currently completing a PhD thesis, ‘Drawing on the British Tradition’ on UK Television animation forms, that contextualises contemporary British social and cultural attitudes within mainstream settings and how these interact with extant ideas on comedy forms and narratives. Having long had an interest in how Surrealism is managed within mainstream cinema and throughout aspects of popular culture it struck me that many critics flirt with how these principles can be observed working in popular animation in a broad assumptive sense but often they seem to be perhaps more confident in discussing Surrealism separately and less specific or accurate when referring to the cartoons themselves in any detail – and indeed this occurs vice versa with animation scholars. What also is apparent when mapping surrealist impulses onto such works that the contexts are constantly shifting due to the nature of production circumstances, authorship situations etc so it is apparent that there is still much work to be done on how the form is read and misread in these contexts and I have to say this still all feels like just the beginning of moving towards a truly comprehensive understanding of how this is mapped out, historically, culturally, industrially and textually.

TheoFantastique: For the benefit of readers, can you define “Surrealism” as an artistic movement, and can you share your thoughts on how this came to be an influence in pop culture, including in animation?

Surrealism is a concept that, as The Unsilvered Screen highlights in each chapter, has become somewhat devalued and often misinterpreted in today’s culture. It’s a school of thought that seeks to discuss what lies beneath the surface of our reality (hence the ‘sur’ – meaning under) and expresses the dialogues of the subconscious, the hidden desires and feelings that we don’t express in our daily lives. It does so by using images represented through an adherence to photographic realism and placing them together in incongruous contexts or to produce a disturbing outcome. Andre Breton coined the term in his manifesto in 1924 and relied on a technique called ‘automatism’ by which he would detail unmediated, uncensored, unstructured thought onto a page. He deployed this tool to access what he saw as ‘the truth’ that lay beneath what he saw as the bourgeois construction that was ‘reality’. This unmediated approach to art construction thus offers up images that Breton felt should feed out of our dream landscapes and that then supposedly reveal interior narratives and produce ideas that should be, (if to be regarded as true surrealism) ‘shocking and disturbing’.

The fact that Surrealism has pervaded art to literature to film is hardly surprising. Contemporary culture has absorbed, appropriated and quoted so much of Andre Breton’s original conception that over the 20th century it’s become but one of Western society’s key background narratives. And the shifts in contemporary morality, the expansion of modern media and our late modern fragmentary take on visual culture have all contributed to a ‘flattening out’ and in fact a corruption what was originally an incredibly subversive form.

TheoFantastique: In your chapter you discuss animated cartoons that were used as “fillers” along with newsreels between double features at the cinema. It might be a surprise to some readers to think of these as serious art forms that, as you write, “responded to and articulated a range of complex ideas.” What types of cultural ideas were the animated features in the 1930s and 1940s responding to, and how did Surrealism play a part in that exploration?

Van Norris: In terms of American animation (and in the context of the chapter I’m thinking more about popular Classical forms of the 30s and 40s here) this has arguably always been a form that has flirted with what are in fact related types of dialogues, those which manage incongruous imagery, subversions of a given ‘reality’ and actualise internal desires through visual representations. This can be seen from the early works of J. Stuart Blackton through to Otto Messmer and his 1920s incarnation of ‘Felix the Cat’. Although due to the commercial nature of the form the degrees to how ‘shocking and disturbing’ these can be is obviously compromised.

The cartoon filler is also a form which has since its origins processed popular culture and replayed aspects of it in the public realm continually (see Messmer’s citation of Hollywood, celebrity, industry, the star-system and genre in the 1923 ‘Felix Goes to Hollywood’ for example). I think, using the Warners animation as a more detailed example, they were attempting to define an identity away from the monolithic success of the Disney ‘Silly Symphony’ shorts of the 1930s. In their ‘Looney Tunes’ and ‘Merrie Melody’ cartoons that emerged in the late 1930s they seized on the fact that popular culture, film, radio and literary references went down very well with their proletariat audience base. And often this went beyond mere quotation and moved into parodying items such as a then ongoing media-managed feud between broadcasters and radio personalities, Walter Winchell and Ben K. Bernie in Friz Freleng’s ‘Coo-Coonut Grove’ (1936) through to the compendium of references that mock contemporary values in Bob Clampett’s 1946 ‘Book Revue’ to Frank Tashlin’s 1944 ‘Swooner Crooner’, which is a cartoon that satirises both the entertainment industry through the presentation of a passive audience dominated by manufactured singers and, with the wry positioning of the Porky Pig character, the efforts of wartime industrial profiteers.

Now, animation is a form that crosses boundaries with cinema and art practice and, (like film itself), is preoccupied with continually transgressing recorded realities and thus makes it an obvious platform for the Surrealist. Importantly Franklin Rosemont also talks about how much impact artists like Salvador Dali had on the American psyche throughout the 1930s, whose own work was regarded by the original Surrealists as a somewhat bowdlerized take on the form that was dominated by commerce, self-promotion and was defined by a rationalisation, somewhat shorn of the original movement’s political intent. The Classical animators were all undoubtedly aware of this strand of thinking consciously and unconsciously and its no surprise that aspects of it informed their work. How much of it can be defined as truly ‘surreal’ is another question. And how this form has contributed to this corruption in terms is still another that requires a larger amount than 8000 words to fully assess.

TheoFantastique: How did Warner Brothers studios and their Looney Tunes draw upon Surrealism?

In terms of Surrealism much of Warner’s output dallied with the odd image or juxtaposition of incongruous ideas which appeared to be a stock in trade within Tex Avery’s early work before he left the company in 1941. Bob Clampett’s 1938 ‘Porky in Wackyland’ is perhaps the most celebrated cartoon of the period which explicitly allies itself to what appears a surrealistic register. I think of it as almost an untutored raw misreading of surrealism. In its attempt to push the boundaries of the form, (a preoccupation of Clampett’s) the short contains nods towards the popular misconception of surrealism that had entered the public sphere but also melded aspects of the absurd, (in itself a more nihilistic register) with the surreal by appropriating incongruous pairings of landscape details, using melted clocks in backgrounds and positing images of decay and death – yet in fact removing any potential deeper resonances. Through the combinations of naturalist, Absurdist, expressionist and cinematic grammar, in the flattening out of key surrealistic images and the fragmentary approach to narrative the film is in many ways an ironic, almost Lyotardian commentary on art practice, commerce and indeed popularised understandings of surrealism itself, which through time, cultural factors and simple geography was already moving away from the original Bretonian impulse. The aspects of the surreal here are posited as quotation. Its slickness and knowing quality mark it out with a kind of ‘distance’.

TheoFantastique: How did the Looney Tunes’s use of Surrealism compare with that of the Fleischer Brothers?

Van Norris: First Wave Austrian-Jewish immigrants, The Fleischer Brothers were making less polished shorts than Disney in the early 1930s but still were very highly regarded. These were animations that, too, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with popular cultural and mass audiences of the period. Often their works presented a slightly less ironic sense of knowing cultural quotation than exhibited by Warners. This process was often restricted to inserting jazz songs by Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong into narratives at odd moments and included bizarre unexplained appearances such as Frederic March’s incarnation as Mr. Hyde from Reuben Mamuolian’s 1932 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story in the finale of Betty Boop M.D (1932) – these are moments that jar and unsettle as much as operate as winks at the intended audience. The shorts also consciously and unconsciously referenced the values, mortality and the experiences of adult life in 1930s urban New York, they demonstrated a rougher, grittier, saltier aesthetic than Walt Disney’s folksy farmyard view of America and one which predicted the free-form cultural riffing of Warners.

Mark Langer refers to the pre-Hayes Code intervention ‘Betty Boop/Talkartoons’ shorts (1930-1933) as being pretty much all about “sex and death” and he’s right, in that whilst Clampett steers well clear of the really disturbing areas, The early Fleischer shorts are a miasma of distorted bodies, phallic objects, vaginal openings, fluid uncontrollable metamorphoses, inconsistent compostional sensibilities, dislocated sounds and all are contained within fractured dream-like narratives that exist as arranged sequences that appear as some kind of half-recalled afterthought. ‘Bimbo’s Initiation’ (1931) is an amazingly complex short which exemplifies this and replicates the dream state entirely through its subversions of space and time. Intriguingly it’s a film that is immersed in all sorts of Freudian totems that suggest acknowledgements around male performance anxieties and about becoming an ‘adult’ as much as any extension of what is permissible in terms of demarcating cartoon space. Like a number of films produced by the studio through this fertile period from ‘Old Man of The Mountain’ (1932) to ‘Is My Palm Read’ (1932) to the celebrated 1933 ‘Snow White’, it’s actually genuinely disturbing in places – which surely the pre-requisite of any surrealistic work. Clampett is more interested in popular culture while the Fleischers exhibit a more explicitly surrealistic approach. This is as much down to the haphazard ways they created their cartoons as it was their favouring of fusing a distinctly European approach to cartoon making to American industrial expectations.

TheoFantastique: In your chapter you also talk about the significance of Walt Disney’s animation, but he did not draw upon surrealism so much as his contemporaries. Where did Disney express Surrealism, and why did his expression of animation not draw upon it in greater ways?

Van Norris: There is something of a myth here, (and which I suspect the downplaying of Disney’s role within popular surrealistic animation in my own chapter in the book is adding to this!) in that the studio rejected this and other high art avant-garde practices. I think the rejection of a directly Bretonian register in such a commercial avenue would have had to have been inevitable as those ideas don’t really correspond with what Paul Wells refers to as the ”folksy Republicanism” that informs the studio’s overall ethos. However Disney experimented with limited/smear animations, abstract forms (which were tellingly rationalised beyond recognition in his 1940 ‘Fantasia’) and surrealism itself through his collaboration with Dali on the remarkable ‘Destino’ project began in 1945, but was never completed. All of this was laudable and certainly progressive in intent but inevitably appeared to be undermined by Disney’s own highly compromised nature as part artist and part business-man. Disney, like Clampett at Warners, seems happier to contain moments which conform to aspects of surrealistic practice (that occasionally could shock and disturb) within dream sequences, extreme moments and as contained within some space away from the universe in which his central characters operate. Which again points to this larger issue that often, as Rosemont points out, American art feels the need to quantify the irrational and the unexplained in terms of form and theme – that such a resolutely European idea as Surrealism inevitably would become transformed into something altogether less contentious.

TheoFantastique: Van, again, thanks for your discussion of an interesting topic. I hope it will give animation and Surrealism fans alike new things to think about.

Van Norris: Thank you.