Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank

Abstract

Reviewed by: Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank Matthew Levay Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons. Hannah Frank. Ed. Daniel Morgan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. 273. $34.95 (paper); free open access at University of California Press Luminos (luminosoa.org). One cannot review Hannah Frank’s Frame by Frame without observing that it is a book marked by tragedy, specifically its author’s passing in 2017. That might have meant the end of the present volume—a lightly edited revision of Frank’s dissertation—had it not been for a few prominent advocates who saw it through to publication, even as they cautioned that, without much opportunity for revision, readers should consider Frame by Frame a work in progress. In his editor’s introduction, Daniel Morgan explains that the book “is basically the dissertation that Frank defended in August 2016,” and “not the book that she would have published,” as Frank had already begun planning extensive changes to the manuscript that she did not live to complete (xxii). Despite this warning, Frame by Frame is not a work for which a reader’s expectations must be tempered. In fact, Frank’s is a remarkably polished account of the material conditions underlying the Golden Age of American cel animation, focusing on Hollywood shorts produced by Disney, Universal, Warner Brothers, and Paramount from the 1920s to the 1960s and propelled by an incisive critical acumen that blends formalist, historicist, and ideological approaches with apparent ease. Her book is by turns provocative and careful, and offers nothing less than a wholesale reconceptualization of how animated cartoons might be understood not for the illusions of motion they create but as products of the uncredited artistic laborers, mostly women, who created them, and thereby shaped one of the twentieth century’s most prominent popular art forms in ways that have gone largely unrecognized. Frank begins with an elaboration of her method, an ambitious approach that examines animated films frame by frame, poring over individual cels rather than analyzing the continuous, projected sequence that gives a cartoon its final form. As such, she challenges established practices for viewing any film by lingering on seemingly trivial material details, cataloging obvious errors like blurred characters and missing limbs to more intentional time-saving practices like reused cels and Xeroxed lines. This minutiae, Frank argues, is significant in that it represents the handiwork of the anonymous laborers who made animation happen, their work as inkers, painters, and photographers being essential to the production of animated films yet never deemed essential enough for them to receive artists’ credit; by making them the focus of her study, Frank illuminates the otherwise unseen moments of contingency, accident, and even boredom that, despite their apparent inconsequentiality, reveal the material realities of film production within an industry built on unequal divisions of labor. “By arresting the animation of animation,” she explains, “I aim to return cartoons to how they were made: one drawing at a time, one photograph at a time, one frame at a time” (2). Her focus is thus “on the incidental and the accidental, the qualities of the image that resist being understood as the product of creative intention: the textures of a graphic mark, the patterns of paint splatter, jarring collages, swirling specks of dust” (6). What Frank locates in these moments of chance is, paradoxically, evidence of individual agency that emerges within a form whose communal nature makes it impossible to gauge just who those individuals were or to understand their efforts as artistic in their intention. In other words, by looking at an animated cartoon frame by frame, we see evidence of the individual within the collective, the labor within the art, in a manner that frustrates efforts to separate them. Frank’s examples are compelling and carefully chosen, and each chapter follows a consistent mode of looking at cel animation frame by frame that productively leads to different, though related, conclusions. Her first chapter, for instance, theorizes the animated film as a sequence [End Page 448] of documents that functions like montage, and brings together examples as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Winsor McCay, Robert Breer...