The First World War: British Animated Cartoons and Their International Contexts

Abstract

This chapter explores British animation’s international relationships up to and including the First World War. The lightning cartoon act originated in Britain before being exported globally, playing a crucial role in the development of animation as a distinctive form of filmmaking and placing British traditions on an equal footing with animation innovators such as Blackton and Cohl. The First World War stimulated growth in the production of animated cartoons in Britain, but it also allowed American film interests to become dominant in the British market, and in turn established the aesthetic criteria by which British animated cartoons were judged. The intermedial qualities of British cartoons were denigrated at that time and by later historians, a position that is reassessed here.