Das Maus

In the beginning was the line: squiggling merrily, unpredictably across the frame before arranging itself into an abstract geometric form or perhaps a stick figure doing acrobatic tricks. In those nearly prehistoric cinematic days, just after the start of the 20th century , animation entranced the eye and opened the mind, particularly the eyes and mind of a handful of largely Germanic, largely Marxist, artists and intellectuals. While the wider intellectual community debated whether the cinema--that vulgar and hybrid form--could ever become an art in any customary sense, this alert minority saw in these little drawn films unique expressive possibilities, a logical (and often charming) extension of the modernist revolution gathering force everywhere else in the visual arts.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Esther Leslie's "Hollywood Flatlands," a dense, often fascinating, sometimes frustrating history of the theoretical arguments surrounding the development of animation, is the extent of this discussion. You will be amazed at the sheer weight of the words that Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer--Marxists all--placed on the quivering shoulders of Mickey Mouse. They found more to think and write about in him and his pals than they did in the whole infinitely larger history of live-action features, which they mostly despised.

They argued persuasively that animation is "absolute" cinema, owing nothing to any preexisting art and something that could only be accomplished in movies. This set it definitively apart from dramatic films, which drew their ruling conventions from 19th century novels and the melodramatic stage.

Moreover, animation in its early days was strictly two-dimensional, like much of modernist painting. There was no attempt in movie cartoons to create the illusion of the third dimension: depth. As Leslie says, the experimental artists of the early 20th century "found that cartoons touched on many things they wished to explore: abstraction, forceful outlines, geometric forms and flatness, questioning of space, time and logic .... "