29 outubro 2002

CULTURAS IN VITRO
Not a single cute deer in sight: Like many other art forms, animation has both an official history and a more interesting secret lore. For the standard, sanitized version of animation history, you can turn to any number of authorized biographies and studio brochures celebrating prominent producers such as Walt Disney or William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. But these men were Hollywood big shots who spent so much time negotiating with banks that they were rarely hunched over drawing boards.
If you want to know the real lowdown on 20th-century American animation, told from the perspective of the artists whose physical labour and demented visions actually went into the creation of cartoons, you should ignore the conventional corporate histories and turn to renegade comic-book artist Kim Deitch, who will be speaking at the University of Toronto tonight. Both in his new graphic novel, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Pantheon), and in his frequent public lectures, Deitch offers a refreshingly revisionist take on the history of animated films.