In “Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation” (Atlantic Monthly Press), Reid Mitenbuler recalls that flood—and points out that the vintage cartoons within it were often censored by later distributors in ways that robbed them of their original spice and sex appeal. Of the kinds of popular books that have proliferated in the past few decades—the little thing that changed everything (cod, longitude, porcelain), the crime or scandal that time forgot (Erik Larson’s specialty)—none are more potent than the tale of the happy band of brothers who came together to redirect the world. The genre runs from Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” through Jenny Uglow’s “The Lunar Men,” and Mitenbuler’s “Wild Minds” is an attempt to do the same for the history of American animation.
“Wild Minds” assembles its history with love and a sense of occasion. The chronicle that results, as Mitenbuler explains in a prefatory note, also appears at a moment when, for the first time in the history of the form, everything is available. Obscurities that in the past one would have waited years to find in a stray MOMA screening are now online. Even the lewd (though government-sponsored) “Private Snafu” cartoons, made for G.I.s during the Second World War and written by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, can be found at a touch of the YouTube tab. The act of pulling everyone together in this way is new, and significant. The peculiar excellence of “The Right Stuff” was not that it showed astronauts to the world but that it showed the astronauts as worldly. Wolfe explained that they were far from dim-witted test pilots: they knew what they were doing and what was being done to them. Mitenbuler’s larger aim is similar: to show us that the best cartoonists were not haphazard artisans but self-aware artists, working against the constraints of commerce toward a knowing end of high comic, and sometimes serious, art. The book’s governing idea lies in its heroes’ collective intuition that animated films could be a vehicle for grownup expression—erotic, political, and even scientific—rather than the trailing diminutive form they mostly became. A cartoon tradition that could seem child-bound, sexless, and stereotyped was once vital, satiric, and experimental.