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Colin Williamson, "Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Close your eyes. Exhale.
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Feel your body relax and let go.
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Of whatever you're carrying today.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
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Dr. Colin Williamson
And breathe.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
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- [00:58]
Dr. Colin Williamson
1-800-Contacts.
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- [01:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I got a message that our flight.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
To confirm our credit card info. Wait, I got a security alert from McAfee. It flagged that message as a scam.
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Colin Williamson about his book titled Drawn to Nature, American Animation in the Age of Science, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025. Taking us deep into the world of anim animated classics like Fantasia, for instance, from Disney, and helping us see that there's obviously a whole history there in terms of, in that case, obviously the Disney company in terms of art and animation and comics. But there's also a whole history in biology, in nature, in even physics and geology, and that there's a whole kind of extra set of influences to some of these iconic drawings that we may not be aware of, but thankfully we will be because now we have this book and we're gonna, I think, have some fun talking about it.
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Dr. Colin Williamson
So.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So, Colin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to chat a little bit.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I am as well. But before we get too far into the book, can you introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book. What sorts of questions are you asking and how did this project develop?
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Yeah, so I'm a film historian by training. I'm also an assistant professor of cinema studies at the University of Oregon out here in the United States. I think broadly, I work on European and American film history. I specialize though in around three fields, so early film history, animation studies and histories of science in the cinema. I tend to be really eclectic in those interests though. So as you make your way through the book, you're going to see my brain on display making connections across disciplines and things of that sort. So that's probably the research profile that I work with the book Drawn to Nature. So that's the most recent book that I've been working on that came about through some research that was related to my first book, which came out about 10 years ago now. That book was called Hidden in Plain Sight. And in that earlier project I was looking at these kind of obscured intersections between histories of special effects and the history of science. So related to Drawn to Nature, but, you know, different area of research. And as part of that project. So the earlier one I was writing about, in one chapter, I was writing about a post war science filmmaker whose name is John Ott. And he contributed to a series of popular science what we call nature documentaries made by Walt Disney Studios. Those films were part of a series called the True Life Adventures series. They ran in the 1950s, mostly 1948 to around 1960. And in looking at John Otto, I was thinking about writing a book about those films in particular because they combine science, filmmaking and special effects and anim. That was going to be the follow up book to the first one. And I was doing some research at the Disney Archives on the True Life Adventures. I came across a series of drawings for the animated musical fantasia from 1940, which you had just mentioned. And the drawings were similar to biological studies of plant cells. And being familiar with Fantasia, just an animated musical, I was really confused about why Disney animators were exploring scientific ideas. Fantasia was a film that was not about science. It was about art and mythology and music. So I started chasing this kind of science Fantasia connection. And it seemed pretty rich because I was working on the True Life Adventures series. And I thought, well, maybe this is a bigger book about Disney and science and maybe Disney's relationship with the natural world. And as I do with a lot of my research, I just started, you know, following rabbit holes. So the further I got into that topic of trying to figure out science and Fantasia, the bigger it got. I kept finding these unexpected connections between popular animated cartoons. So animated cartoons made for the purposes of entertainment, connected to the sciences. And I started recalling these examples that I had filed away in previous research of early animators who made it into drawn to nature, like Windsor McKay and the Fleischer brothers, who were, you know, involved in exploring scientific ideas, especially ideas about nature in their cartoons, but aren't typically thought about in those terms. And the more of those cases that I kind of assembled as part of this early research, the more I started thinking about why American animators in particular, have been interested in science. So all these examples exist. What is going on? And if we understand what's going on, how might that help us think about the history of animation differently? So a couple of things for background to the significance of doing that for me was the fact that in American animation history, cartoons are typically understood as forms of mass entertainment and art, Right? So that's the Fantasia mode. Questions of science are not typically part of the conversation that we have around American animated cartoons. And I wanted to know what the history of science could teach us about those cartoons, right? So cartoons like Fantasia that apparently have nothing to do with the sciences, but are, in fact, very much in conversation with them. So that's where the book kind of took off for me, of trying to think through what this archive of this history of science could teach us about things, you know, that don't typically get connected to that.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a very helpful introduction to the book. Thank you for that beginning. Is there anything further we want to say about the literal starting point of the book, the actual title itself? Right. Drawn to Nature can mean many different things. Is there anything else you want to kind of throw in as additional sort of context and goals for the book?
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Just that, you know, titles are the bane of my existence. Maybe. My notes are full of things that I'm trying to think through all the time of how to sell projects and whatnot. But that title ended up being a play on words. So animators make cartoons using medium of drawings, right? So paper and pencil, ink, oftentimes paint and cellular sheets. And in the cases that I was looking at, the animators also seem to be attracted to scientific ideas of nature. So I was thinking of Drawn to Nature as a kind of tendency of animators to be interested in animating scientific ideas helpfully in a medium that involves drawing. But behind that. So, you know, it's fun play on words, but behind the play is like a pretty important question for me. And I think, for the field of animation studies, which is why American animators have been interested in science. Right. So is there, if I could break down some more of these questions, is there an affinity between drawn animation and the sciences that might be driving animators interests? Right. So like, is there something about the medium that draws animators to the sciences? Right. Is there something about nature that animators have found to be really interesting because they work with drawings and, you know, what's the significance of that connection, the medium of drawings and, you know, how scientists think about and understand the natural world. So fun title, but there's a lot going on, I think, in terms of this idea of attraction. Right. So why animators are drawn to that field.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, when we talk about attraction and sort of someone's interest being engaged, that doesn't necessarily mean like attracted, necessarily in a positive way. Right. Like you can be intrigued by something because you're worried about it. Right. Or you can want to know more because you're like, ugh, I don't know, kind of uncertain what's going on here. So when we're talking about attraction, I think it's worth emphasizing that it's not just sort of, oh, this is super cool. Like, that's part of it. But there's some fear and uncertainty elements in this as well. And you talk about this early in the book around kind of fears of industrialization as being relevant to understanding early 20th century animations.
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Yeah. So great connection there. I think it's really important to note that American animation in those early decades of the 20th century was a product of industrialization. So the cinema, you know, broadly, the cinema was an outcome of 19th century innovations in science and technology. It was a kind of scientific and technological apparatus. And it became very, very quickly a site for people to think about the changing landscape of industrialization in modern life in the United States, globally. But my focus here on the United States, I'll speak specifically about. So if the cinema was itself a kind of industrial output, animation was immediately part of that too. And in the United States, the changes that industrialization had kind of initiated were pretty uneasy. People, you know, people were really excited about the future possibilities of a world that was, you know, being really dramatically shaped by science and technology. Right. So there's this kind of optimism, especially if you follow science fiction, Right. These are the kind of the polarizations of science and technology is that people are positive about the future possibilities of it, but they're also really nervous about the impacts of industrialization on things such as, you know, Their bodies, their minds, how they experienced the world, how they related to each other, right? So industrialization did a lot of things to people broadly that raised a lot of concern. And there's this kind of tension in the early 20th century American context between, I think, the idea of industrialization, right? So science and technology promise a kind of progress, and then there are the realities of industrialization, right? So the ways that industrialization creates disorientation, things like alienation or violence, right? And early American animated cartoons reflect this tension. And the kind of. The way that I frame it in the book is a kind of nervous excitement about modern life. So I use the case of an early animator named Windsor McKay to start the book. And his cartoons are famous for celebrating speed and movement and machinery. So much, very much a celebration of industrialization. And the cinema for Windsor McKay, as with a lot of early filmmakers, is folded into that celebration. So the cinema is a kind of modern machine capable of doing wonderful things. The tension, though, and this is to your point about nervousness and fear, is that in McKay's animated cartoons, like a lot of American animated films and the cinema generally, these cartoons are constantly on the verge of going out of control. So there's a lot of chaos and anarchy and delirium. And Those qualities in McKay's cartoons express this kind of widespread sense that industrialization and modernization were kind of outpacing people's abilities to keep up with the changes. And that outpacing created a lot of anxiety about, you know, the promise of industrialization. But for the most part, and I think this is key, you know, throughout the. The story that the book tells, early American animation tends either to celebrate industrialization or at least to promote the fantasy that the chaos of industrialization, right? So McKay's kind of chaotic cartoon worlds and whatever fears that it might be raising could be controlled. So in Windsor McKay's case, he typically featured himself on screen as an animator who could kind of stabilize and restore order to the chaos of his kind of industrialized cartoon worlds. And in many cases, the chaos was bracketed off or kind of written off as a bad dream. So there's this kind of fantasy of being able to control the fears of industrialization that animators tapped into and kind of helped support very early on, and that persisted throughout the history of much of American animation.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to see this kind of so early in the history of animation and this interaction with industrialization and sort of ideas of out of control, because, I mean, I think our brain does go straight to Fantasia and that's you know, an additional element that's like, oh, yeah, that's worth remembering that that was there too. So thank you for giving us that kind of beginning chronologically. If we're thinking then about animations that seem to kind of more directly be about nature. Right. The title of the book again, Drawn to Nature. Is this thing about industrialization then, like, irrelevant to that? Is that just sort of a telling us what's the beginning of animation and then we go into nature? Or is what you've just told us about also related to these animations that might be more obviously about nature?
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Oh, that's really, really good point. Yeah. There are some things that I have to juggle in the book. Right. There's multiple components of a story about how people understand the natural world in the 20th century through Cartoo cartoons, through art. I will clarify very carefully that the two are actually deeply interrelated. So industrialization and this idea of being drawn to the natural world, it's very common. And this was one of the motivations for doing the book and one of the reasons that the questions of the book exist. Is it very common to think of nature as something that's separate from industrialization? This is a very longstanding kind of nature culture divide in Western thinking. But in the American context in particular, the two have always been wrapped up in each other. Nature has always been wrapped up in questions about modernity and modernization and science and technology. And we can think generally about critiques of the impacts of technology on nature. That's a pretty long standing conversation in American history that stretches back to how people imagined the North American wilderness as a natural place in relation to civilization. We could also think of celebrations of industries like ability to control nature. American progress, industrial progress, is typically about the exploitation and control of the natural world. And if we think specifically about science. So the focus of the book, much of the story of science in the 20th century that I am working with is the story of scientists being able to control nature through science and technology, producing knowledge about it, controlling by solving its mysteries, or, you know, science in relation to industry. And the idea that scientists and industrialists could harness nature's powers typically, you know, in order to advance the progress of modern life. Right. And this is, this is a core backdrop, but also kind of thread throughout the book is that if that's the, the interrelationship between nature and industrialization in the United States, when animators, especially in the first half of the 20th century, were what I'm calling drawn to nature, it's because they Were very similarly interested in using nature to test what they could do with technology. Right? So the technology of motion pictures and of animation. And I'll just keep going with Windsor McKay a little bit here because he's a good kind of origins point for the idea of the book. He was famous for developing this squashing and stretching cartoon style, right? The rubber band elasticity that maybe we're very familiar with thinking about cartoons.
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Dr. Colin Williamson
His cartoon figures were very much about how animation could transform in endless variety. And he borrowed the squashing and stretching motif from the visual culture of Darwinian evolution, which at the time was reimagining nature as a world in kind of constant transformation. So in Darwin's world, species are kind of evolving continuously and nature is capable of producing, you know, an endless variety of living things. And in McKay's cartoons, that scientific idea of nature is kind of folded into or subjected to a discourse of control. So the. In his films, the animator is this kind of figure who uses a modern machine, right? So this industrial apparatus, the cinema, to make the movements of nature do whatever he wants them to do. So in the process of kind of rehearsing this idea of control, he asserts the power of industrialization over nature. That's the way that I'm rereading Windsor McKay. And this is one of the ways that nature and fears and optimism about industrialization kind of held together in the history of animation that I map in the book. So very much interrelated and through these cartoons being worked out and these debates.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Around science and technology and what could be done, what should be done, what maybe shouldn't be done. These are, as you've been describing, clearly, debates happening within early animation. But you also discuss in the book that, for example, if we look at the 1920s in the early 20th century, these are things being discussed kind of more broadly in US Society at that point, it's not just the animators off by themselves asking these kinds of questions. So can you tell us about kind of this moment and why these were relevant topics and how cartoons were considered very much a part of these discussions?
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Yeah, sure. So I think another important thing to keep in mind is that early American cartoons, and by early, typically film historians, we mean from like the 1890s through what's called the silent period of the 1920s, like most forms of, like, art and cultural production, those cartoons were responding to changing ways of life. Right. And science and technology in the early 20th century were undergoing very tremendous transformations, and they were transforming very publicly. So it makes sense to see cartoons taking up ideas about changes that people were thinking and talking about more broadly in American society. The 1920s, to your point in particular, were very remarkably vibrant if we think about periods in the history of science. And just to give you a sense of a couple of the key points of discussion at the time, something that you, Miranda, are more fluent in as a backdrop, World War I had just proven at this moment, so the 1920s, that science and technology and their roles in industrialization could modernize warfare in ways that were previously unimaginable. So the human costs and environmental costs of that conflict were staggering. Right. And drew a lot of discussion and debate in the interwar period about things like, you know, is science good, Right. Is it like an agent of progress if it was responsible for things like chemical warfare and mass death? Right. So the status of society, like science, in American society was very much up for debate in that particular moment because of that. That conflict on top of that. So this is how the scientific community's transformations are becoming very public. Charles Darwin was having a kind of Renaissance in the 1920s. Darwin's writings on evolution go through cycles from the 19th century into the early 20th. And in the 1920s, they were experiencing this kind of renewed wave of interest in the United States that was primarily driven by interest, I would call it a pretty insidious movement to popularize eugenics, which was using new research in genetics, specifically heredity. And Darwin's idea of survival, of the fit, is to kind of try to control evolutionary change through practices such as, like segregation and sterilization. And that eugenics movement was experiencing pretty widespread popularity and public debate in the United States at the time. So if we think as a follow up to World War I, should science also be used to justify racism and social engineering and things along those lines? Right. And then on top of this, there was Albert Einstein. So Albert Einstein was working in the early 20th century. By the 1920s, his theories in physics were starting to draw a lot of attention from scientists and the public because they offered pretty radically new ways of conceptualizing essentially the cosmos. But they were incredibly difficult, if, like, relatively impossible for most people to understand. And there are, during the 1920s then very public debates about Einstein's contributions to physics. And those coincided with this huge movement at a national level to get the American public to basically buy into this idea that science was key to progress. And so science is being debated. And the push was to get people to accept that science was critical to something like building out America's national identity as a superpower. And if that's the case, then how do you convince the American public, if science is up for debate at this time, that it is actually necessary for national identity? And as all that is happening, you start to see that cartoons are reflecting the changes. So the ways that the wider public is thinking about science during this time. And in the book, in the 1920s section, I'm thinking specifically about these changes in relation to a famous cartoon series called out of the Inkwell, which was made by New York based animators named Max and Dave fleischer in the 1920s. And the fleischer brothers were responsible for developing a very popular cartoon character named Coco the Clown. And in each episode of this series, Coco springs to life from the animators inkwell. So where the artists draw their ink and then he goes on adventures, kind of wreaking havoc on the animator's world. And it's not something that gets talked about widely, but the Fleischers were involved in making popular science films during and after World War I, and they made some films about evolution and physics in the 1920s. And what I do in the book is I trace how the Fleischer brothers interests in scientific ideas about nature and these very public debates informed what they did with Koko the Clown. So the Inkwell cartoons are not a series about science, but it looks very different when we think about them in relation to their interest in the animators interest in science. To the extent, as I demonstrate in that section of the book, looking at Koko's movements in relation to the history of science, you start to see that the ways that the cartoon figure moves are actually in conversation with ideas about eugenics and physics in the 1920s. And the idea for me, and hopefully for readers, is that Coco, at the level of how the character is designed, is a kind of animation of scientific ideas that are not commonly thought about in relation to the cartoon. So animators are absorbing kind of energies that are in their milieu and then performing those ideas in their cartoons. So part of the project then becomes demonstrating that kind of circuitry between the wider popular discourse and how cartoons are actually functioning during this period.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting, these interdisciplinary links that you're making here. So thank you for explaining the aspects of the history of animation that we perhaps don't usually think about. That I think now lets us turn to the aspects that we do usually think about. So I know we've mentioned Fantasia a few times kind of as a reference point. I want to make sure we actually properly talk about it though, because you. You do discuss in the book how some of these ideas that you've just been telling us about get brought into Disney. Obviously, Fantasia is the most famous, I think, for many people, but of course, Disney has loads of things going on. So can you tell us a bit about kind of the interaction of some of these concepts in this particular context?
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Dr. Colin Williamson
Yeah, you're reading the book and my approach to it very much in line with how it was, how it developed. So Fantasia was the centerpiece of my thinking and it becomes the center of the book. So a lot of the ideas that I develop, you know, in previous and following chapters pivot on Fantasia as a case study, but also as this kind of nexus for all the ideas that both interest me and help me tell the story. And it's significant to think about the fact that Disney's relationship with the landscape of science and technology in the 20th century was very different from the. So from the Fleischer brothers before or Windsor McKay, especially from the 1920s through the 1940s, so the period of what we call kind of golden age animation. In the United States, specifically for Fantasia, Walt Disney and his studio were known for cartoons that celebrated an older, traditional or conservative pastoral vision of nature. So they're animated. Cartoons prior to Fantasia typically are like flights into a pre industrial world where nature is kind of held up as something that's pristine or untouched and exists kind of in harmony with the non human world and sometimes with the human world. So we could think of things like Snow White, if you're familiar with Snow White. Snow White has a very harmonious relationship with woodland creatures in the forest. Bambi from 1942. So after Fantasia is another good example of this idea that the natural world could be harmonious, but humans intrude on it. Right. And there's an effort to balance that harmony again in that film. By the time that Fantasia was released in 1940 Disney had developed this kind of popular image as having an affinity with the natural world, one of Walt Disney's personal interests as a person, not just the studio, although we conflate the two often. Walt Disney's personal interest was in the Rite of Spring. So this was a 1913 ballet and music composed by the Russian artist named Igor Stravinsky. And Disney related that, like the composition, when he first heard it, gave him visions of the story of the origins of planet Earth and the evolution of life. And it's very important, I think, to keep in mind that Walt Disney in particular, and Disney Studios are very careful about the stories that they tell. So we have to kind of take these anecdotes and recollections, I think, is part of a larger marketing strategy that's significant. So that when we think about, like, in the 1930s, when Fantasia went into development, Disney was crafting this idea of the studio's relationship with the natural world at the time. This is not a coincidence, though. At the time, in the 1930s, scientific ideas about origins and evolution, what we broadly call the, like Natural History of Earth, were very popular, both in the cinema and popular culture more broadly. So Fantasia came out of this moment of people thinking intensely about the history of Earth. And the film offered Disney an opportunity to bring that popularity together with his personal interest in natural history. Fantasia as a film broadly, was conceptualized as a series of cartoon vignettes set to classical music. So the idea of Fantasia aligned pretty well with this idea of animating Igor Stravinsky's score for the Rite of Spring and then combining that with the natural history interest that Walt Disney had already had. All that made a lot of sense. The story is that Disney wanted his version of the Rite of Spring to be, quote, unquote, scientifically accurate. So he invited scientific experts to help his animators animate things like the formation of the Earth, the evolution of cellular life deep in prehistory, and very famously, the extinction of dinosaurs. And he wanted his animators to be doing that according to leading scientific theories at the time. So they worked with an astronomer named Edwin Hubble, very famous astronomer Barnum Brown is a very famous paleontologist, and another very famous biologist named Julian Huxley to do a kind of accurate representation of scientific ideas of the origins of life on Earth. The appeal, right in Fantasia, in the segment of Fantasia, that appeal to science was partly a marketing tactic, and the collaborations with scientists were, like, relatively thin. Disney wanted Fantasia to be a film that would ultimately convince American audiences, global audiences, that animated cartoons were Series, like, were a form of serious high art, if I could frame it in the ways that Disney would want it framed, not lowly comic and vaudeville forms. So what he did was he used the cachet of scientific expertise to elevate his studio's animation as producer of animation art in the 1930s and 1940s. But beyond the kind of marketing strategy, what's really significant about this is that the Rite of Spring segment of Fantasia was designed to showcase the studio's new animation style. So as part of Disney's vision of animation as high art, the studio was promoting a version of what we call animated realism. And that realism involved making cartoons move like things in the natural world move. Right. So things in nature move unpredictably and spontaneously. And Disney wanted cartoons to look as if they were not made by human hands. He wanted them to look like they were moving spontaneously on their owns, as if they were moving naturally. So he was trying to use the Rite of Spring to sell this idea of animated realism as a new stylistic endeavor. And the scientific story of natural history in Fantasia was useful for that. So that story is the story of spontaneous movements and formations of things like matter and life on the planet. And when Disney animators set out to visualize that in Fantasia, they ended up using scientific ideas of nature's movements to kind of test out the idea of realistic movements in animation. Right. So that's the. The kind of cyclic nature of these interests of being drawn to nature is that Disney's Rite of Spring was a way of testing out realism by using scientific ideas about how things move in the natural world.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is a really interesting way of thinking about Fantasia. Thank you for explaining kind of how we can use this lens of science, of technology to look at this very iconic output. So definitely really interesting there. But of course, Fantasia's not the only thing animation being produced in this sort of moment. We're talking, obviously, if we think about global events, kind of early Cold War things going on. So when we're talking about matter, as you just mentioned, there's the sort of, oh, look at all this new science happening, but there's also the, oh, no, there's atomic weapons now. Right. Like, that's a whole element to being able to think about kind of particle physics and stuff like that. So how do we see those sorts of things coming up in animation and cartoons.
- [33:37]
Dr. Colin Williamson
Yeah. In the mid century moment for American animation in particular is very fascinating for that reason. Disney as a studio is famous for kind of fleeing from modern life into these kind of, you know, fantasy Worlds that protect and insulate audiences from the realities of things like global conflict. Right. So in the kind of mid century moment that I outline in the book, I turn to a different set of cartoons. Because Disney was working with this pastoral vision of nature in the early decades of the Cold War, American animation, say, beyond Disney was experiencing something like a stylistic revolution. Um, and in the book, I chart the ways that this stylistic revolution kind of mirrors the revolution taking place in science. So I'll start with some cartoon stuff and then work toward like Cold War particle physics. Right. Cartoons in this post war, early Cold War moment were moving very intentionally away from the idea of animated realism that Disney had developed earlier, trying to showcase animated realism with Fantasia. A lot of animators in the early Cold War period rejected that idea. Idea, the one that Fantasia had offered American audiences. And they began experimenting pretty widely with kind of abstract and simplified animation styles. So what you see in, you know, from the immediate post war period, 19, mid-1940s forward through the 1960s, is that cartoons become significantly more pared down. So they start to really emphasize two dimensionality, flatness, and what we call kind of a cartoony style, by which we mean simply that cartoons become less realistic. Cartoon characters don't move as if they're lifelike. They move like squashing and stretching animated drawings. And that big shift was driven by a studio called United Productions of America, or upa. And UPA was formed by several ex Disney animators, most famously by John Hubley, Zach Schwartz and another animator named David Hilberman, who had left Disney Studios after a very infamous strike at the that studio in 1941. To develop this new animation project through United Productions of America. And the UPA animators developed a style that we call, well, the UPA style, which was essentially premised on this idea that if you strip cartoons down to their basic design elements, so if you get rid of all the detail and lifelikeness that Disney had crafted for the animated realism in the 30s and 40s, you could make it possible to visualize very abstract ideas and phenomena in very accessible ways. Right. So you could simplify cartoons, and in simplifying cartoons, you could communicate complex ideas. And in my book, I detail how the this UPA style was in conversation with ideas in atomic science, which was experiencing, you know, a pretty intense moment following World War II and the scientific endeavors that, you know, contributed to that conflict. In the early Cold War period, scientists were promoting the idea that the physical universe could be understood as consisting, like cartoons, of basic design elements. So atomic structures, forces and energies become the kind of the point of focus for Cold War science. And those basic design elements cannot be photographed, but in the context of animation, they can be drawn very easily enough by animators, right? So if I think about, like, Cold War physics, being interested in things like the force of gravity or the nature of time or, like, the shape of the universe or like the structure of atoms, right? Those are not things that you can visualize through photography and film, but animators could step in and visualize it because the medium of animation has this of abstract flexibility to it. And as scientists were turning increasingly toward thinking through those abstractions, like the atomic world, animators began to think scientifically about how to design their cartoons, right? In kind, sometimes explicitly, by engaging in, like, the representation of atomic science, scientific ideas, but also using those ideas to imagine different ways of animating figures and spaces and movements, right? So as Cold War science kind of makes the. The cosmos more abstract, cartoons start to become more abstract in kind as a way of kind of making sense of that scientific moment.
- [38:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to see those interactions again, Right. The science is changing a lot from where we started in the early 1900s, but the ways that we see these kind of interactions and the like intrigue and also fear sort of keep being intertwined as we go through the century, which is really quite interesting to kind of see those continuities over time. But speaking of continuities, as I was reading the book, I admit there was one section where I was like, okay, I'm with Colin on the interdisciplinary. That's one of the reasons I picked the book. I like that kind of thing. This is all very interesting, but have we gone on a tangent? Like, have we taken interdisciplinarity sort of off in a different direction? When I got to a chapter in the book that wasn't about an animator per se, it wasn't about Disney. It was about a physicist who works on lasers, which in and of itself seemed quite interesting as I read the first few sentences of the chapter. And of course, by the end of it, I was like, okay, I see what Colin is doing here. But for our listeners who have not yet read the book, do you want to explain why you have a chapter on a physicist and her work on lasers?
- [39:27]
Dr. Colin Williamson
Yeah. Thank you so. Well, there are a lot of reasons to it. One of them, and I'll walk through them carefully with you, but one of them is to, I think, elicit the kind of response that you had of feeling like, this is a really unexpected move that we're Making in a story about science and animation and then realizing that it does make sense. Right. So kind of an intentional disorientation to get readers to think a little bit outside of the box. Part of that choice also happened by chance. So the book, the book is very intentional, but there's a lot of, you know, unexpected, like, happenings that, that come out of doing archival research. And Garmire was one of those happening. So as a little bit of context for. For her work, she's a laser scientist. And in the 1960s, she experimented with using lasers to make art. So she made these abstract images, still images and moving images using animated light. And I had encountered her experiments while I was researching early animations relationship, oddly enough, with a performance from the 1890s known as the Serpentine Dance. So as part of the kind of deep dive into animation and science that I was doing early on, following the Fantasia stuff, I started getting really interested in this Serpentine dance, which was developed by an American artist named Loey Fuller. And that dance involved creating abstract, transforming images out of huge silk veils. And Louis Fuller plays a very prominent role in all the cases that I examine in this book. She is this kind of original figure who created this animated dance. And a lot of the forms that she created, animators, had picked up on throughout the 20th century and recycled. And I found in thinking through, like Elsa Garmeyer's experiments and kind of expanding them, that a performance she had Contributed to the 1970 World's Fair in Japan with an organization called Experiments in Art and Technology, was in homage to Loy Fuller's Serpentine Dance. And I, early on, I filed that away as a very interesting connection that this laser scientist who made experimental art in the 60s was in conversation with Loy Fuller from the 1890s. And I thought, well, I'll do something with that someday. And when I was in the early stages of writing Drawn to Nature, Garmire was not part of the book. I was on a humanities fellowship at Rutgers University in the United States, and I had mentioned Garmire as part of a seminar. And someone in the history of science there pointed out that Garmier's laser experiment seemed to gather all the strands of the history that I was mapping in the book, at least the conceptualization of the book into a kind of form of experimental art that does not appear in histories of animated cartoons. And the more I thought about that, the more I realized that she was in fact, like this unlikely but really fitting part of the story. So I had really wanted to work on her and didn't think that it was going to be a part of the book, and then realized that it was one of the ways that it made sense for me to end the story of the book. So the specifics of this is that Garmeyer used animated laser light in the 1960s to kind of intervene in ideas about controlling nature in science and art, primarily by offering this kind of ecological vision that she was developing of collaborating with the natural world, that science should be a form of collaboration rather than exploitation. And she was drawing, both intentionally and unintentionally on the earlier animators in the UPA's Cold War animation movement. When I interviewed Garmire about her work in the 60s and 70s, I discovered that she was, somewhat unknowingly, also in conversation with all the ideas that I mapped from Windsor McKay through the Fleischer brothers, Disney's Fantasia, and then the Cold War animation stuff, broadly like thinking about the changing ideas of animation and scientific control that had unfolded over the first half of the 20th century. She was in conversation with Nat, but mostly thinking about some experimental animators who kind of haunt the book, experimental animators like Jordan Bellson and John Whitney and also an earlier animator named Mary Ellen Bute. And she was really happy to learn about how connected her experiments were with the history of animated cartoons. And I was happy to think that maybe this does fit, right? That she is this kind of a piece of a story that she didn't even know that she was a part of. And I end the book partly with her, partly, I think, because she makes unexpected sense in that story. She kind of just gathered a lot of my ideas together in these really amazing artworks that she had produced. But I also, to my original point, wanted to get readers to think differently about the history of animated cartoons. Even saying cartoons limits what we are talking about, right? As drawings that get photographed into films that get screened as squashing and stretching stories. Right. And I wanted readers to see how early Cartoons by Winsor McKay are connected in pretty meaningful, if even unexpected ways to, like, experimental laser art in the 1960s. Animation as a world is very small. So there are, like, unintentional and intentional synergies across, like, historical animations and animators, forms that people inherit and recycle, sometimes without knowing it. And I want those connections to invite readers to think differently about, like, what counts as animation history. Right. So whose stories should be told and how should we tell those stories? And in what context does it make sense to write about Elsa Garmire in relation to Winsor McKay and Fantasia. Right. And I really wanted the book to be an opportunity to kind of model a way of thinking, of inviting ways of connecting things that don't typically get connected. So if it feels tangential at first, it is intentionally tangential to get people to understand that the connections are there if we think about telling the story a little bit differently.
- [45:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
See, this is why I found the chapter very exciting, because that's exactly the sort of thing I look for in books on lots of topics is kind of connecting things that we may not think to connect, but as soon as we do some really interesting things, things come out of it. So thank you for explaining the purpose of that chapter and the thought that you put into it as a perhaps final question on the book. Given that that chapter, for me, was a pleasant surprise. I'm wondering if you had any surprises in putting all of this together. Anything you want to share as a final comment on the book?
- [46:11]
Dr. Colin Williamson
Yeah, I think. Well, a couple of things came out of it, but I think I was very pleasantly surprised that the core idea for the book ended up being bigger than what I had imagined. Right. So it was very helpful for me to think, well, I'm going to write a book about Disney and Disney gets talked about a lot. And then that became something else. Right. And I did not expect to find the connections that shaped the book in its final form. And that is, I think, a wonderful thing about archival research and the values of kind of letting research materials talk to you instead of trying to fit things into a narrative. Right. This bottom up approach of allowing the connections to present themselves and following them wherever they go and then seeing what happens there in the process. I would say what was most surprising that stayed in the book was Windsor McKay's debt to Darwinian evolution. So I was fascinated by Garmire and Fantasia, but Windsor McKay, I had always been fascinated by his animation style, especially his transforming contour lines. And there are a lot of ways that I and other folks in animation studies have gone about interpreting those lines largely by looking to disciplines like art history or the history of comics and animation theory. I did not expect to find that his animated lines, like look the way that they do because they were in conversation with scientific ideas about species evolution and the movements of cellular matter. That discovery of the possibility that science could have informed those lines really opened my eyes to how important it is to embrace new methods in archives to those. To being open to those connections. That you also found pleasantly surprising with Garmire, because doing this can totally transform what you think you know about the things that you study. Right. So this was a really important moment for me to kind of defamiliarize the. The stories that I have been told and that I had thought about telling about American animation. And that largely came from a reorientation through Windsor McKay early in the project.
- [48:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Archives definitely can offer up all sorts of interesting things if one sort of, as you said, kind of lets them speak. So I'm curious whether you're back in the archives now. Is there anything currently on your desk you want to give us a sneak preview of back in the archives?
- [48:31]
Dr. Colin Williamson
Yeah, everyone told me, you know, you finished the book, you should take a breather. And before the book was proofed, I was already onto some new things. Right now, I think it's a new book. I'm working on a project. So the title, back to the original question about Drawn to Nature title, Right. The title of this new work that I'm tinkering with is Cartoon Geographies. And I'm building on the theme of science and nature and Drawn to Nature, but pivoting to questions of geography and the environment, both of which are related to the Drawn to Nature book and kind of spun off because they didn't quite fit the question of science. And right now I'm looking into specifically how like, changing ideas of real space and place in mid century America shaped how animators constructed cartoon space. Cartoon space is not typically thought about in terms of physical reality. It is artificial and wonderful and fantastic. And right now I'm looking at how cartoon backgrounds, which have also largely been ignored and seem disconnected from physical reality, are actually encoded with animators experiences of the changing places in which they lived and worked. So working again with this kind of shadow history approach of the things that we don't think about in cartoons, right, backgrounds, but also how backgrounds are connected to space and place. And the kind of the origins and core component of that project right now are the Roadrunner cartoons, Warner Brothers Roadrunner cartoons from the 1950s, which are about highways in the American Southwest. And I'm starting to dig through some new archives to try to figure out how those cartoons in particular are related to the urban landscape history of the American west and Los angeles in the 1950s. So digging through city planning records and transportation records, photograph and film archives of how they built highway systems in those areas, and then tracing how those changes in real spaces and places are actually inscribed on cartoon backgrounds that don't seem like they're connected to those places at all.
- [50:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Again, connecting things that we may not think are connected. So that sounds intriguing. Best of luck with the archives there.
- [50:48]
Dr. Colin Williamson
Thank you very, very much.
- [50:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Drawn to American Animation in the Age of Science, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020. Colin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:04]
Dr. Colin Williamson
Thanks for having me. This has been a sincere pleasure.
- [51:20]
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