Date of Award
Spring 6-7-2016
Document Type
Honors Project
University Scholars Director
Dr. Jeff Keuss
First Advisor/Committee Member
Mike Hamilton
Second Advisor/Committee Member
Scott Kolbo
Keywords
animation, cartoons, disney, american, history, contemporary
Abstract
This project attempts to elucidate the connection between animation and preconceptions about appropriate age demographics in the United States. It endeavors to demonstrate that animation has primarily remained a children’s medium because of contingent contextual factors, rather than elements inherent to the medium, and that its evolution over time is proof of its merits as a medium. Through an exploration of the Golden Age of animation between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, as well as an exploration of animation between 1988 and the present, it uses various examples within film, television, and theatrical shorts to show limitations placed on the medium. These limitations caused the medium to be marketed towards children and to be perceived as being only for children, creating a paradigm in which more mature explorations were infrequent. Both the preconceptions and the consequences of the contextual factors that caused this remain to this day, but American animation’s history has provided evidence that these strictures are not inescapable.
Recommended Citation
Meyer, Andrew, "Animation or Cartoons: An American Dilemma" (2016). Honors Projects. 40.
https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/honorsprojects/40
Copyright Status
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Additional Rights Information
Copyright held by author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Comments
A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the University Scholars Program.