Animation, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Imagination

This essay surveys a curious absence in accounts of science fiction's cinematic development the numerous examples of sf-themed animation during the 1920s and 1930s. In this formative period when sf was finding a scant place in live-action cinema, with much of its appearance limited to serials, the sf imagination established a vigorous presence in the work of the period's key animation studios, all of which produced cartoons on the subjects that were then populating the new pulp magazines space travel, alien encounters, robots, fantastic inventions. Seen from the vantage point of a "conservative modernism," these cartoons both reflected and critiqued science and technology's presence in and influence on modern life, in the process affording the emerging sf genre a most appropriate and fertile ground in the decades before World War II.