How did ideas about evolution inspire the dreamworlds of early animated cartoons? What did the art of Walt Disney’s Snow White (1937) have to do with the American conservation movement? And what can Cold War science teach us about the style of postwar animated cartoons? With an eye to such questions, this talk explores the unexpected and overlooked ways that animators in the United States have drawn on scientific ideas about nature to imagine the fantastic possibilities of bringing drawings and paintings to life with motion picture technologies. In the process, Colin Williamson offers a way of thinking about how the history of style in popular American animated films—and related ideas about labor, craft, and creativity—is entangled with the history of science and discourses on the environment. 

Colin Williamson is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Cinema Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is also Associate Editor at Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. His research focuses on histories and theories of aesthetics in early cinema, animation and special effects, and scientific uses of film and related media. He is the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and a new book, Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science (under contract at University of Minnesota Press), which charts the overlooked impacts that the natural sciences and ideas about the natural environment have had on stylistic trends in mainstream American cartoons.