Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Cartoons
Chuck Jones parodied Wagnerian opera in What’s Opera, Doc? (1957). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
ent, more culturally appropriate, aesthetic to his films.
Marks and Jutrisa, though, like many artists working in
Eastern Europe, looked to the spareness and clarity of
modern graphic design, creating a maximum of suggestion
with a minimum of lines and forms.
Also, during the 1960s the Japanese animation
industry expanded its production specifically for the television
market, and series like Astro Boy (1963–1966)
debuted on US television. Echoing the popularity of
manga—mass-produced Japanese comic books and
graphic novels—animé of all kinds emerged in the postwar
period. By the early 1980s Japanese studios were
producing some four hundred series for the global TV
market, and by the early 1990s over one hundred features
were produced annually. Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira
(1988) was the breakthrough animé, introducing
Western audiences to the complex, multinarrative, apocalyptic
agendas of much Japanese animation. The works
of Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1941) (e.g., Nausicaa, Valley of the
Wind, 1984, Tonari no Totoro, 1988 [My Neighbor
Totoro], Princess Mononoke, 1999), Mamoru Oshii (e.g.,
Mobile Police Patlabor, 1989, and Ghost in the Shell,
1995), and Masamune Shiro (b. 1961) (e.g., Dominion
Tank Police, 1988, and Appleseed, 1988) that followed
competed with Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar in the
global feature marketplace. The work of Miyazaki and
Studio Ghibli has been particularly lauded for privileging
female heroines, complex mythic and supernatural storylines,
and moments of spectacular emotional epiphany
while still remaining accessible and engaging to the popular
audience. Japanese television animation, though
cruder in style and execution, has nevertheless had a great
impact. Pokemon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh! have all
proved popular, and their attendant collectibles, including
computer games and trading cards, have prompted
near moral panic, as children have invested considerable
time, energy, and money in them.
Animation production houses Filmation and
Hanna-Barbera continued to produce cartoons for
American television, and Disney, perhaps inevitably, initially
consolidated its place in the new medium with
Disneyland (1954–1958) and later variations like Walt
Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (1961–1972), which
recycled Disney cartoons, showing them on television for
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