Animation America In The 20th Century

Animating America in the 20th Century

During the 20th century America faced many issues overseas, but during times of trial America continued to grow culturally and developed many new media. Throughout the 20th century new forms of media were slowly being produced throughout America, including animation. While there were many experiments during this time that ultimately failed animation grew in popularity very quickly. Animation slowly developed throughout the 20th century and encountered three eras, the silent era, the golden age, and the television/dark era.

Animation in America began during the early 1900s while the production of media was still very experimental. During this time moving picture movies had a lack of color as well as a lack of sound, therefore storytelling relied completely on visual cues. This period in both animation and any other form of American

By this time there is the emergence of many new concepts and techniques in animation such as color, sound, and feature length animations. While Walt Disney is mostly reliable for creating the golden age with his recognizable characters and techniques, there were other key players in the success of this time. Two of these men were Max and Dave Fleischer who help develope audio techniques such as synchronization in animation (“History”). Another animator of note was Paul Terry, creator of Terrytoons, he helped create memorable characters that were easily recognizable. The emergence of iconic characters in this time really made animation stand out to family audiences and the feature length nature of animations at the time allowed animation to be viewed as a medium for both adults and children (”Baker”). During this time the animation industry faced little to no adversity and expanded greatly, but like all golden ages it had to come to