Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation

By Kevin S. Sandler

Book Overview

"A wide-ranging inquiry into an important area of contemporary scholarly interest, and also an engaging, well written and intelligently conceived collection." -Eric Smoodin, author of Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons From the Sound Era

Despite the success of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and their Looney cohorts, Warner Bros. animation worked in the shadow of Disney for many years. The past ten years have seen a resurgence in Warner Bros. animation as they produce new Bugs Bunny cartoons and theatrical features like Space Jam as well as television shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs. While Disney's animation plays it safe and mirrors traditional cinema stories, Warner Bros. is known for a more original and even anarchistic style of narration, a willingness to take risks in story construction, a fearlessness in crossing gender lines with its characters, and a freedom in breaking boundaries. This collection of essays looks at the history of Warner Bros. animation, compares and contrasts the two studios, charts the rise and fall of creativity and daring at Warner's, and analyzes the ways in which the studio was for a time transgressive in its treatment of class, race, and gender. It reveals how safety and commercialization have, in the end, triumphed at Warner Bros. just as they much earlier conquered Disney.

The book also discusses fan parodies of Warner Bros. animation on the Internet today, the Bugs Bunny cross-dressing cartoons, cartoons that were censored by the studio, and the merchandising and licensing strategies of the Warner Bros. studio stores. Contributors are Donald Crafton, Ben Fraser, Michael Frierson, Norman M. Klein, Terry Lindvall, Bill Mikulak, Barry Putterman, Kevin S. Sandler, Hank Sartin, Linda Simensky, Kirsten Moana Thompson, Gene Walz, and Timothy R. White.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813525381
• ISBN13: 9780813525389
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Great Book That Covers Topics Others Wouldn't Think Of

This is a great book for anyone who likes warner brothers animation. This book covers many interesting topics that you normally wouldn't think of. Some on the topics cover Gender Evasion of bugs bunny, African-American:Images and portrayal, temporary Disneyfication of Warner cartoons and fans verses Warner Brothers and even talks about the fans erotic fantasys (some people actually think of that ?)on the internet. It's a really interesting book and I really recomend it. It's not boring like others i've read. Each chapter is also written by a different author ( Kevin Sandler only edited them)so it keep it interesting.

Serious, but still fun

Over the last few years, academics have discovered the joy of writing about pop culture phenomena. Some (like the contributors to the book Enterprise Zones, a collection of papers on Star Trek) get lost in a fog of postmodernist critical/cultural theory, churning out abstruse and obtuse collections of quotations from French philosophers, ignoring as much as possible the text under study.Thankfully, the contributors to this book don't do that. They're writing some serious history and commentary, but the Warner Bros. cartoons remain the focus, not what Jameson said about what Derrida said about what Foucault said. More to the point, even when criticizing elements of the cartoons (as in the paper on representation of black characters), the reader senses that the writers are fans of the Warner Bros. cartoons, flawed though some may be. There's always the sense that, no matter how serious the discussion, this is ultimately about something fun.Oh, and the editor's comments in the introduction, about the recent dumbing down of the classic characters into friendly TV commercial shills and merchandise movers, is right on the money (so to speak).