Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between animation, avant-garde art and modernist criticism.

Focusing on the work of aesthetic and political revolutionaries of the inter-war period, Esther Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema. She looks afresh at the links between the Soviet Constructivists and the Bauhaus, for instance, and those between Walter Benjamin and cinematic abstraction. She also provides new interpretations of the writings of Siegfried Kracauer on animation, shows how Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's film viewing affected their intellectual development, and reconsiders Sergei Eisenstein's famous handshake with Mickey Mouse at Disney's Hyperion Studios in 1930.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prelude (p. v)
• Preclusion: experi-mental (p. 1)
• Zeros, dots and dashes: drawing and the european avant-garde (p. 33)
• Mickey mouse, utopia and walter benjamin (p. 80)
• Leni and walt: deutsch--amerikanische freundschaft (p. 123)
• Eye-candy and adorno's silly symphonies (p. 158)
• Siegfried kracauer, dumbo and class struggle (p. 200)
• Eisenstein shakes mickey's hand in hollywood (p. 219)
• Techne-colour (p. 251)
• Winding up: a flat ending (p. 289)
• Notes (p. 301)
• Select bibliography (p. 331)
• Acknowledgements (p. 338)
• Index (p. 339)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Once in a long while, a book appears that meets all the highest standards of scholarship. In the field of animation, Leslie's Hollywood Flatlands is that work. Obviously believing in a connections theory of history, Leslie (English and humanities, Birkbeck College, UK) links animation, avant-garde art, and modernist criticism. She brings in aspects of art history and the sciences of movement, sound, and color; reinterprets many scholars' and filmmakers' (including Kracauer, Eisenstein, Adorno, Benjamin) writings on animation; and focuses on a number of aesthetics and political revolutionaries of the interwar period. For this superbly researched book the author dug deep into many archives (particularly in Germany), resurrecting long-buried documents and correspondence, while also making abundant use of popular and trade press accounts. Amazing is Leslie's ability to wander so far afield, discussing Goethe and Newton, Disney in relationship to Hitler, Eisenstein, strikes, Soviet constructivists and the Bauhaus, and theoretical constructs in many fields. She blends these seemingly different topics into a coherent, interesting, readable whole. This groundbreaking volume must be in all visual arts, communication, popular culture, and film collections--in short, in the library of any institution that takes animation as a field of study seriously. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. J. A. Lent Temple University