Animating the Science Fiction Imagination ISBN: 9780190695309 Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited Subjects: Film;
Long before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded our movie screens in the 1950s, there was already a significant but overlooked body of cinematic science fiction. Through analyses of early twentieth-century animations, comic strips, and advertising, Animating the Science Fiction Imagination unearths a significant body of cartoon science fiction from the pre-World War II era that appeared at approximately the same time the genre was itself struggling to find an identity, an audience, and even a name. In this book, author J.P. Telotte argues that these films helped sediment the genre's attitudes and motifs into a popular culture that found many of those ideas unsettling, even threatening. By binding those ideas into funny and entertaining narratives, these cartoons also made them both familiar and non-threatening, clearing a space for visions of the future, of other worlds, and of change that could be readily embraced in the post-war period.
J. P. Telotte is Professor of film and media studies at Georgia Institute of Technology, co-editor of the journal Post Script, and author of many publications, most recently Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film (Routledge, 2016).
