| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Tom Sito, Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky 2006)

WRITING IN THE 1930's the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci evoked the hyper-rationalized, atomizing character of Fordism as the singular feature of modern Americanism. Gramsci's critique was especially prescient in its highlighting of the hegemonic implications of such standardized production beyond the industrial sphere in which the Model T and Mickey Mouse ostensibly constituted two sides of the same Fordist coin. In Drawing the Line, Tom Sito, a 30-year veteran of the animation industry and past president of America's largest animation union, Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists (MPSC), Local 839, crafts an appealing analysis of the heretofore undocumented tensions resulting from the production process of one of America's most enduring cultural media.

For Sito, "animation is the strangest of art forms" in which the imperatives of mass production and the mass market combine with the vicissitudes of the creative mind to "produce dreams by the yard."(47) Certainly one could see such a process as evincing a Fordism of the imagination, in which the individual creative consciousness is deconstructed into standardized parts and subsumed into the rationalized 'wholeness' of production. Although invested in the production of the absurd, animators have not found themselves exempt from the workings of capitalist production and have often turned to unionism as a means to protect their livelihood.

Much of Sito's analysis of animation unions follows an explicitly linear path, beginning in the 1920's with the first attempts at unionization of the nascent industry by the IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees) through to the present day labour challenges faced by animators contending with the effects of new technologies such as CGI (computer graphic imaging). Relying heavily on oral sources, Sito is especially effective at outlining the dire working conditions of early animators who laboured in conditions not far removed from the pre-World War I sweatshop. While such attempts at organizing ultimately proved futile in the politically conservative climate of the Jazz Age, the coming of the Great Depression and the comparatively pro-labour policies of the New Deal such as the 1935 Wagner Act provided the impetus for a much more vigorous labour presence. For Sito, the landmark strikes at Fleshcier studios in 1935, Disney in 1941, and the record twenty-eight week Terrytoons walkout of 1947, in their respective attempts to relate workplace grievances to larger issues of social justice, represented the high-water marks of animation unionism.

The seminal 1941 Disney strike was of particular importance because it witnessed the temporary eclipse of the increasingly corporatist IATSE by respectively the liberal Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG) and radical Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). While such a trend was seemingly beneficial in winning concessions for animators in the short term, its disastrous long-term implications became clear with the passage of the corporatist 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the 1948 Paramount decision (in which the Supreme Court declared the studio system to be in violation of anti-trust practices, thereby hastening the decline of the short cartoon) and the rise of McCarthyism and HUAC in the early 1950's. Like many of their contemporaries in the artistic and intellectual worlds, animators suddenly found that attempts at industrial democracy were constrained on almost all fronts by those wishing to purge American society of even the faintest progressive taint.

Following the general trend of American labour in the 1960's and 70's, animation unions, cowed by the ascendant conservative backlash and sated with the material rewards of neo-Fordism, eschewed issues of socio-economic justice and moved closer to a moderate liberal consensus. However, such complacency exacted harsh retribution when the corrupt, pliant unions of the late 1970's and 80's proved utterly impotent in the face of rising production costs, technological change, and widespread outsourcing which were beginning to engulf the industry.

The inability or unwillingness of animation unions to confront the "runaway production" (outsourcing large parts of the final production process overseas) of the late 1970's resulted not only from the general effects of the post-war labour economy but from specific contingences of the animation industry relating to issues of worker consciousness and corporate paternalism. (253) Although sensitive to the material economic imperatives which underwrote animation unionism, Sito employs an almost Thompsonian social analysis to argue that an artistic moral economy was also at work in this process. Like most workers, animators derived a strong sense of self from their labour, yet were unique in believing that the artistic nature of their medium set them on a plane exempt from the pedestrian realm of economics.

While labour historians such as Dan Rodgers and Lisa Fine have explored the nature of 20th century corporate paternalism in decidedly industrial settings, Sito's analysis of the process in the animation industry demonstrates the unique rhetorical devices employed to justify this ideology in an artistic labour context. Whereas modern industrial paternalism focused on producing a mass rationalized efficiency, paternalism in the animation context, while not totally dissimilar, often evinced a character akin to traditional guild craftsmanship with its attendant notions of apprenticeship and meritocracy. Studio heads and ex-animators such as Walt Disney, Don Bluth, and the team of Hanna-Barbera (pioneers of the 'runaway production' of the late 1970's) often made appeals to recalcitrant workers via the rhetoric of a common artistry, thereby weakening much of the overtly coercive character of corporate paternalism. Yet the ostensible absence of coercion along with the aforementioned autonomous 'artistic mentality' combined to prevent the development of a consistently oppositional unionism amongst animators.

Drawing the Line is a fine analysis of an intriguing aspect of labour history made all the more so by the author's obvious passion for the subject and its actors. Thanks to the nature of the subject matter, the reader is treated to a plethora of rare and humorous cartoons and photos which give the narrative a real human dimension. An appendix detailing the relevant, and disproportionately Canadian, Dramatis Personae, along with a glossary of technical industry terms is especially helpful to the animation neophyte. Moreover, like much of the now greying 'new' labour history, the book possesses a distinctly utilitarian political character, from which Sito clearly hopes current and future animators, as well as the public at large, will draw inspiration. In many ways this accessible book is a mea culpa on the part of the author (which stops short of the polemical), for what he describes as his initial ambivalence toward animation unionism. Written as "part history, in part a memoir and in part a personal reflection on my specialized field," (5) Sito brings a level of intimacy to his work which is rare in historical scholarship.

Yet to describe this book as a work of academic scholarship would perhaps be misguided. While admittedly making no claims to the contrary, Sito's work is of limited use to the academic historian due to its near total lack of engagement with the larger literature of labour and cultural history. Too often the anecdotal stands in for the analytical and attempts to place events in a larger historical context prove unsuccessful. Only superficial mention is made of the larger trends in political economy and cultural politics of the last 80 years (such as the commodification of leisure) which drove the mass production of animation that made unions necessary in the first place. Nevertheless, Drawing the Line provides an invaluable point of entry for professional scholars who wish to further investigate the intriguing field of artistic unionism.


PAUL LAWRIE University of Toronto

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