Ryan Dunlavey

A fun overview of the history of mainstream animation. Walt Disney and his company suck up most of the pages of course, Hayao Miyazaki is pushed forward to represent pretty much the entirety of Japanese animation, and apparently nothing much happened anywhere else in the world. So sure, it has some shortcomings trying to reduce 120 years of animation development and progress into the same number of comic book pages, but I still enjoyed the new tidbits I learned and made a game of spotting all the animated characters used to represent real industry figures and tucked in around the edges (a lot go unnamed in the book, but I think I worked out most of them).

Anyhow, with a focus on the 1940s to 1990s, it's a nice nostalgia wallow for anyone like me who grew up watching cartoons on Saturday mornings during the '70's and '80s. Younger folks might be disappointed to see the last twenty years reduced to a cameo of Garnet and She-Ra walking arm in arm (which, yes, crossover please!).… (altro)