Or: Why the commissar shouldn’t vanish

“Truth is strange, stranger than fiction.”
William Makepeace Thackeray, The tremendous adventures of Major Gahagan
(Thackeray 1921, 1)

In spring 2008, a vociferous discussion erupted on the Society for Animation Studies’ mailing list on the subject of an extensive definition of animation. More technically-oriented explanations clashed with highly theoretical ones, scarcely finding a common ground between the variety of arguments brought forward. Strangely absent from the discussions, however, was the question of animation historiography, of an analysis of the processes by which our historical knowledge of animation is obtained and transmitted, helping in the definition of the object of inquiry.

And indeed, while there have been rather many histories of animation, so far only a few animation scholars have thoroughly undertaken to explore how historical developments relating to their study of animation are registered and chronicled. There are certainly well-worn, often formative paths of narration that so far characterise how history has been viewed and written in Animation Studies. Several examples come to mind: Giannalberto Bendazzi’s gargantuan, yet curiously Vasarian canonical work Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (Bendazzi 1994); Michael Barrier’s landmark, but deliberately re-narrating Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (Barrier 1999); John Halas’ influential, but very production-orientated framework Masters of Animation (Halas 1987); or Sergey Asenin’s Walt Disney: Secrets of a Drawn World (Asenin 1995), which, while in many ways insightful, is peculiarly unsuspecting of the difficulties of “oral history”.

These works, while all of them milestones in Animation Studies, to a certain extent miss the possibility of reflecting on the ways in which intrinsic as well as extrinsic factors influence the way historical conceptions are developed. However, this is certainly attempted in works like, for example, David MacFadyen’s book Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges (MacFadyen 2005) that draws on a large variety of sources and their analysis; it can also be encountered in Robin Allan’s Walt Disney and Europe (Allan 1999) that undertakes a laborious verification of sources to establish its main arguments.

This paper will endeavour to examine some aspects of this heterogeneous initial situation, posing the question of “how history has been and how it is written” (Breisach 2004, 4). A discussion that has been conducted in the discipline of history itself since in the 19^th century, Leopold von Ranke asked the question of “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (a question well-nigh untranslatable, as it not only asks for “what has actually happened”, but also for the metaphysical implications of what has happened) - especially as, thinking of Hans Belting’s “The End of the History of Art?” (Belting 1987), similar discussions have been launched profitably in other disciplines.

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