Animating the Science Fiction Imagination

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.