Useful in the Abstract: Midcentury Modernism and Design in Postwar American Animation and Film

This dissertation explores the various points of contact between midcentury modernism and film, with a particular focus on postwar American animation. While acknowledging the explicit influences of modern art on the modern cartoon, I argue for a common set of theoretical and aesthetic concerns that animation shared with other fields involved in the larger project of midcentury modernism, including architecture and graphic design, as well as live-action cinema both within and outside of Hollywood. Design is thus a central term in this argument, extending across disciplines to express a set of ideas about a changing world in the wake of World War II. I frame this set of ideas particularly in terms of vision and a utopian project of using the visual and spatial arts to "retrain" the human eye, enabling it to perceive the chaos of postwar modernity more efficiently and more competently. The main tools in this midcentury modernist toolkit--- abstraction and simplification of the external world to minimalist elements of line, color, and shape---characterize these various branches of cultural production during the postwar period. This dissertation analyzes the specific work of the American cartoon within this larger design project, recasting what is often considered to be animation's mere appropriation of a general style as instead a serious and theoretically informed exploration of space, representation, and communication in dialogue with other fields of cultural practice. Throughout, I argue for the importance of the postwar American cartoon as a critically engaged and interdisciplinary medium that was in contact with design discourses in heretofore unarticulated ways. In addition, I propose a form of postwar cinematic modernism that supplements the field's current assumed trajectory from literature and theater to film; I advocate instead for an explicitly visual modernism that can be traced through discourses of postwar design. Ultimately, I propose an understanding of midcentury animation as a driver of design innovation and a key source of this visual modernism in the postwar period.