Gender and Cartoons from Theaters to Television: Feminist Critique on the Early Years of Cartoons

Introduction

Cartoons are painted, phantasmagoric worlds. Their use of metaphor, icon, archetype and symbol makes the unimaginable imagined; cats play jazz bass, dogs strum banjos, hippos and alligators dance ballet – symphonies of suspended disbelief. In this revisionist reality, the viewer offers no resistance to heeding a talking doorknob’s words of wisdom or being miffed by the malicious intentions of a flower; ¹ and, as such, bears no grievance to a cross-dressing rabbit’s kiss on an unsuspecting hunter. ² From cinema screen to television programming, cartoons’ consistent ability to entertain children as well as adults has made them a mainstay of popular culture media.

This article discusses the social critique that originated with cartoons’ theatrical beginnings that were met with substantial praise from the intellectual and art community of its time. The early years of this new media form’s consumption easily welcomed a woman director, such as German animator Lotte Reiniger. As the US moved from a country with a few scattered nickelodeons in 1905 to nearly 20,000 movie theaters during the 1920s and 1930s (Butsch, 1990:,136), there was no notable resistance from theater audiences towards fluid female representations or lack of gender binary enforcement; the compulsive coding for cartoon gender presentations had not yet been established. Although there were examples of successful women directors and animation producers, an exploration into the massification of the medium reveals its role in the marginalization of women as underpaid and unrecognized labor. Gender bias was common labor practice in the major studios, offering opportunities to trained male artists, while relegating women to the lower paid positions of inking and painting.

This article also explores the industry’s creation of a compulsive gender coding associated with the animated female form. Disney’s pedagogy and gender coding set the stage for the princess master narrative that has come to be associated with animated women; young, thin, demure, attractive, orphaned heroines and their cute animal friends who passively await rescue from an unknown prince. This image fitted into Disney’s feminine triptych, perpetuating heteronormative gender coding in the form of the princess, the witch and the fairy godmother. To compete with the overwhelming appeal of the symphonic Disney style of sentimental and cute, rival Warner Bros. animators transformed their cartoons into a cacophony of the surreal (Cholodenko, 1991; Putterman, 1998). Their irreverent weirdness, featuring homicidal and sardonic characters, was admitted to be an intentional opposition to Disney (Wells, 1998: 63; Wells, 2002a: 49). This expanded the portrayal of women into the ‘madonna–whore’ duality. Whereas Disney portrayed its young women as conservative and beautiful damsels, Warner Bros. portrayed them as sexualized broads and dames (Perea, 2011: 69). These feminine characters’ gendered demarcations were shown through sexualized attributes such as breasts and curves, as well as feminine clothing, hairstyles, and long eyelashes. Although Warner Bros. women differ from Disney in their sassy attitude and overt sexual appearance, the message remains the same: women exist as the male object of desire. Disney’s damsels, like Snow White and Cinderella, reinforced domestic gender roles whereas Warner Bros.’ sarcastic and sexy dames, like Petunia Pig or Bug Bunny in lingerie drag, reinforced women’s objectification and, at times, like the girl cat being chased by the boy skunk Pepe Le Pew, violence against women.

An important exception to these portrayals is the girl cartoon series Little Lulu, created as a comic strip by Marge Henderson and produced as a cartoon by Fleischer-Paramount (1943–1947). Little Lulu comics and cartoons presented a smart and sassy little girl, an example of the audience willingness to consume a popular culture product with an empowered girl lead. Little Lulu was a theatrical girl cartoon in the 1940s that would later, as most theatrical cartoons, be recycled as a syndicated US television cartoon in the 1950s and beyond, demonstrating that girl cartoons were easily consumed by men and women as well as boys and girls. As cartoons left the theater and entered the home, they also entered the genre of children’s television. Recycled theatrical cartoons were sold inexpensively to stations in syndication nationwide and aired as children’s television programming. The same cartoon intended for the adult theater audience now became coded by the industry as children’s television programming, based upon the media form of animation. With the introduction of more television sets in homes, the use of limited-animation style allowed made-for-television cartoons to proliferate, created specifically as children’s fare. Starting in the late 1950s with cartoon shows such as Huckleberry Hound (1958), Quick Draw McGraw (1959), The Flintstones (1960), Yogi Bear (1961), The Jetsons (1962) and many more into the 1960s and 1970s, Hanna-Barbera Productions dominated US television cartoons and, as such, the portrayal of gender in US cartoon programming. Television cartoons had the opportunity to shift the gendered portrayal, but children’s television was populated and controlled by men; women continued to be marginalized in the workforce and girl cartoon characters were not considered a priority; no girl cartoons were created.

Animation beginnings: Women and gender representations

In early cinema, as live-action silent films grew in popularity, so did the silent cartoons. Film technology developed quickly and soon animators were presenting around the world. The animation industry was competitive and international. German animator Lotte Reiniger is one of the first women to gain notoriety in animation with her short The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart (1919), featuring her unique style of paper cut-out animation. Her cartoon was successful and profitable in Europe as well as in US theaters. While the first feature-length animation was El Apostal (1917), by Argentinian director Quirino Cristiani, it is considered a lost film since no copies have survived (Bendazzi, 1996: 1). As a result, the title of oldest feature-length animated film commonly goes to Lotte Reinger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). As a media form, cartoons had been produced as comedy and gag humor, and Reiniger took a risk creating a feature-length cartoon based on the story of the Arabian Nights. The recognition of the theatrical success of her shorts allowed her feature film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival to critical and popular acclaim (Moritz, 1996: 1).

Soon there were cartoon stars, animated characters that brought in theater viewers on their own stardom. ³ Among the early ones was a girl dinosaur as the title character in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). Created by US animator Windsor McCay, Gertie was a lovable character widely identifiable by audiences nationwide who ‘were awed by the dinosaur’s lifelike movement’ (Lenburg, 2009: 1). In the surviving prints, one can see that there are no gender signifiers other than being addressed as a girl – she could easily have been a boy character. Gertie is playful and puppy-like’; nothing about Gertie as a character is reflective of her gender other than her name and pronoun usage. A unique example of this era is the gender fluid titular cartoon character in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1916). Over 200 Krazy Kat cartoons were produced from 1916–1940 (Lenburg, 2009: 34). The cartoon’s popularity was based on the fandom of Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip, whose title character seemed to waiver between female and male pronouns, sometimes in the same strip. A common plot point was Krazy’s love interest in Ignatz, a mouse that often resorted to violence to resist Krazy Kat’s romantic intentions. Ignatz would throw bricks at Krazy’s head and Krazy would interpret them as love letters. ‘In an era when books depicting homosexuality and gender nonconformity could lead to charges of obscenity, Krazy Kat featured a gender-shifting protagonist who was in love with a male character’ (Bellot, 2017). This fluid female representation in Krazy Kat and lack of gender binary enforcement in Gertie the Dinosaur did not stop audience consumption; they were both financially successful cartoons. The compulsive coding for cartoon gender presentations had not yet been established.

When Walt Disney’s cartoon Laugh-O-Gram Studio went bankrupt in 1923 he moved to California and was financially rescued by producer Margaret J Winkler, who was interested in his series Alice in Cartoonland (1924–1927). These were silent films starring a live action girl actor surrounded by superimposed cartoon images, a real girl escaping the constraints of reality by entering the fantasy of an animated world (Finch, 1975: 19). The Alice in Cartoonland series’ financial success was for the most part due to Margaret J Winkler. She is recognized as the first woman to produce and distribute animation films, such as the very successful silent era cartoon, Felix the Cat, as well as Krazy Kat and Fleischer films (Lenburg, 2009). This recognition, however, is partly due to the lack of notice given to other women who went unrecognized. One such example is Margaret Bray, John Randolf Bray’s wife. John Bray had many successful cartoons, including the series Colonel Heeza Liar (1913) and Goldwyn-Bray Pictographs (1919) with over 50 cartoons in 1920 alone (p. 27). Animation historian Conrad Smith recounts how John Bray went into Windsor McCay’s studio to steal his animation process and then patent it himself in order to profit off other animators. ‘When Bray’s wife, Margaret, saw Paul Terry’s first animated cartoon, she promptly told him he would have to pay royalties to the Bray studio for the rights to process’ (Smith, 1980: 11). Margaret Bray clearly played a hand in the company’s endeavored success yet is not formally recognized as anything other than ‘the wife’. Margaret Winkler, on the other hand, is recognized outright as a distributor, as she should be, although even this recognition is at times shrouded. In his encyclopedia of American cartoons, Jeff Lenburg (2009: 18) refers to Margaret Winkler as MJ Winkler, clearly missing the opportunity to recognize the role of a woman pioneer in early animation. Although this may have been an unintentional oversight, Lenburg includes her husband’s full name, Charles Mintz, and refers to her brother as Mintz’s brother-in-law George Winkler. ⁴ Margaret Winkler’s production, distribution, as well as editing of the Alice in Cartoonland series brought Walt Disney out of financial ruin and fostered the financial stability needed for him to form his new animation studio in 1923, the Walt Disney Company. After giving birth in 1926, Winkler retired and left her husband Charles to run the company. Soon after she left, the Alice series was cancelled and Disney was encouraged by Mintz to create an animated series with a male character, the successful Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (1927–1928). When Mintz’s distribution outlet partnered with Universal Pictures, he decided to claim ownership of Oswald and reduce Walt Disney’s share of the profits. Disney left Oswald to Mintz and created his new star, a mouse that he wanted to name Mortimer but that his wife, Lillian, an animation artist, instead convinced him to name Mickey; ⁵ thus Mickey Mouse was born (Barrier, 1999: 49).

Gender bias – off screen

Lillian Disney was an inker on the Alice in Cartoonland series (Finch, 1975: 21). Bell et al. (1995: 107) observe that ‘the hands of women, painting and transcribing the creative efforts of men, performed the tedious, repetitive, labor-intensive housework of the Disney enterprise.’ Cartoon production of the era was dependent on teams of animators. Ink, paint, fill, line, and color, were all separate workstations, with the biggest salary separation between them and the animator directors (Deneroff, 1987; Leslie, 2002; Wells, 2002a, 2002b). These budgetary constraints on the medium shaped its new construction. Animators standardized the assembly-line production of cartoons by breaking down different jobs and different salaries on the logic that one could work one’s way up to animator and be able to perform all the tasks in between (Deneroff, 1987: 2); women were rarely offered this opportunity. A Disney help-wanted newspaper ad of the 1930s illustrates this gender bias: ‘Walt Disney Wants Artist: Walt Disney, creator of Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies, offers exceptional opportunities to trained male artists. Write for particulars, giving age and occupation.’ ⁶ Women were restricted as a matter of studio policy as stated in a 1938 Disney employee handbook:

All inking and painting celluloids, and all tracing done in the Studio, is performed exclusively by a large staff of girls known as Inkers and Painters. This work, exacting in character, calls for great skill in the handling of pen and brush. This is the only department in the Disney Studio open to women artists. (Barrier, 2007: 229)

This gendered labor division was common practice in the studios, greatly affecting women’s financial stability within the industry. Top animators and art directors on average were paid about $500 per week, inbetweeners $20–$22 per week, while ink, paint, fill, line and color, the jobs women mostly held, were all $12–$15 per week jobs (Leslie, 2002: 210). These lower-paid positions were often the only entry women had into the animation industry:

At the time, most women in animation were confined to working in such tasks as inking, opaquing, timing, and matching: they might hope to rise to a managerial position within these ranks, but opportunities to climb up to the status of inbetweener (beginning animator) or beyond were almost nonexistent. (Deneroff, 1987: 2)

In 1933, Lillian Friedman became the first woman animator in the United States, drawing for Max Fleischer Studios (Lenburg, 2009: 694), followed at the Walter Lantz Studio by Lavern Harding in 1934 (Peary and Peary, 1980: 196). ⁷ Friedman was soon joined at Fleischer’s by Lillian Oremland ⁸ and Edith Vernick, who earned half the salary of her male counterparts and only $1 per hour more than the lower-ranking employees serving under her (Deneroff, 1987: 5). In all, these women were an exception to the male-dominated industry. The labor exploitations led to a strike at the Fleischer studio in 1937 and later, in 1941, at Disney. At the Fleischer strike, animation historian Leslie Cabarga (1980: 204) recounts the involvement of three feisty underpaid women workers:

The police broke up another noisy demonstration outside the Fleischer studio’s building on July 3 by arresting Ellen Jenson for felonious assault, biting and kicking an arresting officer on the left arm, and Helen Kligle for kicking and scratching Elizabeth Howson, a loyal employee. Seven men were also arrested.

With the US entering WWII, budget cuts caused the imposition of mass layoffs. Men animators feared the lesser-paid women from the paint and ink department would be upgraded, replacing men animators at a lower cost; this did not happen (Leslie, 2002: 208).

Cartoons’ master narrative shapes gender

The role of Disney Studios in shaping animation as an industry is difficult to overstate. While it has often been contested whether cartoons are lowbrow children’s fare or avant-garde expression, Disney has never faltered to position itself as a valuable, traditional, American icon (Wells, 2002a). Early Disney cartoons like Steamboat Willie (1928), Mickey’s sound debut, and the Silly Symphonies (1929–1967) series garnered considerable notice from art critics and scholars alike (Finch, 1975: 33).

Disney received creditable attention in academic and art-related periodicals like the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and also enjoyed wider dissemination in general interest and cosmopolitan magazines like The New Yorker, as well as the established news and entertainment industry publications. (Wells, 2002a: 2)

Walter Benjamin collected press clippings on Disney and Mickey Mouse from the mid to late 1930s. In 1935, the first version of his renowned essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’, ⁹ in a section entitled ‘Mickey Mouse’, he articulated his analyses of cartoons as an art ‘which takes fragmentation and disintegration into its laws of form, making clear how constructed not only it is but also the social world – ripe for transformation’ (Leslie, 2002: 122). Benjamin’s praise for Disney’s cartoons changed, however, upon the release of its first feature film Snow White (1937) whose realistically drawn narrative form brought moralistic values and sexual repression, along with gender normative coding to the cartoon form. Benjamin claimed Disney cartoons had turned into a regular part of the bourgeoisie system for the middlebrows (p. 121); this conformity had also occurred previously with Disney’s Alice in Cartoonland shorts as Cary Elza (2014: 20) explains in her article:

Early on, Alice saves the day repeatedly but, as the series progressed, she often has to be rescued herself … An early turning point comes with Alice and the Three Bears in late 1924, the tenth episode of the series … the bears capture Alice, trap her in a bag, and tie her to a log on a conveyor belt in a classic damsel-in-distress scenario. Before the obligatory buzzsaw at the end of the line chops her in two, though, Julius [the male cat] comes to her rescue.

As the Alice in Cartoonland shorts gained popularity, the lead girl character seemed to lose agency. As Elza (2014: 20) points out:

In the last scene [of Alice and the Three Bears], Alice says, ‘My HERO’, then kisses [Julius] on the mouth as the film ends, the heart that appears above their heads, in addition to the drops of sweat and/or tears emanating from their entwined forms, exemplifies Alice’s capitulation to a traditional gendered scenario, which contrasts her behavior in the earlier shorts.

Theodor Adorno resonated Benjamin’s critique of Disney by presenting Donald Duck’s slapstick violence and mishaps as an example of mass man’s willingness to accept the inequalities of capitalism. One can muse that Adorno saw Donald’s antics as the underpaid animation workers’ cry for help. He writes, ‘Donald Duck, like the unfortunate in real life, gets a thrashing so that the viewer can get used to the same treatment’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997[1972]: 138). Adorno, however, did not frown upon all cartoons, he did like the cartoon garter belts, long eye lashes, and high heels represented in Fleischer studio’s highly sexualized Betty Boop. He considered her quick-fire gags with her dog Bimbo to be representational of life’s untamed instincts (Leslie, 2002: 174). Wearing a short skirt and high heels, her storylines were often laden with sexual innuendos, so much so that she was deemed inappropriate by the strict censorship laws of the US Production Code Administration established in 1930, also known as the Hays Censorship Code, that governed film productions, including cartoons. Adorno critiqued the Production Code Administration’s censorship laws for censoring Betty Boop and making her naturalistic and tame, thus more palatable to a constructed mass audience. Like Benjamin, Adorno felt the attempt to clean up and present cartoons as respectable resulted in loss of their actual value: ‘perspectives must be fashioned that reveal the world, with its rifts and crevices, as indignant and distorted’ (Leslie, 2002: 117). The Hays Code sanitized the vampish Betty Boop from a raunchy, hip-swaying flirt who owned a business (Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions, 1933), led a hunting party (Betty Boop ‘A Hunting We Will Go, 1932) and ran for president (Betty Boop for President, 1932) to a wholesome, decently dressed character who is a caretaker of animals (Swing School, 1938) and performs domestic tasks (House Cleaning Blues, 1937). Adorno critiqued this massification of Betty Boop:

In a pretentious claim to know better than others…the industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired. By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish … the result is a constant reproduction of the same thing. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997[1972]: 134)

A desexualized Betty, with moralistic values and sexual repression, did not fare well with audiences. Lowering her hemline also lowered her popularity; by 1939, she had disappeared from theater screens altogether (Lenburg, 2009: 56). What Adorno did not address was that the morally imposed desexualization of the character turned into a disempowerment, from sexy and in charge to sanitized and domesticated. Betty could have easily still run a business, run for president, or led a hunting party in sensible shoes. Instead, the lesson learned by the industry was that sex sells women characters. While animators such as Warner Bros. and MGM banked on this sexualized caricature by creating saucy dames, Disney remained in compliance with the censorship laws and codes through actions such as covering cartoon cow udders with little dresses and petticoats. This particular compliance has since become a trope used in contemporary cartoons to accentuate the ridiculous nature of deeming cow udders as indecent. A good example of which can be seen in episode Storytelling (2010) of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time where main character Finn encounters a cow in the woods who is covering her udders with a paper bag. Finn encourages her to remove it, telling her to be proud of her body and not cover up until it is revealed that her udder is mutated and has its own face, upon which she is urged to cover it up again.

With the success of Snow White, Disney became the industry norm, establishing the standard of narrative clarity and realism, moving animation away from its initial artistic presentation of alternative, surrealistic imagery and subversive, socio-cultural perspectives (Benshoff, 1992; Cholodenko, 1991; Finch, 1975; Sandler, 1998; Stable and Harrison, 2003; Wells, 2002a); this norm applied to heteronormative romance and young women’s subservient positioning as well. For over two decades, between Snow White (1937) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), all animated feature films produced in the US, with the exception of two Fleischer films, Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941), were Disney films (Lenburg, 2009). Disney’s conformity into a hegemonic replicator ensured its success and profits, solidifying it as the leader in the animation industry – establishing not just how cartoons were to look but also what messages they were allowed to deliver.

Disney’s feminine triptych: The princess, the witch and the fairy godmother

Disney’s traditional notions on gender portrayal was set early on with Snow White (1937), domesticator, damsel in distress, princess singing ‘someday my prince will come’, and perpetuated with Cinderella (1950) and again with Sleeping Beauty (1959). These films set the stage for the princess master narrative that has come to be associated with Disney’s animated women; young, thin, demure, attractive, orphaned heroines and their cute animal friends passively awaiting rescue from an unknown prince. Interestingly, in each of these films there is also an independent and powerful woman character; she is the villain. She is cunning and older than the heroine, usually in her 40s (Douglas, 1994: 29). Her villainy represents the feminist critique of the social stereotype against middle-aged women’s sexual vitality as men their age reach erectile dysfunction, causing a power shift in the gendered sexual norms. Elizabeth Bell (1995: 116) provides an analysis of this Disney femme fatale:

Unlike the conflicting somatexts of Disney’s [princess] heroines, the caricature and melodramatics of the femme fatale are iconic and congruous cinematic codes that inscribe middle age as a time of treachery, consumption, and danger in the feminine life cycle.

Middle-aged Maleficent is Sleeping Beauty’s evil foil – a powerful and magical member of the kingdom who curses baby Aurora after being offended because she did not get invited to the baby princess’s christening. The villain to the princess Snow White, described as being animated ‘even closer to live action than Snow White herself’ (Barrier, 2007: 219), is her beautiful, middle-aged stepmother, the Queen, who turns herself into a hag so as to tempt Snow White with a poisoned apple to ensure that youthful beauty does not compete with her own. Cinderella also has a wicked stepmother, Lady Tremaine, who is middle-aged and treats Cinderella like a maidservant and prevents her from attending the prince’s ball to ensure she has no opportunity to escape her dismal domestic life. These adult women, evil stepmothers, witches and queens, are beautiful and powerful middle-aged women who are not to be trusted, until they get much older. Along with the usual animal friends, aiding the sweet, youthful, princess heroines are the grandmotherly women who are physically plump, cheerful and nurturing helpers (Douglas, 1994: 29) Although they are often magical, their powers always seem to be limited. Cinderella’s fairy godmother is powerful enough to magically transform animals and materialize a beautiful ball gown with glass slippers, yet her powers are useless to free Cinderella from Lady Tremaine’s servitude. Although Princess Aurora has three fairy godmothers, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, their combined magical powers are no match for the evil witch Maleficent; yet it is the brave prince, with no magical powers, who kills her and saves the Sleeping Beauty with his true love’s kiss. ¹⁰ While princess Snow White has no grandmotherly fairy to help protect her, she has seven times the better in the de-sexualized little men, dwarfs, who come to her defense after the old witch has poisoned her. She too is rescued by her prince’s true love’s kiss. The Disney master narrative of the feminine triptych is for a girl to grow up and hopefully find her prince to care for her. As she gets older and reaches her sexual power and her prince reaches his sexual impotence, she becomes a witch, to be feared and ostracized. Eventually, as age wears on, she is tamed into a nurturing, benevolent godmother. This triptych narrative can be seen in a later non-princess Disney film 101 Dalmatians (1961) where the human women are represented by the kind and beautiful owner Anita with her musical prince Roger, the villainous Cruella de Vil who is set to destroy their happiness, and the kind, older, plump Nanny who could not defend the puppies from intruders. Although other Disney films of this era, The Three Caballeros (1945), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953) and Lady and the Tramp (1955) do not have the princess narrative or the feminine triptych, they have been critiqued for perpetuating heteronormative gender coding (Bell et al., 1995; Benshoff, 1992; Ortega, 1998). The avant-garde style of Silly Symphonies and the early Disney shorts had been replaced by the safety of narrative realism in their feature films.

Little Lulu: Exception to the rule

Throughout Disney’s feature film success, cartoon shorts were still popular in theaters. Little Lulu was a Fleischer-Paramount produced cartoon that, like Krazy Kat, was based on a newspaper comic strip. Much like the way Krazy Kat’s gender fluidity did not deter a successful fandom, Little Lulu fans were not deterred by a cartoon girl title character. Little Lulu comics and cartoons presented a smart and sassy little girl who was a master of deadpan delivery. Lulu displayed a willful resilience; she was mischievous yet well-intentioned, depicted more as innovative creativity than rebellion. Creator Marge Henderson said she used a girl character because a girl could get away with more fresh stunts, which in a boy might seem boorish (Jacob, 2006: 1). The storylines often involved cunning pranks on adult men who had lied to her (Cad and Caddy, 1947, Snap Happy, 1945), standing up for small animals and younger children (The Dog Show-Off, 1948) or just a fecund imagination in self-motivated mischief (Musica-Lulu, 1945), generally associated as boy characteristic, as in boys-will-be-boys. However, Lulu is very much a girl. Little Lulu was incredibly popular and spurred a merchandising empire of Little Lulu dolls, lunch boxes, bubble bath, pajamas, candy, as well as being the Kleenex tissue spokesperson for 15 years. She is another example of audience willingness to consume a popular culture product with an empowered girl lead. Little Lulu is an important exception precisely because she is a young girl and not a young woman. While it is possible for a girl to be sexualized, it is not culturally coded as a norm as it is compulsively done with adult and young adult women who are compulsively given boobs and boyfriends (Perea, 2015). Little Lulu was a theatrical girl cartoon and would later be recycled as a syndicated television cartoon, demonstrating that girl cartoons were easily consumed by men and women as well as boys and girls.

Disney and Warner Bros. ‘madonna–whore’ gender representations

Like Disney, Warner Bros. was substantially important to US cartoons gender representations. Originating in 1930, Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and shortly after Merrie Melodies were both replicates of Disney’s Silly Symphonies (Putterman, 1998: 30). Animators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, who worked on Disney Studios’ series Alice in Cartoonland (1924), and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (1927), left Disney to create an animation department for Warner Bros. Wells (2002a) points out how Looney Tunes was intended for the adult theater audience:

[The cartoons were] clever social satires generously overlaid with sexual innuendo, their characters always winking knowingly at the audience rather than batting their eyes … The Warner Bros. cartoonists effectively focused on making ‘adult cartoons’ with requisite degree of slapstick to appease a children’s audience. (2002: 49)

By 1935, Looney Toons and Merrie Melodies had stylistically transformed with the input of new animators, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and later Friz Freleng, ¹¹ who all went on to become successful cartoon creators (Cholodenko, 1991; Putterman, 1998; Wells, 2002). To compete with the overwhelming appeal of the symphonic Disney style of rational, sentimental and cute, the rival animators transformed their cartoons into a cacophony of the surreal. Their irreverent weirdness, featuring hyper, homicidal and sardonic characters, was admitted to be an intentional opposition to Disney’s eagerness to promote an idealized model of innocent and optimistic family entertainment (Wells, 1998: 63). In both studios’ shorts, the feminine characters’ gendered demarcations were shown through sexualized attributes such as breasts and curves, as well as feminine clothing, hairstyles, and long eyelashes. Through their intentional opposition to Disney, these Warner Bros. anarchic cartoons created the portrayal of female characters in a madonna–whore duality. Whereas Disney portrayed its young women as conservative and beautiful damsels, Looney Toons portrayed them as sexualized broads and dames. The Disney prince, thanks to his enchanted kiss, rides off with his new princess in the traditional, heteronormative narrative of ‘happily ever after’. In direct mockery of this, Looney Tunes’ Bewitched Bunny (1954) shows Bugs Bunny, who’s been poisoned by Witch Hazel, awakened by the kiss of a traveling Prince Charming. Bugs informs him that he is in the wrong picture: ‘You’re looking for Snow White.’ At the end of this same short, when Bugs saves himself by throwing magic powder on Witch Hazel which transforms her into a voluptuous bunny with red lips while still retaining her cackling laugh, he walks off with her and breaks the fourth wall, turning to the audience, ‘Aw sure, I know, but aren’t they all witches inside?’ Earlier in the scene, Hazel pokes fun at her own grotesque appearance as she climbs on her broom and says, ‘notice how I ride side saddle, it proves I’m a lady of quality.’

Unlike the Disney Princess, Warner Bros. only has secondary female characters, never leads, and there are only a handful of them amongst the dozens of male leads. Warner Bros. uses the female form as a tool, to objectify or ridicule, or both. An example of this with Hazel is in A Witch Tangled Hare (1959), as she intends to fly up on her broom but goes down instead and says ‘Oh, we women drivers, I had the silly thing in reverse.’ As she mounts the broom, we see her panties, she blushes as she pulls her dress down and says ‘Modesty is one of my girlish qualities’. The character Granny did have the lead in earlier shorts like Cagey Canary (1941) and Hiss and Make Up (1943), her role was to be the human who threatens the cat or dog with a beating if they mistreat the canary. Her status changed in Canary Row (1950), when she gets established as a side character for Sylvester and Tweety and is part of their shorts from then on as Tweety’s sweet old lady protector who packs a punch. Character Miss Prissy, the side character to Foghorn Leghorn, is a sad spinster chicken who attempts suicide in Lovelorn Leghorn (1951) when the other chickens talk about her behind her back. Although Foghorn feels empathetic, he does throw side insults, like, ‘Nice girl but about as sharp as a sack of wet mice’ and in Of Rice and Hen (1953), ‘She reminds me of Paul Revere’s ride, a little light in the belfry.’ He later comments on her body ‘Girl reminds me of the highway btw Ft. Worth and Dallas, no curves.’ Petunia Pig is the side character and romantic interest of Porky Pig. She is not cast in a very good light. In Case of Stuttering Pig (1937), she’s a blonde, flirty coworker at the bank who chooses a murderous thief over Porky because, ‘That killer sure can kiss!’ In, Porky’s Romance (1937), she’s an abusive gold digger, and in Porky’s Picnic (1939), although she is nice to Porky, she’s an airhead brunette who is dangerously inept at babysitting. Although Warner Bros. women differ from Disney in their sassy attitude and overt sexual appearance, the message remains the same: women exist as a tool, be it the object of male desire or point of ridicule.

Disney’s traditionally drawn, demure, damsels reinforced domestic gender roles whereas Warner Bros. sarcastic and sexy dames reinforced women’s objectification and, at times, violence against women. Sybil DelGaudio (1980: 212) provides an analysis of Looney Tunes’ Pepe Le Pew cartoon series:

The cartoon seems to be the favorite place for the depiction of the pursuit/capture plot structure. When female characters enter the picture, they automatically take their places in line with the pursued, while the means of pursuit is changed to seduction and the end is clearly sexual … it seems conceivable that some male–female cartoons are about rape – specifically, how funny rape is. Metaphorically speaking, this seems implied in the idea that it is humorous to see a male chase a female who doesn’t want to be chased.

In Broomstick Bunny (1956), after asking the magic mirror genie ‘Who’s the ugliest of them all’, Witch Hazel is assured it’s her until Bugs trick-or-treats at her door in a costume that makes him the ugliest witch. As she tries to kill him, Bugs tricks her into drinking a potion that turns her into a voluptuous red-head. Horrified with her attractive appearance she asks the mirror ‘Who’s the ugliest of them all?’, the mirror genie’s eyes become enlarged, he gives out a wolf whistle and tries to grab her, he then chases her as she flies away from him, and Bugs laughs.

Despite these portrayals, Looney Tunes’ streetwise, overt objectification of women was well received by both audiences and the academy. Looney Tunes earned 23 Academy Award nominations from 1939 to 1962, and received an Oscar five times from 1947–1958. ¹² A 1943 piece by New Republic critic Manny Farber pronounced Looney Tunes’ ‘superiority over the Disney product’ (Putterman, 1998: 33), earning its place as dominant cartoon cultural purveyors.

Hanna-Barbera cartoons: Children’s television epoch

As television sets flourished in the late 1940s, broadcast stations gained advertising sponsorship and, as such, needed programming to fill airtime. Sponsorship for children’s programming was not as lucrative as adult programming, thus its airtime was not a priority. The newly established US television networks chose to avoid the creation of expensive new characters when given the option to easily recycle theatrical cartoons into television programming. Recycled theatrical cartoons were sold inexpensively to stations in syndication nationwide and aired as children’s television programming. Little Lulu was sold to syndication as well as Looney Tunes. Many of the vulgar, violent and erotic jokes, such as the sarcasm and wit of Bugs Bunny, are clearly intended for adult audiences, yet network producers saw it as cost-efficient children’s programming (Erickson, 2005: 6). As cartoons left the theater and entered the home, they also entered the genre of children’s television. Also at this time, the artistic influence of the post-WWII aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism led renegade animators to break away from the Disney and Warner Bros. style and create the limited-animation style: cartoons with bold colors, limited movements, and backgrounds represented by symbols instead of fully drawn-out realistic settings (Leslie, 2002: 294). Since new television cartoons had been considered too expensive to produce, animators found more lucrative ways to convey action by using sound effects and dialogue to express movement instead of actually drawing it all out, thus shaving off considerable production costs (Woolery, 1983: 245). The new limited-animation style fitted the technology, and budgets, of television. In 1950, made on a bare-bones budget, limited-animation style cartoon, Crusader Rabbit (1949) made its syndicated debut as the first cartoon series made for television (p. 74). Lucille Bliss, the voice of the adventurous rabbit, recalls working for $5 an episode, recording tracks in the middle of the night since it was the cheapest studio time (Erickson, 2005: 9). With its cost-cutting production model, the genre of television cartoons had entered into its role as a regular staple of television programming.

Cartoons made-for-television are distinguished as a product created with the intention of airing on television, as opposed to a cartoon created for theatrical release and then later screened on television. By 1964, after over a decade of puppet and live-action variety shows, children’s television programming would consist almost exclusively of cartoons (Woolery 1983: xii). This massification of the medium certainly shaped cartoons’ construction. Cartoons were now considered children’s television, and children’s television was populated and controlled by men with programming populated by male cartoon characters. Women continued to be marginalized in the workforce and girl cartoon characters were not considered a priority (Hendershot, 1998: 43).

Whereas Disney and Warner Bros. were substantially important to the popular cultural image of gender portrayal in cartoons in the theatrical era, it is the limited-animation style of Hanna-Barbera Productions that dominated US cartoons and thus the portrayal of gender in cartoons in the early televisual era. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who produced Tom and Jerry and other theatrical cartoons for MGM since 1939, formed their own independent animation house, Hanna-Barbera Productions (Erickson, 2005: 17). Keeping to the new cost-restrictive television sensibility, they ‘had found a way to prove to the networks that by cutting costs using limited animation, it was possible to make cartoons cheaply enough for television’s needs’ (p. 18), allowing networks to invest in the birth of new characters and help shape the face of television cartoons. While Disney and Warner Bros. theatrical cartoons provided an array of female characters, these competing images were all still of demure femininity versus overtly sexualized feminine bodies. Hanna-Barbera cartoons had the opportunity to shift the gendered portrayal. Despite this opportunity in the establishment of the cartoon genre as a regular staple of television programming, no lead-girl cartoons were created, in fact many of their shows, like Johnny Quest (1964), did not have any female characters at all. While Hanna-Barbera did not replicate the polarity of Disney’s and Warner Bros. damsels and dames, they instead reinforced gender normativity with overt heterosexuality in a domesticated or power structure. Wilma Flintstone (The Flintstones, 1960) and Judy Jetson (The Jetsons, 1962) were conservatively dressed matriarchs financially dependent on their husbands. In a form-fitting body suit, Penelope Pitstop (The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, 1969), although quite capable of escaping, seemed to get herself repeatedly kidnapped. ¹³ The term ‘innovation, imitation, saturation’, used to refer to television’s common practice of imitating any programming that is successful and repeating its formula ad nauseam (Curtin, 1995: 248), perfectly describes Hanna-Barbera cartoons from the late 1950s and into the 1980s. ¹⁴ Hanna-Barbera cartoons also presented essentially the same male lead characters, Fred Flintstone and George Jetson, Quick Draw McGraw and Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Top Cat, Snagglepuss and Wally Gator, along with the same kind of secondary female characters who were helpers or subordinates to the boy and male counterparts and almost never given a main storyline.

When William Hanna was asked in 1980 why there had been so few good female cartoon characters, he responded:

I can’t entirely explain that, but I think that there is more good male voice talent than there is female. There are just more male comedians and mimics. It’s not just because the animators are men that there aren’t any female cartoon stars. (Slafer, 1980: 259)

When reminded about voice actress June Foray, who in her 70 years of voice acting had included many Hanna-Barbera cartoons, he replied, ‘she has contributed more to voice acting than anyone I know’ (p. 259). Hanna also seemed to have forgotten Julie Bennett who voiced dozens of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Jean Vander Pyl’s portrayal of Wilma Flintstone and over 30 years of voice work, as well as Bea Benaderet, most famous for her portrayal of Betty Rubble in The Flintstones, with a voice career spanning over 50 years. ‘Lucille Bliss suffered the indignity of being involuntarily rechristened “Lou Bliss” by Hanna-Barbera when the studio wanted to sustain the illusion that the little boy character whom she was portraying was in fact a male child’ (Erickson, 2005: 947). ¹⁵ Although they had made several lead boy cartoons, by 1998, out of the 7,742 television cartoon characters in Hanna-Barbera Studios’ production history none were a lead girl cartoon, ¹⁶ and when asked why they had no lead girl characters Hanna replied that it had never occurred to them (Perea, 2011). One might consider that perhaps it is because the animators are men that there weren’t any girl cartoon stars.

Conclusion

Although praised by the intellectual and artistic community in the early years, as cartoons left the cinemas with the advent of television, their placement as children’s television and animated programming, both undervalued categories of social placement and study, created debates on their cultural capital and their power as ideological agents. Cartoons continued to be a mainstay in popular culture media, both theatrically and televisually, and presently online. They continue to be recognized as a valuable media form in established cultural institutions and their programming is consumed by millions of viewers worldwide, due to the ease of voice dubbing, since it is a recorded voice and not a live-action voice.

The massification of the medium established a master narrative perpetuating the cartoon industry’s demarcation of gender and sexuality, seen in the emphatic saucy dames of Looney Tunes or the marriage-minded princesses of Disney films. This compulsive gender coding was paired with discriminatory gender labor practices throughout the theater and television industry for many decades. The television industry that created the belief that boys would not watch girl cartoon characters (Perea, 2015) was based on the theater industry that created the belief that women were not animators. It was not until women began to gain entry into US television executive positions in the 1990s that girl cartoons proliferated (Perea, 2015). Most recently, Cartoon Network has aired its first cartoon by a woman creator, Steven Universe (2013), created by Rebecca Sugar. As a highly illusionistic and powerful mass medium capable of expressing much of the complexities of the human condition, cartoons present an alternative form to the restrictions of live-action television and film. Annihilating rationality with ‘the abdication of all mental law’ ¹⁷ (Crafton 1998: 119), a cartoon can do anything, and as such, can present a counter hegemonic potential to the compulsion of gender normative coding.