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Tex Avery, the animation director who helped found Looney Tunes, created a series of films satirizing technology, with titles like The House of Tomorrow and The Farm of Tomorrow. Hollywood animators followed in the footsteps of 19th-century satirical cartoonists, lampooning contemporary obsessions with gadgets and technology. Decades before The Jetsons premiered in 1962, speculation about our future lives was a fertile source for visual gags. These films were popular entertainment, but they also worked to sell Disney’s vision of the future to the American public.ĭisney wasn’t the first to animate the future. But it was this wartime opportunity that brought Disney’s role as a futurist into the public eye, using animation to show concepts like long-range bombers, journeys to Mars, and autonomous vehicles. Walt Disney was a pioneer throughout his career, looking to the future in both his medium and through the visions his artists created. They took animation beyond pure entertainment, using it as a medium to influence and persuade.
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The commissioned films were a mix of education and propaganda, and it was the latter to which the full weight of the creative studio of animators, artists, directors, and writers would be employed. The US government, recognizing the value of the studio’s emotive visual storytelling techniques, contracted Disney to produce 32 animated shorts. His lack of empathy didn’t help: “If you’re not progressing as you should,” he told them, “instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it.” The resulting animators’ strike lasted five weeks.īut the war would also offer Disney a lifeline. The studio’s previous film, Pinocchio, had also lost money, and growing discontent among animators added to Disney’s woes.
But the film didn’t make it to many theaters: the outbreak of war in Europe prevented its release in territories that ordinarily would have provided half its income. The film came with a revolutionary surround-sound system-“Fantasound”-that needed to be installed in every theater it played in. His third animated film, Fantasia, was meant to “change the history of motion pictures”-but ended up nearly bankrupting the studio. In 1941, Walt Disney’s problems were piling up.
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