Forbidden Animation by Karl Cohen.

To those of us of a certain age, the recent jeremiads issued by the Southern Baptist Convention against the Disney Company for it's alleged anti-Christian and pro-gay policies are nothing less than incredible. To this writer, the Magic Kingdom had always been the paradigm of family entertainment. On the bulletin board that hangs over my desk, I have a copy of the infamous drawing of an orgy featuring Disney characters that appeared in Paul Kastner's The Realist in the late 1960s. It's value in my eyes had always resided in the outrageousness of showing Mickey shooting up while Goofy and Minnie fornicate. Next to them, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs indulge in sexual acts for which no specific descriptive terms have yet been invented. The cultural contradiction implicit in having characters embedded in Disney wholesomeness acting like members of the Manson family on an outing with Kesey's Merry Pranksters has made this image a classic of '60s counterculture.

Conservative elements today would see this not as parody, but as an indication of the moral squalor of the contemporary animation industry. Amazing numbers of the radical right apparently spend hours and days freeze-framing images from animated tapes and laser discs, searching for glimpses of spicy stuff. Michael Eisner and his minions from hell have been savaged by guardians of morality with the ferocity of a Chihuahua attacking a meatball. Meanwhile, others in the animation industry, from Beavis and Butt-head's Mike Judge to Pink Komkommer's Marv Newland, who might interpret this parody as a signpost for one of the directions to be taken by contemporary animators, have escaped relatively unaffected by controversy.

A Catalogue of Censorship
Those who call for a fatwah against the Great Satan of Burbank would be well advised to read Karl Cohen's Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America. Cohen, an art historian and President of ASIFA-San Francisco, as well as editor of the ASIFA-San Francisco Newsletter, has spent several years researching these topics, motivated, in part, by the loss of family members' jobs forty years ago due to the FBI informing their employers that they had "questionable backgrounds." Therefore, it is not a surprise to find that Karl Cohen is a passionate advocate of free speech and open expression on both political and other subjects. It is this sentiment that holds together a book of wide-ranging topics.

Cohen separates his subject into five categories: censorship of theatrical animation, stereotypes in animation, uncensored animation, censoring animation on television, and blacklisted animators. In his chapter on censorship of theatrical animation, Cohen gives a chronological overview of censorship, focusing mostly on America, with glimpses of the situation in Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. There is considerable entertainment value in the author's cataloguing of no-nos such as the nude pinups in Daffy the Commando(1943) and He Was Her Man(1937) that somehow managed to evade the censor's shears. More interestingly, Cohen examines standards of censorship in different jurisdictions, from the Production Code administered under Will Hays' Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, to the British Board of Censors. Cohen gives examples of the activities of various boards and points out the limits and contradictions in censorship systems. The author concludes that the censorship conducted for 34 years (1934-1968) under Hayes office at best "protected Americans from seeing a few cow udders and a few drunken animals, or hearing a few rude noises." At it's worst, it may have tamed the most extreme excesses of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett. The Production Code itself became a source of humor in American animation. Cohen recalls such gags as the one in Clampett's A Tale of Two Kitties(1942) in which the cats Babbit and Catstello try to catch Tweety Bird. At one point Babbit says to his partner "Give me the bird, give me the bird!" Catstello answers, "If the Hays Office would only let me, I'd give him the bird all right!"