Understanding: The Golden Age of Animation

The Golden Age of animation has its prestigious name for a reason. Though it endured some dark times, it came out with some of the most iconic animated feature films and characters that we all know and love today. This period in history, began at around 1928 and ended in the late 1950s as it faded out due to the rise and demand in television.

This era is called the 'golden age' because it is really when animation started to get the recognition it deserved. Animation was a novelty art that really was starting to die out and people were becoming less interested in it, and this was something Walt disney acknowledged and wanted to change. Thus 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' came about. This was the first animated feature film that combines both sound and colour. Sound and colour were two elements which were slowly progressing, however independently, and Snow White was really the animated film that combined them both to a good degree. At this point, animation was expensive (and still is) to make, therefore to have sound was just extra money that wasn't necessarily of particular demand, so as a result was usually just music from a public domain added on top of a short animation. As for colour, most animations were hand painted until the process of 'Technicolor' came about, but took a long time for companies to catch on to, because there were still many black and white animated films for a long time after this came about. Therefore 'Snow White' really was a table turner. But a bittersweet one.

Because 'Snow White' was the most innovative of Western animation yet, this meant that animation was increasingly becoming more expensive but simultaneously, was a real eye opener as it illustrated that animation has the ability to compete in the cinema with actual live action feature films as well. Not only that, because everyone saw Disney as doing something right, many companies copied them, their aesthetic and their process, however due to their intense focus on character connectivity and the actual plot of their films, Disney was always the most popular. Many foreign countries were not unfamiliar with the idea of animation feature films and had actually made many before the invention of 'Snow White', to a high quality as well, therefore the Golden Age of animation could actually be seen as just for Western animation.

However this era declined in the 1950s due to many factors. Obviously the main one was the rise and demand of television, but there were also dark times in this period. Disney's 'Fantasia' and 'Pinnocio' didn't do as well as they had liked and there were also social pressures during the war to produce films in connection with propaganda to keep authorities happy. Production costs were exponentially rising, and also the style of animation was ever changing and loads of people were losing their jobs because they were unable to keep up with these demands. Yet this age produced some of our favourite animated films to date and will always be an extreme turning point in animation history.