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Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation
Top of the pile
76
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
77/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Reid Mitenbuler
Publisher:
Atlantic Monthly Press
Date:
December 1, 2020
The story of the Golden Age of classic animation and the often larger-than-life artists who created some of the most iconic cartoon characters of the twentieth century.
What The Reviewers Say
Mitenbuler's real target is a quintessentially American story of daring ambition, personal re-invention and the eternal tug-of-war of between art and business.
In his prologue, Mitenbuler suggests the story he’s about to tell will go from rude to rarefied, but one of the most fascinating things about the history he recounts is that animation, like so much of American culture, continually scrambled all sorts of categories and expectations. The arc of Wild Minds is appropriately weird, full of high-flown aspirations and zany anecdotes.
Mitenbuler goes wide and deep in surveying the talented, sometimes eccentric, and often irascible artists who developed, nurtured, and transformed the medium.
Wild Minds is at its best when minds are at their wildest, during American animation’s dawn.
