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The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954. By Christopher P. Lehman. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. xii, 137 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-613-2.)
Christopher P. Lehman's survey of American animated shorts, The Colored Cartoon, takes the reader through an informative, sometimes entertaining, sometimes shocking tour of the concealed history of this major social and artistic expression. As he audaciously begins, "American animation owes its existence to African Americans" (p. 1). Up to the very cusp of the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, studios large and small habitually relied on visual and auditory race stereotypes for their humor.
The parade of blackface caricatures, objectified humans, and animals anthropomorphized into black humanoids begins at the dawn of animation in films. In the silent era, cartoonists imbued characters such as Felix...