A History of Animation

1940 – 1949 · 10 events

The 1940s

War reorganized the studios, a strike fractured them, and a group of dissenting artists proposed that animation should stop imitating photography.

What changed in this period

The decade begins with ambition: concert-length experiments in visual music, elaborate multiplane work, and a general assumption that animation was heading toward ever greater illusionism. Economics interrupted. Overseas markets closed, budgets contracted, and a bitter 1941 strike at the largest American studio scattered experienced artists across the industry.

Government contracts filled the gap. Training films, insignia, propaganda shorts and instructional reels made animation a wartime tool, and taught studios to work fast, cheap and graphically simple. Those constraints turned out to be creatively productive.

Out of the strike and the war came a studio built on the opposite premise from realism: flat color, angular design, stylization borrowed from modern painting and poster art, and movement reduced to its essentials. It argued that a drawing should look like a drawing.

In Japan, a state-supported feature completed in the final months of the war established a domestic tradition that would matter enormously two decades later. Animation was becoming genuinely international, and increasingly unwilling to agree on what it should look like.

The record

Every documented event, 1940 – 1949

Listed in order, with context, technique, sources and related events shown in full.

  • 1940 February 10, 1940

    Tom and Jerry begin at MGM

    A cat-and-mouse chase built almost entirely from physical action, without dialogue, launched a series that would win seven Academy Awards over two decades.

    United States Cel animation Short film
    Artist or studio
    William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    MGM's animation unit was competing with two established studios and needed a property that could travel internationally without translation.

    Why it mattered

    It refined pantomime comedy to an exceptional level of timing precision and proved that dialogue-free animation had unmatched export value.

    What followed

    The partnership behind the series later founded the studio that industrialized television animation, carrying its timing discipline into a far more constrained format.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1940 July 27, 1940

    A Wild Hare defines Bugs Bunny

    An earlier rabbit design was rebuilt as a relaxed, confident wisecracker who wins by remaining calm, establishing the character's voice, posture and comic method.

    United States Cel animation Short film
    Artist or studio
    Tex Avery, Leon Schlesinger Productions for Warner Bros.
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    Avery's unit was pushing Warner animation toward faster timing, direct address to the audience and gags that acknowledged the artifice of the cartoon itself.

    Why it mattered

    It completed the American cartoon's turn from cuteness to attitude, and gave the studio the character that would define its identity for fifty years.

    What followed

    The self-aware, audience-addressing comic persona became a durable animation archetype, and Avery's exaggerated timing influenced comedy animation worldwide.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1940 November 13, 1940 Full record

    Fantasia premieres with Fantasound

    Eight animated sequences set to classical works, ranging from pure abstraction to mythological narrative, premiered with a custom multi-channel sound system installed theater by theater.

    United States Cel animation Feature film
    Artist or studio
    Walt Disney Studios, with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    The Fantasound system required specialized equipment and operators, limiting the initial release to a handful of venues and making the film financially difficult from the outset.

    Why it mattered

    It is the most ambitious attempt to place animation on the level of the concert hall and gallery, and it brought European abstract film traditions into a mass-market studio production.

    What followed

    Fantasound anticipated stereophonic and surround exhibition by two decades, and the film's reputation recovered over later re-releases to become a reference point for animation as art.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1941 May 29 – September 1941

    The Disney animators' strike

    A five-month walkout over union recognition, pay disparity and screen credit divided the largest animation studio in the world and ended in a federally mediated settlement.

    United States Cel animation Studio and institution
    Artist or studio
    Screen Cartoonists Guild and Walt Disney Productions
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    Rapid wartime expansion, uneven compensation and the transition from a small workshop to an industrial operation had created lasting grievances.

    Why it mattered

    It permanently changed labor relations in American animation, establishing collective bargaining as a fixture of the industry.

    What followed

    Artists who left during and after the strike founded or joined competing studios, directly enabling the graphic modernist movement of the following decade.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1941 September 26, 1941

    The Fleischer Superman shorts raise the ceiling on action animation

    A series of lavishly budgeted shorts combined rotoscoped human movement, dramatic lighting, deep shadow and cinematic staging to treat a comic-book hero with complete seriousness.

    United States Rotoscoping Short film
    Artist or studio
    Fleischer Studios, released by Paramount Pictures
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    Paramount funded the series at unusually high cost, and the visual approach borrowed from contemporary crime and horror cinema rather than from comedy animation.

    Why it mattered

    It established that animation could handle straight action drama without comic distance, and set a visual standard for superhero adaptation that was not surpassed for decades.

    What followed

    The design language of these shorts — angular architecture, hard shadow, heroic silhouettes — became a lasting reference for animated action series, particularly in television from the 1990s onward.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1943 January 1, 1943

    Der Fuehrer's Face wins the Academy Award

    A satirical short depicting a nightmare of forced factory labor under fascism won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film and became a widely circulated piece of wartime persuasion.

    United States Cel animation Award and recognition
    Artist or studio
    Walt Disney Studios
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    American studios devoted a large share of capacity to government and morale work between 1942 and 1945, much of it unavailable commercially for decades afterward.

    Why it mattered

    It shows animation operating as national propaganda at the highest level of craft, and raises the interpretive problems that wartime cartoons continue to present to archives.

    What followed

    Many wartime shorts contain racial caricature and are now presented by archives with contextual framing rather than withdrawn, an editorial practice this project follows in describing them.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1943 June 1943

    Private Snafu and the wartime training film

    A series of instructional shorts for military audiences used comedy, rhyme and a hapless recurring soldier to teach security, hygiene and equipment discipline.

    United States Cel animation Short film
    Artist or studio
    United States Army Signal Corps with Leon Schlesinger Productions and others
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    Produced at cost for restricted audiences, the films could use adult language and situations impossible in theatrical release, and were made on very short schedules.

    Why it mattered

    It proved animation's effectiveness as an instructional medium and gave studios a wartime revenue base that kept crews employed as commercial markets contracted.

    What followed

    Educational and industrial animation became a substantial sector after the war, and the graphic economy demanded by tight schedules fed directly into postwar limited animation.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1944

    United Productions of America proposes a modern graphic style

    A studio formed largely by artists who had left the 1941 strike produced a political campaign film in flat, poster-like design, rejecting the prevailing illusionist style.

    United States Limited animation Studio and institution
    Artist or studio
    United Productions of America
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    Its founders drew on modern painting, graphic design and stage abstraction, arguing that animation had confused technical polish with artistic value.

    Why it mattered

    It opened a serious aesthetic alternative within commercial American animation: design-led, graphically flat, and economical by intention rather than by budget pressure.

    What followed

    The style shaped advertising, title sequences, mid-century illustration and television animation, and its economics made the coming television format possible.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1945 April 12, 1945

    Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, Japan's first animated feature

    A navy-commissioned feature using animal characters to depict a military operation was completed in the final months of the war and screened to limited audiences.

    Japan Cel animation Feature film
    Artist or studio
    Mitsuyo Seo, Shochiku, commissioned by the Imperial Japanese Navy
    Country or region
    Japan

    Historical context

    The production was ordered as propaganda and made under severe material shortages; a print was rediscovered decades later.

    Why it mattered

    It is the first Japanese animated feature and demonstrated to a young postwar generation of artists that feature-length animation was achievable domestically.

    What followed

    Several founding figures of postwar Japanese animation cited seeing the film as formative, and it stands at the head of a national tradition that would reshape the medium globally.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

  • 1947 1942 – 1949

    The package feature era

    With European markets closed and the studio carrying wartime debt, feature releases became compilations of shorter segments rather than single sustained narratives.

    United States Cel animation Feature film
    Artist or studio
    Walt Disney Studios
    Country or region
    United States

    Historical context

    The strategy spread risk and used material that could be produced by smaller units, keeping the feature program alive through a period of severe financial pressure.

    Why it mattered

    It documents how directly economics shape animated form: the anthology structure was a financing decision that produced a distinct body of work.

    What followed

    The studio returned to single-story features in 1950, and the anthology format persisted in television specials and later streaming compilations.

    Sources consulted

    Related events

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