not to have considered the idea that there could be a normal, everyday stylization that has a broad appeal and might have derived ultimately from some modernist influence that had filtered out, not just into animation, but into the culture more generally.
There was such a popularization of modern design in the 1940s and especially the 1950s, and it took place across many areas of American popular culture, including architecture, interior design, and fashion. Thomas Hine has dealt with it in his 1999 book, Populuxe: From Tailfins and TV Dinners to Barbie Dolls and Fallout Shelters. Hines doesn't cover film, but the styles that we can see running through the illustrations in Cartoon Modern have a lot in common with those in Populuxe. Pixar pays homage to them in the design of The Incredibles.
Second, Amidi seeks to establish UPA's importance by casting Walt Disney as his villain. Here Disney stands in for the whole pre-1950s Hollywood animation establishment. For the author, anything that isn't modern style is tired and conservative. His chapter on UPA begins with an anecdote designed to drive that point home. It describes the night in 1951 when Gerald McBoing Boing won the Oscar for best animation of 1950, while Disney, not even nominated in the animation category, won for his live-action short, Beaver Valley. UPA president Stephen Bosustow and Disney posed together, with Bosustow described as looking younger and fresher than his older rival. Disney was only ten years older, but to Amidi, Bosustow's \suggests the vitality and freshness of the UPA films when
placed against the tired Disney films of the early 1950s\
That line perplexed me. True, Disney's astonishing output in the late 1930s and early 1940s could hardly be sustained, either in quantity or quality. But even though Cinderella (a relatively lightweight item) and the shorts become largely routine, few would call Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Lady and the Tramp tired. Indeed, the two Disney features that Amidi later praises for their modernist style, Sleeping Beauty and One Hundred and One Dalmatians, are often taken to mark the beginning of the end of the studio's golden age.
In Amidi's view, other animation studios, including Warner Bros., were similarly resistant to modernism on the whole, though there were occasional chinks in their armor. The author selectively praises a few individual innovators. A very brief entry on MGM mentions Tex Avery, mainly for his 1951 short, Symphony in Slang. Warner Bros.' Maurice Noble earns Amidi's praise; he consistently provided designs for Chuck Jones's cartoons, most famously What's Opera, Doc?
The book's third problem arises from the decision to organize it as a series of chapters on individual animation studios arranged alphabetically. There's at least some logic to going in chronological order or thematically, or even by the studios in order of their importance. Alphabetical is arbitrary, rendering the relationship between studios haphazard. An unhappy byproduct of this strategy is that the historically most salient studios come near the end of the alphabet. After chapters on many small,
mostly unfamiliar studios, we at last reach the final chapters: Terrytoons, UPA, Walt Disney, Walter Lantz, Warner Bros. Apart from Lantz, these are the main studios relevant to the topic at hand. Amidi prepares the reader with only a brief introduction and no overview, so there is no setup of why UPA is so important or what context Disney provided for the stylistic innovations that are the book's main subject. 译文
现代卡通，动画风格和设计
在20世纪70年代，当我还是一个电影专业的研究生时，美国联合制片公司UPA就受到了学院和影迷们的关注。伴随着16 mm胶卷技术的蓬勃发展，16mm电影拍摄技术的发展已历经了二十年了，现在人们仍能偶尔在电视上看到动画片“多根的嘟嘟声”或“花园里的独角兽”。在此后的几十年，美国联合制片公司UPA以及50年代的流行动画片，正逐步淡出人们的视野。而那些小制片公司出品的动画电影，只有杰拉尔德仍然有DVD的续集，影迷们必须自己想办法找到资源，才能看到其他的动画片。大多数其他的受现代主义影响，其他小型的制片公司出口的不太突出的动画，现在则完全找不到资源了，影迷们想看也很难找到了。
然而，美国联合制片公司在电影的历史长河中仍然占有重要的地位。接下里
的二十年，迪士尼出品的现实主义色彩的动画占据了动画业的主导地位，一些小型的制片厂更是大胆引入了一个更抽象的现代主义风格动画。其他的一些小制片厂就跟着这一潮流，推出了类似的产品。约翰?哈比利和他的妻子合作，致力于为动画行业设立一个规范。但这一趋势，从很大程度上说，早在50年代就结束了。现在看来，他们的这一做法是理所当然很重要的。我和大卫·博德维尔两人沿着这一模式继续研究，本文简要地介绍了下美国联合制片公司UPA的动画电影历史，一个简单的介绍，我们也介绍了16mm黑白动画电影。虽然现在，美国联合制片公司UPA及其动画产品获得了影迷们的尊重，只不过不像以前那样有名了。
这一切都使得《现代卡通》这本介绍动画的书成为一本很重要的书。书中使用了一系列的有吸引力动画图像，提供了数以百计的绘画，脚本，故事，还有其他50年代的现代主义动画的元素。这本书将50年代现代主义动画风格，展示在大家面前，提供了很多未发表的有趣的动画故事和图片，这些都吸引了大批动画影迷、学者、爱好者的乐趣。从这本书中寻找出这些有意思的元素，这是一个很重大的成就，其结果对后面的研究也是有极大的意义的。
这些动画图片是如此有吸引力，与这些图片搭配的故事脚本也是很有趣。不幸的是，无论是从故事的组织结构，还是故事信息，其文本上还是存在一些问题。
艾米陈述了书中的引言部分，主要是介绍“50年代建立的动画设计的现代主义艺术传统”。事实上，他几乎没有讨论现代主义艺术。他更关心的是如何识别
出合适的导演、设计师、艺术家等们，此外，他认为，50年代的这些现代主义风格的动画作品都是传统的，保守的。当这些电影人喜欢上爵士乐，或者在一个艺术学校学习时，都表达了对费尔南德的钦佩。他可能偶尔欣赏抽象表现主义、波普艺术，但他依靠这本书，就可以让读者知道美国和欧洲二十世纪的艺术趋势。他至少两次提到，乔治、凯普1944年出版的书，这对一些动画制作者们都产生了很大的影响，使得他们都倾向于制作现代主义风格的动画作品，但他从未解释，当时的这些制作者们是受到他的影响 。本文并没有尝试阐述现代主义风格是如何影响那些好莱坞的。总的来说，其他的艺术和现代主义都只是假设，没有一个详细的解释和规范，可以用来指导这些动画电影制作者和动画电影上。
在我看来，与艾米的观点有很大的差异。他对现代主义的动画的定义是广泛的、全方位的，但是他蔑视传统动画，特别是迪斯尼的动画作品。
对于艾米来说，“现代”似乎意味着所有的都是抽象型表现主义的。他没有区分立体主义和超现实主义，也没有对他所谓的现代主义做一个详细的解释。他没有明确地对现代主义风格的动画与真正的现代/现代艺术动画做一个区分，也没将其当作现代主义的一部分。因此，它也没有提到奥斯卡·费新格和玛丽·艾伦的作品，似乎是因为这样一个可能性，即他们的工作影响了主流电影制片人。 （完整译文请到百度文库）
