Unlike their minstrel predecessors, these cartoons celebrate oddities rather than ridicule them.
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First, it’s important to understand how deeply embedded the minstrel tradition is in American animation. In a study entitled
Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, University of Toronto professor Nicholas Sammond illustrates how American animation not only developed out of minstrel tradition — cartoons keep the aesthetic principles of minstrel shows alive and could not exist without them. While film and media historians are clear on the relationship between the two widely popular staples of American culture, as Sammond says, “that observation too often has added up to little more than a mere nod or at best a shaking finger — yes, the American cartoon’s debt to the minstrel is undeniable and wrong, now could we please move on?” Meanwhile, the most enduring features of American cartoons reenact the minstrel’s body in all its buffoonery and excitement. “Cartoons didn’t borrow from minstrelsy, they joined” it, as Sammond puts it. A familial resemblance is easy to see in early animation figures from the 1920s, such as
Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid and Betty Boop’s companions
Bimbo and Koko, with their blacked-out bodies, Jump Jim Crow attire (gloves, hats, patent shoes), and vaudeville antics. The similarities become less overt over time. Mickey Mouse and friends, Bugs Bunny, and others would keep the gloves, but by the height of their popularity, became more like “vestigial minstrels,” as Sammond calls them.
