Cartoon Vision

"An inspired account of the experimental design idiom of the legendary UPA studios. Cartoon Vision frames modern animation as part of an urgent project to reorganize vision in a postwar climate of sensory overstimulation. By showing us what Mr. Magoo owed to Moholy-Nagy, Bashara’s bold interdisciplinary study unsettles familiar stories about midcentury modernism."—Justus Nieland, author of Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era

“By repositioning United Productions of America (UPA)—one of the twentieth century’s most important animation studios—in a history that goes beyond animation and American cinema to concurrent movements in interwar American art and mid-century design thinking, Cartoon Vision makes a critical contribution to the history of American visual culture at large. It is sure to become a valuable source for historians of many stripes, from film and media studies to art and design to American modernism."—Brian R. Jacobson, author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space