A History of Film Music: Defectors to television

Documentary and animation were two specialized genres of film conceived for theatrical release that flourished in this context only in the heyday of movie-going, when audiences still expected to see more than one attraction in a programme and something by way of contrast to the feature-length and mostly fictional narratives that formed the core of the presentation. The documentary film in the pre-television era fulfilled both didactic and entertaining functions – and, in times of war, totalitarianism or national crisis, often served as powerful propaganda aimed at a captive spectatorship. In both Europe and the USA in the 1930s and 1940s some documentary films acquired artistic prestige on account of an audio-visual experimentalism that was often sorely lacking in narrative films. By contrast, the animated short was generally comedic in nature and predominantly anthropomorphic in conception, but occasionally abstract or didactic in intent. The fortunes of both genres in the cinema seriously and permanently dipped towards the end of the 1950s when television established itself as the ideal medium for disseminating factual and current-affairs programmes, at the same time as a growing demand for uncontroversial family and children's viewing secured cartoons a firm (and, to the production companies, still lucrative) niche in the living room. This development occurred as theatrical features continued to become more adult-oriented in the wake of the long-awaited collapse of the moral strictures of Hollywood's Production Code.