Tashlin Bibliography

It was probably inevitable that someone like Frank Tashlin, given his extensive experience with various modes of illustrated story-telling -- from the single-panel gag cartoons which constituted his first professional work, to the four-panel newspaper strip ("Van Boring") with which he moonlighted during his early career as an animator, to the full-blown animated films that he turned out for Leon Schlesinger Productions (Warner Bros.) and Screen Gems (Columbia) -- would eventually turn his talents to the more traditional form of the "children's book." (And yes, I put that term in quotes for a reason, which I'll get to.) In addition to his general background, it's not difficult to pinpoint the specific experiences and influences which, beginning about 1940, nudged him in this direction: his short-lived stint as a story and gag man at the Disney studios, where he no doubt found himself in a somewhat more refined story-and-character-development atmosphere than the gag-driven ethos that prevailed at Termite Terrace (films in development and/or production during his time at Disney included DUMBO and PINOCCHIO); his own experience as a father (his daughter Patricia was born in 1938); and, not least, his driving ambition to break out of what he saw as the artistic ghetto of the "cartoon director," which was almost certainly at its peak during the mid-to-late 1940's.

Whatever went into the stew, it finally bubbled over with the publication in 1946 of The Bear That Wasn't -- which was something of a smash hit both commercially and critically, and garnered him some very admiring personal publicity as well (including a cover story in a February 1946 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature). And it's probably not too much of a stretch to say that the book is ultimately his most enduring work in any medium -- not to take anything away from his films, but merely to acknowledge that while even his best films (such as The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) are largely relegated to appreciation by the cognoscenti, The Bear That Wasn't (thanks in large measure to the venerable Dover Publications, whose paperback edition first appeared in 1962) remains in print to this day (in numerous languages).

Now let's just talk for a second about this "children's book" appellation -- which I essentially reject, as did Tashlin himself. While it's true enough that The Bear and The 'Possum, with their fuzzy-animal protagonists and simple surface narratives, serve the little-tyke audience reasonably well -- but they are hardly soothing bedtime fare, at least not for the kid who's really paying attention to the underlying messages. It's pretty obvious that Tashlin constructed these little parables in order to have his say about what he saw as modern society's wrong-headed oppression of the world's free spirits, specifically the enormous pressure to conform that is brought to bear (no pun intended) on anyone who dares to insist on his individuality, or to take a stand against the established order. (It is entirely appropriate that both the Bear and the 'Possum made their appearance during the early years of the Cold War, when failure to conform to the norm could get you a whole lot of hot water -- especially in Hollywood.)

He abandoned the "children's book" pretense entirely, at last, with The World That Isn't, an astoundingly bleak portrayal of Modern Man and the evils he has wrought upon the world, leading finally to nuclear apocalypse -- which rather improbably brings about a return of humankind to its natural Eden-like state. This is not a book that any rational parent would read to their child.

It's not at all clear where Tashlin might have been headed -- i.e., where the Bear --> 'Possum --> World trajectory might have taken him next -- and this is reflected in the nature of his various unpublished works, which range wildly from Golden-Bookish conservative (Little Chic's Wonderful Mother) to borderline radical/revisionist (The Turtle That Couldn't). For more discussion of that part of his ouevre, however, you're just going to have to wait until I get the "Unpublished Books" section of this bibliography up and running.


*The Bear That Wasn't* (1946)	*The 'Possum That Didn't* (1950)	*The World That Isn't* (1951)	*How to Create Cartoons* (1952)