If Toy-Land really existed, it would be populated by animated cartoons: small children are convinced of the fact and, seeing cartoon’s worldwide success, many grown-ups continue to think so, too. The adults who wander around this never-ending Fun Land in their droves can now count upon an exceptional fellow traveller. In the company of the philosopher Andrea Tagliapietra, they will see their best-loved animated cartoons in a different, even more thrilling light – that of the history of ideas.
From Snow White to the latest instalment in the Toy Story series, animation has been populated by characters of marked individuality that, albeit only images and things – simulacra – are familiar to us as living beings. Ultra-refined big-budget technologies thus produce a theatre of experience that shapes our consciousness. And they do so through figures and plots on this side and that of the human in a dimension of non-organic, paradoxical dynamism with an autonomous reason of its own. A feast for thought.
‘In my memory, even if it was summer or spring, the day after seeing cartoons was always like Christmas.’ Like his baby boomer peers, Andrea Tagliapietra saw his first cartoons on television in black and white. A palette of shades of grey that would be regarded as unwatchable today used to suck viewers into a ‘festive and exciting sensory event’. It was only at the cinema that it was possible to relish in the marvel of magically unnatural, warm, saturated colours, in backgrounds, ambiences, fairy-tale characters and anthropomorphic animals. The entire history of the culture of our time – ethics, aesthetics, anthropology, social philosophy, economics (of production) – has unfolded in the long journey from the first Disney shorts to the apocalyptic grotesque of Sony’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Whether they refer back to the reassuring pedagogy of Duckburg and Mouseton or to the anti-Disneyan genre that touches on hyperbole in the sadomasochistic circularity of the hunter-prey twosome of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, cartoons challenge metaphysical immobility and stretch violations of physical laws to the limit. They respond to the fundamental magical-symbolic need – present in myths, legends and popular traditions since antiquity – to animate the inanimate and let things speak. Pure-state mythology in the heart of contemporaneity.

Andrea Tagliapietra teaches History of Ideas, Philosophy of Culture and History of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, where he founded and directs the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research on the History of Ideas (CRISI). His essays include: Il dono del filosofo. Sul gesto originario della filosofia [The Philosopher’s Gift. On the original gesture of philosophy] (Einaudi 2009), Icone della fine. Immagini apocalittiche, filmografie, miti [Icons of the End. Apocalyptic images, filmographies, myths] (Il Mulino 2010), Non ci resta che ridere [All We Can Do Is Laugh] (Il Mulino 2013) and Esperienza. Filosofia e storia di un’idea [Experience. Philosophy and history of an idea] (Raffaello Cortina Editore 2017). With Bollati Boringhieri he has published La metafora dello specchio. Lineamenti per una storia simbolica [The Mirror Metaphor. Outlines for a symbolic history] (2008) and edited La fine di tutte le cose (The End of All Things) by Immanuel Kant (2006) and L’uomo è ciò che mangia (Man Is What He Eats) by Ludwig Feuerbach (2017).