5.In between Isotype and Disney
Besides his work for Fortune, Ragan’s postwar work included films for several clients. Perhaps the best known is One World or None, commissioned by the National Committee on Atomic Information. Addressing the horrors of atomic bombings and their international control, the film combines live action and multistylistic animation. In the live-action footage, which includes scenes of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the animated sections, alongside the diagrams, we can identify realistic illustrations that had been absent in Ragan’s earlier work as well as abstract illustrations representing nuclear fission. These illustrations were created by Sam Feinstein (1915–2003), who worked as an animator for Ragan Productions for a short time in 1946–1948.
During the war, Ragan was closely connected with the arts, opening the Ragan Art Gallery in Philadelphia in 1941 and publishing the art magazine Art Outlook in 1943. Feinstein’s employment may also have been motivated by this interest since he was a Russian painter who created abstract expressionist art. However, because he was not allowed to be credited in the film, Feinstein wrote to a newspaper reporter who had written an article praising the film:
These sequences were quite a technical tour de force, being scientifically accurate (the result of supervision by Dr. Leonard Schiffy of the University of Pennsylvania physics department), as well as dramatically visually, the result of darn hard work by me, in terms of creation and execution.
(Feinstein, 2008, p.46)
Feinstein’s assertion was undoubtedly true, judging from the stylistic features of Ragan’s films up to that point. The scenes depicting nuclear fission were accurate in that they were viewed by a physicist who was an expert in the field, and they also succeeded in creating dramatic visual effects. In the other scenes, Feinstein may have been responsible for realistically depicting people’s fears superimposed on the atomic bombings. In contrast to this abstraction of fear, the film uses a symbolic form of circles, such as the transformation of the ‘O’ in the title to the earth at the beginning of the film, the conference table with a roundtable, and the circle around the skull that conveys the extent of the damage of the bomb. Simply put, the film communicates an overall impression of an unruly object of terror and its control. The circle is interpreted as a tool that controls the chaos (Figure 16).
An article featuring Ragan in the November 1949 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, a local newspaper, praised him as ‘the Disney of scientists’, as One World or None was technically supported by the Federation of American Scientists, a group of eminent scientists, and even garnered praise from Albert Einstein and others ((Figure 17)).
This newspaper article quoted Ragan as follows:
With Disney, education is a by-product of entertainment. With me it’s the other way around. My movies are as objective and as factual as is humanly possible. They are animated facts without resource to fictional indirection that tells an amusing story and hopes the audience will absorb the message as a by-product of the laughs.
(McIlvaine, 1949)
Here, Ragan cited Disney to explain the difference between entertainment and education. Meanwhile, Neurath is no exception in emphasizing the educational value of the Disney comparison. When he was approached by a magazine with the idea of combining Isotype animation with Disney’s informational animation, he rejected the possibility:
This mixture of Disney photos and our own drawings is unbearable -either- or. The reason is, that his maps and other drawings in principle do not intend, what we intend to do, i.e., giving some educational information.
(Neurath, 1942, cited in Burke, 2013, p.370)
Neurath was considered as taking a sensitive stance in setting boundaries with Disney, which he found difficult to reconcile with Isotype. Meanwhile, compared to this strictness, despite his arguments, Ragan was relatively wide open at least in terms of the form of expression. There was humor in the early movements of the Plugger character, and his late-war and postwar work showed a relative reduction in the weight of pictograms and the addition of shades of realism and abstraction. This difference may be partly due to Ragan’s exploration of animation as a filmmaker. Monotony is unavoidable, especially in animations longer than two minutes. Meanwhile, Neurath was a theorist who directed Isotype and believed that visual design innovation was secondary; rather, education through visual argumentation was the most important goal, in which pictograms were an essential language-like element.
Ragan’s direction may be somewhat similar to that of Modley, who approached the realm of illustration by actively incorporating elements of cartoony culture and proposed the potential of pictographic animation as a ‘new dynamic method of graphic presentation’.
Ragan’s situation seemed good until about 1946, when he began expanding his business by building more studios. However, these circumstances would be short-lived; in around 1948, Ragan Productions went bankrupt and ceased to operate as a production company. Nevertheless, fragments of Ragan’s animated films like Target You can be observed after these events. Far from the images that were expected to convey ‘sound principles of international understanding’, these were gloomy, direct reflections of the political situation during the Cold War. The existence of such films is one reason why Ragan has since been forgotten.