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An Animated Journey to the 1920s: What Is Rubber Hose Style?

Rubber hose is a charming and iconic style that originated in the golden age of American animation in the 1920s. As the name suggests, its most defining characteristic is that characters’ limbs bend and stretch freely as if they were boneless ‘rubber hoses.’ This style maximized the fun of movement and rhythm over realistic expression, breathing life and joy into early animation.

Part 6: The End of an Era – Why Did the Rubber Hose Stop?

Starting in the mid-1930s, the fluid movements of rubber hose animation, which had defined an era, began to stiffen. This once-innovative style came to be seen as a relic of the past, giving way to a new aesthetic. The end of the rubber hose era was not a failure, but a necessary evolutionary step for the art form of animation to advance to the next level.

The Disney Effect: The Unstoppable March of Realism

The most decisive factor that led to the end of the rubber hose era was the overwhelming success of the Walt Disney Studios. In particular, the 1937 release of the world’s first feature-length animated film, , completely changed the landscape of the industry. The phenomenal success of this work proved that animation was no longer just a collection of short gags, but an art form capable of conveying deep emotions and narratives, just like live-action films.

Under the principle of ‘The Plausible Impossible,’ Disney focused on imbuing animation with realism and anatomical accuracy. Disney’s ‘Full Animation’ style, which expressed a character’s weight, the effects of gravity, and the movement of clear joints, was a philosophy diametrically opposed to the flexibility of rubber hose, which ignored the laws of physics.

The success of made Disney’s realistic style the new industry standard. Audiences and distributors wanted more sophisticated and moving stories, and other studios, including Fleischer, faced immense pressure to join this new trend. Fleischer’s ambitious feature, <Gulliver’s Travels>, was criticized for the incongruity between the realistically depicted Gulliver (using the rotoscoping technique) and the cartoonish Lilliputian characters—a problem Disney had already overcome.

The Limits of Simplicity: Changing Tastes and Technology

As animation matured artistically, the ambitions of its creators also grew. There was a rising demand for complex emotional performances and delicate psychological portrayals, moving away from the simple, gag-oriented short format. The simple designs and exaggerated movements of the rubber hose style had limitations in conveying such subtle expressions.

Consequently, by the late 1930s, the rubber hose style began to look primitive and outdated compared to the ornate and detailed world created by Disney. The surrealistic sensibility of the 1920s did not fit with the more realistic atmosphere of the Great Depression era, and the style gradually fell out of fashion. Fleischer Studios was the last to maintain the style until around 1940, but ultimately, they could not go against the tide of the times.

Underlying this change was the desire for animation as a medium to secure artistic legitimacy. Disney, the most influential producer of the time, believed that for animation to be recognized as an art form equal to live-action film, it had to follow the grammar of live-action film: realism, anatomy, and dramatic narrative structure. In the end, animation sought to join the mainstream arts by adopting the universal grammar of cinematic realism, at the cost of sacrificing its unique, chaotic, and surreal language inherited from comic strips.