How do you picture evolution? The images that come to mind are probably not works by any of Darwin’s great artistic contemporaries. No, they’re a couple of 20th-century cartoons. There’s Rudy Zallinger’s illustration, The March of Progress, which first appeared in the Time-Life book Early Man (1970). It shows a line of primates walking, from left to right, evolving step by step from a knuckle-dragging ape to an upright, modern, Caucasian man. You know it well. It’s an image that’s become proverbial, much quoted or adapted, familiar to multitudes that have never seen its original version.
The other cartoon is Walt Disney’s animation, Fantasia (1940). In the prehistoric sequence that accompanies a drastically edited version of The Rite of Spring, there’s an evolutionary episode. It starts with a ballet of undersea primal blobs. One of the blobs takes shape, and embarks on a journey, left to right and upwards, during which it mutates into more complex life forms – tadpole, fish, amphibian – finally surfacing as a primitive terrestrial quadruped.
Independent (thanks, Fosca)
Forget Fantasia’s textbook evolution depiction – animator Bruno Bozzetto’s retelling has a much more quirky take on the evolution story… we all evolved from the dregs of a coke bottle thrown from an alien spaceship to the strains of Ravel’s Bolero!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PLlsjyhbLU
Well it’s still more convincing than creationism!
Here’s part 2 if you want to see how it ends!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y71HAeHjdNA
If we list every theory about how we got here, creationism isn’t always at the bottom. I cringe at the idea that a lot of people automatically think everything is better than creationism. Nothing is as good as evolution, and nothing else has been proven. Creationism has all appearances of a silly fantasy, but I’ve heard stupider. LOL
Oh. I was going to say… I remember seeing Rudy Zallinger’s illustration when I was a little kid. My Christian parents (one, a Baptist preacher) didn’t know I had been going down to the library to study evolution. I used to look at that drawing with such wonder and amazement. I wanted to tell everyone, “Look what they discovered!” And I soon realized that they were already aware and had never told me. At six or seven years old I began lying about my faith so that I wouldn’t be reprimanded. I was much, much older when I finally began speaking of my childhood research.
Flapjack, that cartoon is amazing. Gets really sinister at the end.
Too bad there are no examples of the art on this exhibition .. I am a bit curious actually, to see with what they have come up .
SGC- glad you enjoyed it, it’s part of a feature called “Allegro non Troppo” which was an Italian parody of Disney’s Fantasia with an ecological angle to it, made back in the 70′s.
First saw it at an animation festival 12 years ago.
This is still my favourite out of the 6 animated segments in the movie as it’s funny and psychodelic, with a sinister sting in the tail.