It’s a Bird: Animation, objective humour and the heart of the black star

Fijalkowski, Krzysztof (2025) It’s a Bird: Animation, objective humour and the heart of the black star. In: Abigail Susik, ed., Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920-Present. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, pp. 25-37.

Abstract

The edited volume Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920-Present is the first scholarly publication devoted to the theme of animation within the international; surrealist movement, from the 1920s up to the present. This chapter considers an early avatar of surrealist animation in the work of pioneering animator Charlie Bowers, whose mixture of live film and stop-motion contributed to a series of comedy shorts, highly popular in the US and Europe during the 1920s and 1930s but now forgotten. Surrealist founder and key theorist André Breton was aware of Bowers’ film It’s a Bird (1930) in which Charlie captures a legendary metal-eating bird from Africa, which among other achievements eats a trombone and hatches a Model-A Ford. Breton’s appreciation of the film is contextualized with his contemporary development of ‘objective humour’, later developed into the surrealist ‘black humour’ that will act as a defence against the rising tide of fascism in 1930s Europe.

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