Book review: Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture

Optical toys have long been relegated to being museum pieces in the prehistory of cinema, whether they are live action or animated. In their time, they were, however, not only things to be seen, to be looked at, but playthings – things to be played with. More importantly, they were radically new. Meeting them, just as precursors to cinema now, it may be hard to imagine them as challenges to the media ecology of their time, full of promises, fears and reception debates. Helping us to imagine that is precisely what Meredith A Bak’s very exciting and thought-provoking Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture sets out to do. Published under the dual categories of ‘education and media’, the book’s interdisciplinary approach to optical toys in their original 19thand early 20th-century contexts makes it relevant for scholars outside of childhood studies as well, such as game and play studies or, more importantly, animation studies. Although it is not framed within film and animation studies, its archival and media-archaeological treatment of optical toys challenges us to rethink these early predecessors of animation under a new, more nuanced light. Bak’s interest in archival and phenomenological foci brings her study closer to a history of the ideas of (educational) toys and of vision in the century before the advent of screen media. In this, optical toys were the cultural space that paved the way for the coming media, their spectators, their industries and their public discussion. Given the complex way that Bak tackles an already complex subject, the best way to understand the book is by going through its contents. The chapters are structured in a more or less linear order, although the book is not constructed merely as a catalogue of inventions. Chapter 1, ‘Templates, Toys, and Text: Optical Toys in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Culture’, explores the ways that optical toys were introduced and distributed through venues like the juvenile print market. The next three chapters give us a more in-depth look at specific toys. Chapter 2, ‘Language in Motion: The Thaumatrope Establishes a Multimedia Convention’, investigates the thaumatrope, while Chapter 3, ‘Seeing Things: Optical Play at Home’, focuses on domestic uses of toys such as the zoetrope or the phenakistoscope. Chapter 4, ‘Moveable Toy Books and the Culture of Independent Play’, deals with a media format that is rather under-researched: the moveable toy book. This shows the breadth of Bak’s ‘ludic archive’, and highlights general historical trends such as the conquest of domestic space and the conception of leisure time for children apart from adults. The following chapters deal more directly with the application of optical toys in pedagogic projects. Chapter 5, ‘Color Education: From the Chaotic Kaleidoscope to the Orderly Spectrum’, shows the industry and theories built around the pedagogy of colour, in part as a response to 1049364 ANM0010.1177/17468477211049364AnimationBook review book-review2021