Charles Solomon (animation historian)

Charles Solomon is an American animation historian, author, and film critic who wrote multiple books about Disney animation and other animated works.^[1][2]

Education

Solomon attended University of California Los Angeles for his bachelor's and master's degrees in European cultural history.^[3]

Accolades

Enchanted Drawings, Solomon's 1989 book on the history of American animation,^[4] was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was also nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award (a first for a film book).^[5]

Film criticism

Solomon has written about the subject for NPR,^[1] Variety,^[1] Rolling Stone^[1] and The New York Times.^[6]

Solomon, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1986, listed his picks for the best animated films of the 1980s:^[7]

• Crac (Frederic Back, 1981)
• Son of the White Mare (Marcell Jankovics, 1981)
• The Adventures of Mark Twain (Will Vinton, 1985)
• Anna & Bella (Borge Ring, 1985)
• The Big Snit (Richard Condie, 1985)
• The Great Mouse Detective (Burny Mattinson/John Musker/Ron Clements, 1986)

Selected bibliography

• Enchanted Drawings (1989)
• The Disney That Never Was (1995)^[8]
• The Prince of Egypt: A New Vision in Animation (1998)^[9]
• The Art of Toy Story 3 (2010)
• The Art of Making Peanuts Animation (2012)^[10]
• The Art of Frozen (2013)^[11]
• The Art of the Disney Golden Books (2014)
• Tale as Old as Time (2017)^[12]
• Walt Disney's Nine Old Men (2018)^[13]
• The Disney Princess: A Celebration of Art & Creativity (2020)^[3]
• The Art of Wolfwalkers (2020)^[14]
• The Art of Mamoru Hosoda: The Man Who Leapt Through Film (2023)^[15][16]