Drawing for television Illustration and animation in Dutch public youth television, 1951-1996: media technological, financial and cultural influences forming a professional cultural field

Dutch television has a tradition of illustrated, rather than animated children’s programs. To understand this, this dissertation is based on a newly built database consisting of around 600 titles. These programs are part of the upbringing of the majority of children between 1951 and 1996, and should be seen as cultural heritage. Combining Remediation theory and Field theory, this comparative research focuses on how television illustration remediates other media outside television on a cultural, rather than pedagogical level, leaving enilikacentrism (treating children as inferior to adults) behind.
In the 1950s and 1960s, children’s television had to be educational. Television illustration was mostly done by freelance illustrators who remediated book illustration. Illustrations were immersive, just like high art, but made with the specific demands of television in mind. The pioneering phase made place for a rudimentary form of a new Field.
Around the 1970s, children were given more autonomy in youth literature, film, and television. In art and media, the often hypermediated avant-garde came up, which is also seen in illustrated children’s programs. Since television illustration had become a new Field, it stopped remediating other media technologically, but continued remediating culturally. Illustrated youth television flourished, with many assignments for a team of in-house illustrators who had artistic freedom. Short animations were sometimes made. At the end of the 1980s, most illustrators retired, making room for a new generation of freelance animators, which introduced new disciplines to the Field, as an addition to the ‘traditional’ illustrations that were also still made.