The link between blackface minstrelsy and early animated characters such as Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse has been a common observation in discussions of the development of animation and the place of the anthropomorphized animals that occupy that space. Nicholas Sammond takes this observation a step further than many previous scholars and argues that these characters do not merely trace their origins to minstrelsy's formations but were actually minstrels. Explicitly he says: “Mickey Mouse isn't like a minstrel; he is a minstrel” (5, original emphasis), and the key visual clue of that status is his gloves. Sammond examines the rise of animation from performative traditions of the rapid-sketch chalk-and-talk acts in vaudeville and their recourse to racial iconography. So, for instance, James Stuart Blackton, one of the early purveyors of animation, had a vaudeville act which, filmed in 1907 as Lightning Sketch, shows his use of crude racial stereotypes of African Americans and Jews. More importantly, Sammond discusses the trajectory of Winsor McCay, another earlier animator. McCay performed alongside his animated characters, most famously Gertie the Dinosaur, as part of his vaudeville act. Sammond argues that in these performances the part played by McCay, as “the animator,” was somewhat similar to that of the interlocutor in the blackface minstrelsy of the day. This performative aspect of animation's early years remained, as animation shifted from being part of a vaudeville act to being more and more simply a screened short film, and as the creative process shifted from mostly individual artisanal labor to rationalized forms of labor in production houses.

Animators, such as Max Fleischer, liked to tell stories that featured a dialogue between animator and the animated subject. As Sammond shows, these had a performative aspect, often dealt with the whole issue of creation and production, were deeply self-reflexive, and took as their model for the dialogue that of the interlocutor and Bones in minstrel shows. Numerous Ko-Ko the Clown animated shorts of the 1920s played with this theme of Max Fleischer drawing Ko-Ko and interacting with him. By this time, though, Max and his brothers had developed a small-scale studio system to produce such animation, but the performance trope was so tied to animation that despite, or because of, the changing nature of labor, the Fleischer Brothers and other animators retained such themes. Sammond shows that as “the bonds between the cartoon minstrel and its real-world referents” dissolved, popular characters such as Mickey, Felix or Bugs could “continue to visually and gesturally act as minstrels but over time lose a direct association with blackface itself. The tropes of the animated trickster were well enough established that their original referent … could depart the stage without diminishing the power” of the drawn replacements (183–84).

The book is organized into four thematic chapters on performance, labor, space, and race, and deals with much more than this link between performance and minstrelsy, including, for instance, the way that the introduction of sound changed the spatial relations of animation, its display and reception, and indeed that of film in general. This thematic approach leads to some repetition, and if it was not for the importance of “the animator” as presence in the animation trope I might have tired of the return to this topic across Sammond's themes. But that theme, the link between the performance of vaudeville with its minstrelsy themes and its presence in fully animated shorts, is what drives home the case for so many cartoon characters being minstrels. There are some slight wrinkles to this argument that Sammond might have covered more effectively. Many of the characters he examines also had a static existence as comic strips in which there was little trace of performance. Indeed, as John Canemaker, one of Sammond's predecessors in the field of animation studies, relates, Felix the Cat came about in part by adopting the racist trickster comic strip Sambo and His Funny Noises to animation. The Felix comic strip much more successfully elided its minstrelsy origins than the animated cartoons Sammond discusses because the performative aspect was absent. Or perhaps such a view is a mistake because the character of Felix across the mediums of animation and comic strips might have been united in audiences’ minds and the connection might have been clear to the comic strip's readers. This observation does not undermine Sammond's argument, and indeed only makes the performative connection all the stronger.