Educational Media Reviews Online

This is a well-made and provocative film about two decades in the life of Tomi Ungerer, a French artist best known in the United States for his award winning children’s books, his international political posters and sayings (“expect the unexpected”), and his role in the New York art scene of the ‘50s and 60s.

The film opens with Tomi Ungerer in France discussing his ambivalence toward America—thus, its appropriate title, Tomi Ungerer Versus America. It gives an alternative take on American history in the post-WWII era as seen through the words and work of this French artist, who both embraced and was appalled by the America he saw in 1950s New York. He embraced the modernity and future vision of New York, which contrasted starkly with war weary, bombed-out Europe. Yet, he was appalled by the lack of health care, Cold War paranoia, racial segregation and the Vietnam War, which he believed demonstrated all that was wrong with the United States. As an artist, he attacked America’s wrongs through cartoons and posters with an eye to educating people to make them right. As a successful children’s book writer, he could still be a successful ad man and political activist. As an award-winning children’s book writer he could not, however, create pornography. Tomi Ungerer returned to Europe to continue his successful career as an artist, when American morality and his artistic freedom collided.

The film features Tomi Ungerer speaking from his home in France, often in response to other artists, most notably, Jules Feiffer, via computer in the US. It presents interviews with artists and friends who knew him in during his time in America, and who elaborate on his brilliance and ability to reveal abuse of power and hypocrisy, while, at the same time, also note that Ungerer could be “naughty” or “nasty.” Images of Ungerer’s political works are blended with footage of McCarthy’s anti-Communist statements, police attacks against Civil Rights demonstrators, and helicopters burning villages in Vietnam. Ungerer links the American geographical ignorance he encountered when he first arrived in New York (“Americans only know the areas they occupied”), with American’s inability to see the invasion of Iraq as a repetition of Vietnam.

Although the film honors Ungerer for his children’s books, it portrays the wealth and breadth of his artistic creativity and features examples of all—drawings for children, to political posters and pornography. Tomi Ungerer is revealed here as an important artist, whose topical and political art from specific moments in history has gone on to be relevant to later times. The film would work for college level history courses as a revealing portrait of an era from a different point of view, and, of course, for artists and art historians.