Cartoon Modern

Sterling Sturtevant is a name that is not often heard nowadays, but during the 1950s, she was the most prolific female character designer working in the industry. The primary reason for her obscurity is that she died in 1962, long before anybody had bothered to begin documenting the work of Fifties animation designers. She started at Disney in the late 1940s, and during the 1950s, she was a well known and in-demand designer who worked primarily at UPA, where she redesigned Mister Magoo in 1953, and Playhouse Pictures, where she designed advertising characters like the Ford Dog and Burgie (Burgermeister Beer). Below is a model sheet for a Chrysler DeSoto commercial that was produced at Playhouse. It is very typically Sturtevant with clear graphic shapes and a lack of ornament. This simplicity in design allowed the animators to have a lot of fun with her designs and really push the shapes around from pose to pose. This particular spot has some incredible animation by Rod Scribner. I’ll post more of her work in a while.

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(model sheet from the collection of Jerry Beck)

Canadian animator Nick Sung has written a nice appreciation of Ward Kimball’s TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM (1953). He’s using TOOT as inspiration for a personal short film that he’s currently working on, and includes on his blog a few pages of compositional studies that he did from the film. I’ll be writing more about TOOT in the future, but in the meantime, be sure to check out the great set of frame grabs from the film at Ward Jenkins’s Ward-O-Matic.

I’d forgotten I had this until I posted the GERALD item below and it’s something I promise you won’t find anywhere else. Below is a two-page UPA inter-office memo dated September 26, 1952 in which UPA president Steve Bosustow discusses how GERALD MCBOING BOING’S SYMPHONY went over budget. It’s well known that the UPA studio had trouble sticking to budgets on its theatrical shorts, and that fact is stated in a number of animation history books including Leonard Maltin’s OF MICE AND MAGIC and Mike Barrier’s HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS. But this document, which breaks down overages by department, sheds a fascinating new light on the studio’s operations and how it was spending money on its films.

The memo also raises some interesting questions. For example, Bosustow speaks of a “constant morale problem” in the animation department. My best guess is that the morale problem stemmed from the Hollywood blacklist which had torn apart the studio earlier in 1952. In another budget analysis for MADELINE, Bosustow again blames the animation overages on the issue of morale: “We believe this was almost wholly a result of studio morale when, for a period of almost two weeks, there was no work done in Bobe’s unit.”

Anyway, hope you folks find this as fascinating as I do. I have a couple more of these overage memos and I’ll post them if anybody’s interested.

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The term mise-en-scène was seemingly invented for director Bobe Cannon. Regardless of which designer he was working with, Cannon’s films are consistently excellent in the areas of background layout and character staging. GERALD MCBOING BOING’S SYMPHONY (1953) is no exception, and as beautiful as the stills are below, it’s even more impressive to watch the actual cartoon. Cannon continually surprises the viewer with the myriad interesting ways he moves the characters through these super-lean, nearly abstract environments. The film was designed by T. Hee, color styled by Jules Engel and Michi Kataoka, and animated by Bill Melendez and Frank Smith.

The short can be viewed online HERE, but beware there’s a major cut near the end of the video. The good news though is that the four original Gerald shorts — which includes this film — are being released onto DVD in January. Also exciting, Tee Bosustow is currently working on a film documentary about Bobe Cannon. I’ve seen some of the archival material he’s gathered for this project and it’s amazing. It’s going to be a great (and long overdue) tribute to Cannon.

The Deep Archives, the gallery selling the Ed Benedict artwork that I wrote about earlier, also has images of the following UPA backgrounds, which have already been sold:

Though these backgrounds certainly look like something from the 1950s, they are actually from a 1945 US Navy training film called THE ROVER BOYS, directed by John Hubley. The background designers on the film were Jules Engel and Herb Klynn, though I don’t know which of them designed and painted these particular backgrounds. During the mid-1940s, most of the American animation industry was still firmly entrenched in an illustrative and realistically rendered approach to background painting. Only a small group of artists — perhaps two dozen at most — were consciously pushing for stylized design at this time, and a good number of them worked at the upstart cartoon studio UPA. I spend some time in the introduction of my book tracing the roots of 1950s animation design and looking at the pioneering animation designers of the 1940s. To get a sense of how radical the ROVER BOYS backgrounds were in comparison to what was happening elsewhere, check out this painting from Disney’s SONG OF THE SOUTH (1946).

Both approaches have their value so the intent here isn’t to say that a stylized background is somehow more valid or better than an illustrative background. But the ROVER BOYS bgs serve as an example of how far artists like Engel and Klynn had drifted apart from their contemporaries during the mid-1940s. Not only are the film’s backgrounds revolutionary in their wholly unrealistic use of color, but they’re also impressive for their restrained use of color. Notice that a lot of the negative space in the backgrounds is created from white areas that have been simply left unpainted, and in the top background, the unpainted white even creates part of the positive space in the form of the hangar roofs. Leaving so much of the background “unfinished” at another studio like Warners or MGM would have surely gotten Engel and Klynn fired, but at UPA, the use of color as a prominent design element was one of the studio’s distinguishing hallmarks from the very beginning.

Following the post on UPA’s logo, Ward Jenkins asks if I have any photos of the UPA studio that was designed by John Lautner in 1949. Within this building, many classics of 1950s animation were created including GERALD MCBOING BOING, THE TELL-TALE HEART, UNICORN IN THE GARDEN, ROOTY TOOT TOOT and the Mr. Magoo shorts. Sadly the building was torn down many years ago, but below are some 1950s-era photos of the studio. The more famous Los Angeles landmark that Lautner completed in 1949 was Googie’s Restaurant. In the early-1950s, critic Douglas Haskell dubbed an entire school of commercial archicture after Lautner’s building, and thus the Googie style was born. Ironically, Lautner’s design of the UPA animation studio, the place where one might most expect to find the whimsical and cartoonish elements of the Googie style, was free of any such excesses. The UPA studio instead had a sort of industrial modern esthetic and incorporated vaulted roofs made of corrugated metal, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and exposed steel beams inside of the building.

I flipped out when Greg D’Onofrio emailed me about this today. His design studio Kind Company has just launched an amazing website dedicated to West Coast graphic designer Alvin Lustig (1915-1955) with over 400 examples of Lustig’s magazine and book covers, brochures and logo designs, and architectural works. I’ve seen various examples of Lustig’s work here and there, but this is the first comprehensive resource dedicated to the designer and it’s absolutely excellent.

So why mention Lustig here? He was the designer who came up with the ubiquitous UPA logo (below) which was seen on all the studio’s animated films and print materials. The Lustig site also has a couple images of the ultra-rare original UPA logo (above) which he designed in 1946. A rarely discussed aspect of UPA (United Productions of America) is how much conscious effort the studio put into projecting a modern image to the general public. They were the first animation studio that was built upon the foundation of Modern Art, and they wanted to make that fact obvious to everybody, which is why they commissioned an A-list designer like Lustig to design their logo. It’s also why they hired Modernist architect John Lautner to design their studio building.

The Deep Archives, an animation gallery back east, is currently selling some of Ed Benedict’s commercial artwork. Benedict is, of course, the character designer of Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, The Flintstones, and so many other early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but these drawings are for TV commercials that he designed at Paul Fennell’s studio Cartoon Films in the late-1940s and early-1950s. I think some of it might also be from Cascade, where Ed designed TV commercials for Tex Avery in the mid-1950s. It’s perhaps not the most prime examples of his work, but nevertheless it’s rare Benedict art.

I spoke to the 93-year-old Benedict yesterday, and despite some physical ailments, he is still sharp as a tack. He was really happy when I told him that Fantagraphics is doing a book about one of his favorite illustrators, Russell Patterson, and he also told me that the Deep Archives recently got more of his work, so keep an eye out on their website for additional Benedict art. I’ll be writing about Ed much more in the future, but you can also check out my extensive interview that I did with him in the print edition of ANIMATION BLAST #8.

MAN OF ACTION (1955) is an industrial film oddity that can be viewed at Archive.org. The character designs and animation are both pretty weak, but there’s some good expressionistic background layouts and paintings that would look even nicer if the print weren’t so faded. The film was produced by Transfilm, a major New York TV commercial/industrial film producer and designed by Digby Turpin, a British designer and director. Judging from the animation style and Turpin’s involvement, I’m guessing this film was produced in England even though Transfilm is the production company and it’s promoting urban renewal in American cities.

There’s not much info available about Turpin, but during the Fifties, he did quite a bit of work for Halas & Batchelor, including background design on the first British animated feature ANIMAL FARM (1954). Turpin also won a BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ equivalent of the Oscar) in 1958 for his short film PAN-TELE-TRON, a promotional film for the BBC2. Another curio of his that I’ve seen is BEEP PEEP ( 1959), a bizarre theatrical commercial for British Petroleum that is done in an experimental style a la Norman McLaren and has absolutely nothing to do with its sponsor except for an intermittently flashing BP logo that appears throughout the film.

This is a UPA background by Bob McIntosh for an early-1950s TV commercial or industrial film. I haven’t been able to identify what it was for, but it was likely done around the time he first arrived at the studio in 1952.

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The focus of my book is on 1950s animation design in the United States, but by the end of the 1950s, the most innovative and exciting animation design was being produced overseas — primarily in Europe, but also in other countries like Japan. The design movement flourished in these countries well into the mid-1960s, whereas it was pretty much played out in the US by 1961. One of the more famous stylized cartoon characters from Japan is Uncle Torys, an advertising character created for Suntory Whiskey in 1958. Here is a WEBSITE with a few examples of Uncle Torys print advertising and a Quicktime of one of the TV commercials.

The character was created by Ryohei Yanagihara (b. 1931) who went on to become a major figure in Japanese independent animation in the early-1960s. According to the above website, in addition to creating numerous short films, Yanagihara also designed over 40 movie title sequences. Sadly, I’ve never seen any of his animated shorts or title sequences, but sure would like to. Yanagihara’s work has a strong formal graphic sensibility that owes a lot to other mid-century designers and illustrators like Saul Bass and Miroslav Sasek, but also to animation designers like Fred Crippen, Ernie Pintoff and Jimmy Murakami, who were designing very similar-looking cartoon characters at UPA around 1956 and 1957. It’s worth noting that Yanagihara was also a prolific illustrator who created many book covers and other types of print artwork, and in some ways, he seems like a godfather to some of today’s great Japanese illustrators like Toru Fukuda and Tadahiro Uesugi.

Here’s a couple more Yanagihara sites:
Ben Ettinger writes about Yanagihara’s involvement in animation
Gallery of Yanagihara’s paintings for the Mitsui O.S.K. ships

(via Will Kane)

During the course of writing this book, I discovered many new designers and saw enough Fifties animation art to last me a lifetime, but I did not run across another artist who I felt surpassed Tom Oreb’s range and skills as a character designer. (I’m sure most readers of this site are already familiar with Oreb, but if not, he was the designer of shorts like Tex Avery’s SYMPHONY IN SLANG and Ward Kimball’s TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM, as well as the character stylist of SLEEPING BEAUTY.) It wasn’t simply that Oreb was a terrific draftsman — many artists from that period were — but he had a one-of-a-kind ability in applying those draftsmanship skills towards creating some of the most consistently inventive, daring and visually satisfying designs of the period.

For starters, here’s an example of Oreb’s work that I’ve always enjoyed. These owls are taken from a sheet of “ruff model suggestions” that Oreb created for Disney’s SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959). The full model sheet has something like forty-plus owls on it, and each one is a design gem comprised of elegant shapes and packed with personality and a sly sense of humor.

Looks like CARTOON MODERN won’t be the only Fifties-related animation book released next year. Comic book/animation artist Scott Morse (currently working at Pixar) has just announced a new book project, NOBLE BOY, which will be out in spring 2006 through his new publishing company Red Window. The book is a graphic tribute to his mentor, Fifties designer Maurice Noble. Morse recently told Newsarama:

“I worked with Maurice beginning in 1994 and grew close with him. He was a sort of surrogate grandfather for the small group he hand-picked to train, dubbed ‘Noble Boys’, though there were a couple of women, as well. What was so great about Maurice was not only the aesthetic of his artwork, but his drive and energy as a human, his ability to be so down to Earth and not take himself so seriously. It was this view of life that informed his work, and it’s more that than anything that informed the work of the people he grew close to.”

Newsarama’s Chris Arrant has more details on the project: “Told all in rhyme, NOBLE BOY seeks to encompass both the playful quality of the man as well as bringing new light to his teaching and theories. Although it is set to be bound as a ‘board book’-style children’s book, Morse promises that ‘it’s very much for adults as opposed to kids.’”

It’s cool to see that the new artwork Morse is creating for the book incorporates elements of Maurice Noble’s own artwork, like the image above, which is based on a Noble layout for WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? (1957). This project is also a great example of how Fifties animation design continues to exert its influence on today’s animation creators. I can’t wait to check out this book!
(via Drawn!)

These are a couple caricatures of Bob McIntosh painted by genius director/designer John Hubley, while they were serving in the First Motion Picture Unit in the early-1940s. There’s also an incredible Hubley drawing of McIntosh that will be printed in the book. Prior to joining UPA in 1952, McIntosh had worked at Disney (where he painted multiplane backgrounds directly on glass for BAMBI), the First Motion Picture Unit during WWII, and at Paul J. Fennell’s TV commercial studio Cartoon Films Ltd. Bob is happily still with us today, at age 89, and still quite active as a fine art painter.

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Bob McIntosh was one of the main background painters at the leading design-oriented studio of the time, UPA (United Productions of America), where he worked primarily on the Mister Magoo shorts. He started at UPA in 1952 and stayed through the decade. He has a very direct and efficient style, moreso than the other painters at the studio. The flat poster-like quality of his work often reminds me of Stuart Davis though McIntosh told me that Davis was never that big an influence on him. He cites Picasso, Matisse and Miró as his primary modern influences. A typical example of his painting style can be found in these stills from MAGOO MAKES NEWS (1955). I especially like the outlandishly decorative printing press that Bob Dranko designed and McIntosh painted in this film. It is UPA design excess at its best.

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