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:

Rover Boys

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).

Song of the South

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.