Cartoon Modern

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A rather Calder-esque Christmas card (ca. late-1950s) that designer Tom Oreb drew for his mother and sisters. The “From Tom and Pablo” signature refers to Oreb’s cat, who was named Pablo.

Cartoon Modern will be back after the New Year. There’s lots of great updates planned for this blog, and the book will be released next year as well. 2006 promises to be an excellent year of animation design goodness.

I was saddened to hear of the recent passing of Charles McElmurry, a character designer/layout artist who did a lot of excellent work throughout his career, but especially during the 1950s and 60s. I had the chance to visit him last December in Santa Rosa and spent a delightful afternoon interviewing him for the book. Every so often I do an interview where afterwards I feel that I’ve scratched only the surface, and McElmurry was one of those interviews. Even though there was still a lot that I wanted to learn about his work, I’m glad to have had the chance to meet him, and done one of the few, if not only, interviews that he’d ever given.

During the 1950s and 1960s, McElmurry worked as a designer at many studios including Storyboard, Quartet, Pelican, Filmfair, John Sutherland Productions, Jay Ward Productions and Bill Melendez Productions. He was especially popular at ad agencies and was frequently called upon to help streamline and redesign existing advertising characters. McElmurry is among those designers whose work isn’t as well represented in the book as I would have hoped. That is due largely to the difficult (and nearly impossible) task of finding 50s-era commercial artwork to represent specific artists. He had saved many of his drawings from the 60s and 70s, but we didn’t run across his early work that would have been appropriate for the book.

McElmurry is survived by his wife Rosemary (O’Connor), daughters Jill and Jennifer, and nephews Jim and Gary Wakeman. Memorial donations may be made to the Earle Baum Center of the Blind, 4539 Occidental Road, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. For more details about McElmurry’s life and work, check out these terrific blog posts by his daughter Jill:
Charles McElmurry: The Early Years
Charles McElmurry: The Dad
Charles McElmurry: The Artist
Memories of Charles McElmurry

Here are a few things that he designed.
First, a Philip Morris spot (ca. 1955) designed at John Hubley’s Storyboard.

Stills from a 1960 Quartet ad for Budweiser

Quartet character designs by McElmurry for Marlboro, Budweiser and Bank of America

Two beautiful model sheets by McElmurry for UPA’s 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS. The expressive drawings here really reflect his extensive fine arts training. He studied for a number of years at Chouinard and Jepson Art Institute, and he told me that his teacher Rico LeBrun was a big influence.

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Archive.org is an excellent source for public domain films of all kinds. Among them are a handful of well designed 1950s shorts produced by John Sutherland Productions. Sutherland was one of the busiest producers of animated industrials during the 1950s and his studio’s work is discussed in greater depth in my book. I’ve never found a good filmography of exactly how many films Sutherland produced, but from what I’ve been able to gather, he produced well over one hundred corporate/educational animated shorts between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, which was his studio’s ‘golden age’ period. The working conditions at Sutherland were ideal for artists: he paid top dollar so he always attracted A-list designers and animators, and he was very hands-off when it came to the visuals, so artists were free to do as they pleased. These four films at Archive.org offer a good sense of the type of films Sutherland produced, though they are only the tip of the iceberg.

IT’S EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS (1954): Featuring Maurice Noble in one of his rare forays outside of Warner Bros. during the 1950s. Dynamic layouts and beautiful color styling can be found throughout this film. Noble worked again for Sutherland in the late-1950s on RHAPSODY OF STEEL, but that film’s designer was Eyvind Earle, and the end results are much more noticeably Earle than Noble.

DESTINATION EARTH (1956): Jointly designed by Tom Oreb and Victor Haboush, this is among at least two films that I know Oreb designed at Sutherland. The other film is THE LITTLEST GIANT, which is not available online. Oreb likely did others too, but I haven’t been able to track them down. One thing that DESTINATION EARTH proves is that Oreb was equally adept at designing backgrounds as he was designing characters. Vic Haboush also provided great layouts in this film. I think Vic did mostly the Mars layouts, and Oreb dealt with the Earth scenes. (The image at the top of this post is a character layout by Oreb from DESTINATION EARTH.)

YOUR SAFETY FIRST (1956): This film has the weakest design of the four films here. The character designs are really poor, and though the layouts are much better, they’re nothing extraordinary. The film was designed by Gerald Nevius (a veteran who had also worked on DUMBO and FANTASIA) and Charles McElmurry, a designer who did plenty of excellent TV commercial design at Storyboard and Quartet in the mid-1950s.

WORKING DOLLARS (1957): The characters in this film have really nice appealing shapes. They were designed by Bernie Gruver, who also worked as a designer at other commercial studios including John Wilson’s Fine Arts Films and Playhouse Pictures. There’s a great Gruver model sheet in my book for Friskies Dog Food, a series of commercials that he designed for Playhouse in the late 1950s.

Well, this is a bit of an unusual post, but I thought it might be a fun exercise to let readers in on the actual production process of the book. Right now we’re working on the CARTOON MODERN cover design. In books, sometimes the cover choice is obvious and presents itself early on in the design process; other times it takes a lot of searching and experimenting before you find the right idea. This book is definitely of the latter variety, which is somewhat ironic, because one would think that a book with so many visual riches would mean the cover would be an easy decision. In fact, I think it’s a testament to the diversity of design in 1950s animation that has made it such a challenge finding the best way to represent it.

The suggestions for the cover so far have ranged from having no image (”leave the cover an open possibility instead of favoring specific imagery”) to using multiple images that would represent the variety of designs in the book. There’s also the third option of trying to choose an iconic image that sums up the book as a whole. There is still a lot of discussion going on between Chronicle, the designers and myself, but with Chronicle’s permission, I thought it’d be cool to open up the debate to the book’s eventual readers and try to inject some fresh opinions into the process.

So here’s your chance to help us formulate a direction for the cover design. Below are seven of the rough concepts that designers at Chronicle and my own book designers have suggested. None of these are anywhere close to being final, but they represent the options that I mentioned above. I’d love to hear what everybody out there thinks. Please comment which of them stand out visually; whether you dislike any of them (or even if you dislike all of them); which direction you’d like to see us explore further (multiple images, no images, single image); whatever comes to mind. The most helpful responses will obviously be those that explain their reasons instead of simply voting yay or nay, but all thoughts are appreciated. If you feel strongly about any or none of these covers, speak now, or forever hold your peace.

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#7

I wanted to step back for a moment and write a bit about what appeals to me about Fifties animation design in general. I often hear people refer to a cartoon as “Fifties-style” or “UPA-style.” There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’ve done it often myself, but these phrases have the tendency to imply that there is an easily definable style of design from the Fifties. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. During the Fifties, there were as many styles as there were designers, and the appeal of Fifties animation, at least for me, is not that cartoons looked a particular way, but rather, that they didn’t look a particular way.

The primary goal of Fifties designers was to break away from the design conventions of animated films of the 1930s and 1940s. Why copy the same old circular character construction formulas when there were thousands of interesting ways of representing characters? It wasn’t just character designers who were searching for different ways of doing things; there was relentless graphic exploration happening throughout the industry: animators thought of new ways of moving characters; directors figured out unique ways of telling stories; layout artists invented abstract ways of representing objects and showing space; background painters tried all types of different painting techniques and color schemes.

Here’s a visual example to illustrate what I’m talking about. Below are five designs of the sun from Fifties cartoons. Granted, this is a fairly minor example, as most of these suns appear on screen for only a short period of time and aren’t major characters. Brief though their appearances may be, none of the artists took the easy way out by designing a conventional looking sun. The greatest designers constantly strived to find new ways of doing things, whether it was designing something as simple as the sun or a much more involved project. The defining characteristic of Fifties design isn’t a particular look or style; it’s a mentality that refuses to settle for the obvious graphic solution.

designers: Saul Bass and Art Goodman

designer unknown, but either Bill Hurtz or Lew Keller

designer: Tom Oreb

designer: Ward Kimball

designer unknown (Playhouse Pictures)