Cartoon Modern

When I first started this blog in 2005, there wasn’t a whole lot online about Fifties animation. Recently, however, a number of animation directors have been posting about design-oriented ’50s cartoons on their blogs. Here’s a roundup:

Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi discusses the modern color in the 1954 Disney short Donald’s Diary.

Michael Sporn offers a nice set of frame grabs from UPA’s animated inserts for the 1956 TV special Our Mr. Sun.

Ward Jenkins offers this incredible Flickr set of pre-production art and stills from the 1951 Tex Avery-Tom Oreb collaboration Symphony in Slang. The cleaned-up 35mm frame scans are particularly impressive.

When Flintstones designer Ed Benedict was freelancing on TV commercials for studios like Cascade Pictures, he would photograph all of his designs before delivering them to the studio. The images below are from color xeroxes of Ed’s photo contact sheets. The quality isn’t great and the images aren’t very big, but if there’s interest, I have a lot more of these and can post them. These baseball players are plenty appealing and fun to look at, though I have no idea which commercial, if any, they appeared in.