Cartoon Modern

GERALD MCBOING BOING (1951) is one of my “desert island” films. It is damn near perfect on every level—an incredible marriage of design and animation, with gorgeous layouts and cinematic composition throughout, spare yet thoughtful color styling and a perfectly appropriate modern film score. The talent on this film was unbelievable in every department: Bobe Cannon (direction), Bill Hurtz (design, with Cannon), Bill Scott and Phil Eastman (story), Jules Engel and Herb Klynn (color styling), Bill Melendez, Willis Pyle, Frank Smith, Pat Matthews and Rudy Larriva (animation). More importantly, the whole crew was on the same page. The animators interpreted the designs beautifully, the background artists created colors that enhanced the mood and story, all the elements in this film weave in and out of each other with an effortless grace. The reason I bring up the film is because Clarke Snyder has generously posted dozens of frame grabs at the Inspiration Grab-Bag. If you’ve already seen the film, these sequential grabs are a great alternative way of studying it. Every element of this film is carefully considered and worked out; for example, note how after Gerald’s father yells at him, all the shots are planned on tense diagonals, until Gerald gets discovered by the radio station and everything become happy again. There’s just so much to learn from this film. It can be purchaesd on DVD, along with the three other Gerald theatricals produced by UPA, at Amazon.com.

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.