Cartoon Modern

These are stills from three 1958 television commercials produced for AGIP (Italian General Petroleum Association). It’s unclear who the Italian production company was for these spots but they sure look colorful and eye-catching. It’d be especially interesting to see how these designs move. Oh, and a final note: I would have definitely put these in my book if I’d known I had them. Sadly, I just discovered them in my files yesterday. You lucky CARTOON MODERN blog readers can see them now though.

Canadian illustrator Leif Peng recently discovered a 2-page COLLIER’S magazine spread from 1956 with some great stills from the educational film MAN OF ACTION (1955). I wrote a bit about the film back in November and the film can be seen online at Archive.org. The magazine article is below.

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.

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)