Cartoon Modern

Here’s another spot produced by John Hubley’s Storyboard. The highlight here is Rod Scribner’s genius animation. I’ve pulled some frame grabs if you want to look at the drawings more closely.

The commercial was directed by Stan Walsh, who later became the co-founder of Quartet Films. The idea for the spot was conceived by John Hubley and Robert Guidi, one of the best known West Coast graphic designers of the time. Guidi is a somewhat forgotten figure nowadays, as most mid-century West Coast designers are with the exception of Saul Bass, but he was big during the ’50s and ’60s. Guidi co-owned the highly successful design studio, Tri-Arts, and he was the primary album cover designer for the Contemporary jazz label.

Here’s the first of what will hopefully be many more posts with videoclips. This is a Heinz 57 commercial (ca. 1954-55) produced at John Hubley’s Storyboard studio, while he was still based in Los Angeles. Discussion follows below the spot.

Hubley’s studio turned out one great spot after another, and even this one, which isn’t a classic by any means, is still an amazing piece of work. One of Hubley’s trademarks was his ability to integrate the product pitch into the storytelling which is what he does here; note how seamlessly Hubley tells us that Heinz 57 is made with 17 ingredients and that the sauce tastes good on a variety of meats. A lot of other commercials might have cut to a live-action shot of the product with an explanation of these points, but Hubley makes it part of the story.

Hubley embraces the UPA sensibility and reduces the graphics to their barest essentials. Backgrounds and props are kept to a bare minimum, and the animation is efficient, yet moves beautifully. In the night scene, only the king’s face and hands are shown, yet the character still comes across. In the last scene, the princess is designed as a held cel; only her arm moves when pulled (the accompanying sound effect is funny too). It’s refreshing to see well-designed animation like this: appealing full-animation in the acting scenes alternating with stylized bits of animation. It’s the type of smart animated acting that one rarely sees nowadays.

REN & STIMPY creator (and my former boss) John Kricfalusi has been writing a lot on his blog recently about animation design. As with everything else he writes, John has some very definite ideas about what makes for good animation design and whether you agree or not, his thoughts are well worth reading.

The design posts include this one about a John Hubley-produced E-Z POP TV commercial, a piece about the backgrounds in Chuck Jones’s INKI AND THE MYNAH BIRD (1943), which were designed by John McGrew, and a new post about Art Lozzi’s backgrounds in the Yogi Bear TV cartoon SCOOTER LOOTER. I’ve been critical of the H-B backgrounds earlier, but the Lozzi backgrounds in this particular cartoon are gorgeous and perfectly designed for animation. When the work is good, it’s good, and there’s no argument against that.

One of favorite designer ‘discoveries’ while working on CARTOON MODERN was the work of Lew Keller (1912-1996). It’s hard to believe that an artist of his caliber has been so thoroughly neglected over the years. Here’s the few things that I know about him: Keller started at Disney around ‘39-40. He most likely left during the strike though it’s unclear what he did for most of the ’40s. In the late-1940s, he ended up designing TV commercials in New York for Shamus Culhane and Tempo Productions. There’s a few examples of his commercial designs in Culhane’s autobiography TALKING ANIMALS AND OTHER PEOPLE. Based on these images, one might assume that Keller was a pretty poor artist, but in fact, he was a superb draftsman.

Ca. 1951-1952, he began to work at UPA, where he was the primary designer of the animated segments in the live-action feature THE FOUR POSTER (1952). As best as I can make out, he left UPA after this project and worked elsewhere for the next few years. He has credit as co-art director on the classic John Sutherland educational film A IS FOR ATOM (1952) and he also designed numerous commercials for Ray Patin Productions in the mid-1950s. By 1954 however he was back on staff at UPA, where he worked until the end of the 1950s, followed by a short stint at Disney, and ultimately joining Jay Ward’s in the early-1960s.

Keller worked on a wide variety of projects while at UPA. He directed and designed a number of shorts for the BOING BOING SHOW, including the classic “Miserable Pack of Wolves,” and he also designed the theatrical short GERALD MCBOING BOING ON THE PLANET MOO. He was the co-director of UPA’s last theatrical series “Ham and Hattie.”

Below are some of Keller’s concept pieces for THE FOUR POSTER (1952). The animation for these segments was directed by John Hubley, and while the final film doesn’t exactly look like this, Keller’s design presence is felt strongly in the animation. There’s a couple more of Keller’s pieces in the book.

I can’t stop looking at these drawings. What really stands out to me is how beautifully every element is designed and how elegantly the scenes are composed. One could spend days breaking down the design in these drawings. For example, look at the man being dragged into the room by his wife. You can’t fake a drawing like that.

The finished film takes Keller’s designs and goes even further, with incredible backgrounds by Paul Julian, great animation by Art Babbitt and stellar direction by Hubley. From a design standpoint, it is one of UPA’s great achievements; it’s too bad that the film has never been released onto home video or dvd.

(Click on pics for larger versions. The Keller photo in this post is from the collection of Keith Scott. The drawings are from the collection of Mike Glad. If anybody out there has more info about Lew Keller, please do share.)

I’m not sure what aggravates me more: that oil companies are so openly and blatantly gouging the American public or that oil companies no longer make cool animated commercials, like this Speedway 79 spot from 1955. The commercial was produced at John Hubley’s studio Storyboard and I think one of the animators was Emery Hawkins, though it doesn’t look like he handled the entire commercial. The familiar tune is based on the old spiritual “Dem Bones.” Watch the spot below.

While I try to find some time to work up some longer posts, here are a couple interesting photos that I thought would be fun to share. First, a photo of the three main UPA directors in 1951, after winning the Oscar for GERALD MCBOING BOING. From left to right: Bobe Cannon, John Hubley, studio prez Steve Bosustow, Pete Burness, and (I think) UPA’s publicist Charles Daggett.

And a photo of Magoo director Pete Burness (left) and Steve Bosustow. They are holding a certificate from the Motion Picture Herald, which says that Mister Magoo was one of the top ten money-making short subject series of 1952.

Worth pointing out: Brad Bird commented about his love of Hubley’s work in this ROOTY TOOT TOOT post from last week. Brad makes an excellent observation that even though Hubley’s films had a daring sense of design, it was never at the expense of the animation. Hubley’s sensitivity to the movement of characters is even more remarkable considering that he was one of the few directors of the era who hadn’t been an animator prior to directing.

And one final bit of ROOTY randomness. Below is a postcard of a restaurant—Johnny’s Steaks—that had a mural of ROOTY TOOT TOOT on its wall. The decor of the restaurant suggests the photo might be from the 1960s. This was posted before on Cartoon Brew, but I think it’s pretty cool so here it is again. If anybody knows where this was (is?), let me know. We’ll all go and have a steak there.

This will be the last post about ROOTY TOOT TOOT for a while. The following are sequential frame grabs from scenes animated by Pat Matthews. One thing that really stands out to me about these drawings is how much liberty Matthews takes with Hubley’s character designs. Hubley had established clearly what the characters should look like, but he did not stifle the animators so that they could not add a bit of themselves into the work. Matthews, who had a strong ‘cartoony’ animation background, took advantage of the opportunity and really pushed the design of the character Johnny. His drawings have a slightly grotesque quality, which is perfectly expressive of the frantic happenings in his scenes.

(click on images for larger versions)

Below are more of John Hubley’s model drawings from ROOTY TOOT TOOT. His gestural designs are so incredibly rich and give the animators so much to work with; it was a real treat to finally see this film projected on the bigscreen at the Egyptian last weekend. These drawings were originally in color, like the image from the post below, but who knows where the actual artwork is. Thankfully, artists like Alan Zaslove and Pete Burness saved tons of photostat model sheets from UPA, giving us access to at least black-and-white versions of Hubley’s drawings. If anybody out there is handy with Photoshop and wants to try restoring the red color and black ink lines, feel free to give it a shot and if it’s accurate, I’ll post the version up here.

UPDATE: Woodrow Phoenix took me up on the offer and colorized the Hubley model sheet. It looks much better now. You can compare it to this original Hubley drawing in an earlier post. Thanks Woodrow!

(click on image for larger version)

And if you prefer the black-and-white photostat, here’s my original scan:

Here is another John Hubley concept from ROOTY TOOT TOOT. This one is an original whereas the previous image was a color xerox.

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The July 1951 edition of HARPER’S BAZAAR had a two-page spread about ROOTY TOOT TOOT. The article had a half-dozen of John Hubley’s concept sketches, along with the following photo of Hubley and the film’s choreographer Olga Lunick, whose movements were filmed as reference for the animators.

I just had to follow-up on Michael Sporn’s terrific scans of a 1952 LIFE magazine article about John Hubley’s short ROOTY TOOT TOOT (1952). The piece below is a character concept by Hubley of two of the film’s main characters—Frankie and her lawyer, Honest John. These designs were beautifully translated to animation, by the likes of Art Babbitt and Pat Matthews, who managed to bring the characters to life while retaining the daring graphic quality of Hubley’s original drawings. ROOTY TOOT TOOT can be seen this Sunday on the bigscreen, in all its 35mm glory, at the Egyptian Theatre in LA.

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These are a couple caricatures of Bob McIntosh painted by genius director/designer John Hubley, while they were serving in the First Motion Picture Unit in the early-1940s. There’s also an incredible Hubley drawing of McIntosh that will be printed in the book. Prior to joining UPA in 1952, McIntosh had worked at Disney (where he painted multiplane backgrounds directly on glass for BAMBI), the First Motion Picture Unit during WWII, and at Paul J. Fennell’s TV commercial studio Cartoon Films Ltd. Bob is happily still with us today, at age 89, and still quite active as a fine art painter.

(click on images for larger versions)