Cartoon Modern

In the book version of Cartoon Modern, I published a couple character layout drawings from the UPA short Magoo Express (1955). (A sidenote: I misidentified the title as Magoo’s Express, which I hope to correct in any subsequent printings.) What’s particularly interesting about these layout drawings is that they use a female character design which was significantly changed for the final film version.

Below are the layout drawings I included in the book along with corresponding stills from the film showing how the design changed:

The redesigned version of the character, Gigi, creates an intriguing mystery—Why was the design changed midway through production?—and it’s a question for which I don’t have any answers. The mystery deepens because the character designer of the film, Sterling Sturtevant (1922-1962), spent a significant amount of time designing the original version of this character. A lot of Sturtevant’s development work exists from this film and I’ve posted some of it below to show how she came up with the design of Gigi:

These concepts led to the initial design of Gigi. Below are the character model sheets and a few character layouts:

This was obviously not just a design concept but likely the final design that director Pete Burness had approved for production. Otherwise, Sturtevant would not have invested so much time laying out the film using this design. My personal feeling, and I have no hard evidence to back this up but it’s the only thing that makes sense, is that the animation crew may have asked for a change on the character design. (I have to double-check, but I also believe that this is the last film that Sturtevant worked on before leaving UPA in 1954. Though it’s somewhat unlikely that her departure would be connected in any way to this film, one cannot completely discount that possibility.)

Sturtevant (pictured at right) was a talented artist and easily the most prolific and influential woman character designer of the 1950s, but one of the problems with the ‘femme fatale’ approach of this design is that the style reaches beyond the range of her drawing skills, not to mention the skills of the animators on the crew who were tasked with bringing the character to life. Director John Hubley had no problem pulling off a similarly designed character in the earlier UPA film Rooty Toot Toot (1952), but Sturtevant’s drawings lack the cohesive strength of a master draftsman like Hubley. There are nice graphic ideas in a lot of the individual poses, but the overall design lacks structure, and the character looks awkwardly drawn and poorly constructed from certain angles.

At some point, Sturtevant was asked to redesign the character and came up with the second version of Gigi that is used in the film (model sheet and concept drawing below). Personally, I like this second design far more than the first attempt and think it’s better suited to the Magoo universe. Unfortunately the animation of the film is a huge disappointment. To be clear, I think either of Sturtevant’s designs could have been a success if they had been followed up by the proper animators. Burness’s animation crew, however, included some of the most conservative animators at the studio, and his animators during this period rarely pushed the graphic element in their animation. (Lead animators on this film were Cecil Surry, Tom McDonald and Rudy Larriva.) The animators on this film resigned themselves to creating stilted and limited movement with little deviation from the layout poses, which is a shame because Sturtevant’s second design of Gigi offers fun graphic shapes and a distinctive posture that could have been exploited by more creative animators.

Magoo Express is not a bad entry in the Magoo series by any stretch of the imagination. Seeing Sturtevant’s development of the female character offers some fascinating insights into the design process on the Magoo series and also shows how the films could have been even better if UPA had invested in stronger and more graphically-aware animators.

The Los Angeles commercial studio Playhouse Pictures is well represented in the CARTOON MODERN book, but I ended up with many more Playhouse commercial stills and model sheets than I could fit into the book. Here’s the first of a few posts in which I’ll share some of the Playhouse art. The studio’s spots generally had simple and spare character designs (mostly done by Sterling Sturtevant), and the animation of these characters was usually top-notch. Playhouse’s animation director during the 1950s was Bill Melendez, and he brought aboard a who’s who of A-list animators who understood how to draw both funny and with a sense of stylized movement. Animators who worked at the studio during the ’50s include Emery Hawkins, Bobe Cannon, Bill Littlejohn, Rod Scribner, Frank Smith, Phil Duncan, Jim Hiltz and Herman Cohen. As a sidenote, I screened a reel of Rod Scribner-animated Playhouse spots at the Projector Festival in Scotland last month and these spots garnered some of the strongest and most positive reactions of the entire program. It’s nice to see the commercials still hold up fifty years later.

(click on the images below for larger versions)

Ford Falcon

Lanvin Arpege Perfume

Tennessee Ernie Ford tv show opening

Drewry’s Beer

MJB Coffee

Falstaff Beer

Sterling Sturtevant is a name that is not often heard nowadays, but during the 1950s, she was the most prolific female character designer working in the industry. The primary reason for her obscurity is that she died in 1962, long before anybody had bothered to begin documenting the work of Fifties animation designers. She started at Disney in the late 1940s, and during the 1950s, she was a well known and in-demand designer who worked primarily at UPA, where she redesigned Mister Magoo in 1953, and Playhouse Pictures, where she designed advertising characters like the Ford Dog and Burgie (Burgermeister Beer). Below is a model sheet for a Chrysler DeSoto commercial that was produced at Playhouse. It is very typically Sturtevant with clear graphic shapes and a lack of ornament. This simplicity in design allowed the animators to have a lot of fun with her designs and really push the shapes around from pose to pose. This particular spot has some incredible animation by Rod Scribner. I’ll post more of her work in a while.

(click on image for larger version)

(model sheet from the collection of Jerry Beck)