Cartoon Modern

Above: a coffee ad designed by Mordi Gerstein and animated by Grim Natwick.

Here are some random stills from UPA TV commercials. Some of the stills have suffered water damage hence the funky quality. The designers of the ’50s made this type of simplified design look so effortless and appealing, not an easy thing to pull off. I’ve never seen any of these particular commercials but I bet they’re quite a bit of fun to see in movement. Click on the images below for larger versions.

Arcadian Nitrogen fertilizer
designer unknown

Bromo Seltzer
director: Gene Deitch

Same coffee ad as up top

A couple stills from some motor oil ad or something.

A commercial for Holiday magazine

Oldsmobile spot

Proctor toaster
designer: Fred Crippen

Considering how well known UPA was for its TV commercials during the 1950s, it’s ironic that most of their commercials are currently ‘lost.’ I’d guess anywhere in the range of 95-98% of the studio’s commercial output is currently currently unavailable to see. There’s a handful of spots that are floating around, but there are hundreds of others that never turn up on commercial compilation videos or in film collecting circles.

As a consolation prize, some stills and production materials still exist from the studio’s commercial work. A few months back, I posted a Jack Goodford storyboard for a Borden’s Coffee commercial. Today, I’m posting another storyboard, by an unknown artist, designed for an Old Gold cigarette commercial. The spot is a fine example of UPA’s visual range, veering more into the iconic graphic design territory of Saul Bass than the traditional character-driven style of the studio. The Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that produces the cigarette offers a lot of visual potential, and I imagine this would be a particularly striking spot to see in movement.

(click for big version)

I posted onto Flickr a 1956 article from ART DIRECTION magazine about UPA’s TV commercials. The article includes a reproduction of the storyboards to a Borden’s Coffee spot. The four-page article can be read HERE.

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.

Below is an invitation flyer from the collection of Michael Sporn. The flyer, from 1956, advertises a screening put together by New York animation studios to show reels and clips of their work. I’m not sure who the screening was targeted towards—ad agencies and art directors or the general public, but I’m sure they showed some great work.

The flyer itself is designed by designed Paul Kim, a designer/director who I understand is still alive. Unfortunately I was unable to find him, and none of his colleagues from that era have any idea of how to get in touch with him. The most interesting aspect of the invitation is the list of participating studios, which gives a pretty clear indication of how many commercial animation studios were operating in the New York area in the mid-50s.

(click for larger version)

Sure, there’s plenty of Fifties animation design on this here blog, but I’m not the only person writing about this amazing period in animation history. Many other artist-bloggers are also discussing various aspects of Fifties animation design on their blogs. Here’s a few recent posts from other bloggers that are worth checking out:

Michael Sporn has posted some frame grabs from THE INVISIBLE MOUSTACHE OF RAOUL DUFY, a 1955 short directed by Aurelius Battaglia at UPA. The film was written by experimental filmmaker Sidney Peterson. While the short aired on THE BOING BOING SHOW in 1956, I believe it was produced earlier for another purpose. In an interview with Peterson, he said that he’d been working with MoMA to create projects which would enhance the public’s understanding of modern art. Peterson said, “I hit upon the idea for children’s films about artists, films maybe for television, which would be cast in the form of fables. I wrote three such scripts for which UPA did the animation: THE MOUSTACHE OF RAOUL DUFY, MERRY-GO-ROUND IN THE JUNGLE (about Henri Rousseau), and DAY OF THE FOX: THE LEGEND OF SHARAKU.” I’ve never been able to find any record of MoMA being involved in these productions, but it sounds like the films may have been completed before production had even begun on the BOING BOING SHOW.

The modern technique of the 1950s was so pervasive that it was even applied to the cheapest TV productions of the time. Kevin Langley has made a couple posts of background paintings from early Hanna-Barbera television cartoons. The backgrounds were painted by Fernando Montealegre and Art Lozzi and Bob Gentle. While the bgs have some good ideas in them, on the whole, they feel rushed and cheap. I can imagine the painters at H-B had to paint dozens of these a week to keep up with the breakneck production schedules, and the hastiness shows from the generic color palettes to the uninspired technical execution of the paintings.

Dan Goodsell has posted four model drawings from a 1950s Ray Patin commercial. I scanned a few of these in for the book but ended up not using them because there was far stronger work available from the Patin studio. At the time, we didn’t know which artist had drawn them or what they were for. Dan recently discovered that they were made for a Campbell Kids Clubhouse commercial, which can be viewed HERE. As you can tell from the finished commercial, the type of rendering that the artist used in these drawings was utterly useless for the purpose of animation. That time would have been far better spent had they focused on the design and construction of the characters. Nevertheless, the animator(s) of the commercial do a terrific job of creating beaver characters with strong designy shapes and appealing animation.

I thought it’d be interesting to do a comparison between the stills from the Italian gas commercial in the previous post and the stills from this Sohio-Boron gas commercial posted above. While the Italian spots have some slick color and generally solid styling, I’d wager that this Sohio commercial is far superior in the animation department.

One of the hardest things to get across when discussing animation design is that it’s not just about character designers, layout artists and background painters. The animator is a critical member of the design team. In this case, the animator—Bill Littlejohn (b. 1914)—was a master of his craft and somebody who was completely in tune with Modern design values. I’ve seen a lot of his commercial work so I have a fairly good sense of how he’d move these characters, but even if you haven’t seen a lot of his work, it’s easy to appreciate the animation genius contained within these stills.

Littlejohn delivers the elements of design that can only be added by the animator. For example, in the first still look at how he draws the front view of the man in the car. Animators of the 1950s often avoided the front view when animating large-nosed characters because it requires a certain amount of effort to make it work well. Case in point: there isn’t a single front view in any of the Italian commercial stills. Littlejohn, however, has no problem tackling the straight-ahead view. He manages to put in an elegant asymmetrical shape in the straight-ahead complete with opposing angles in the head shape and the tilt of his hat. He also finds a creative way of making the eyes fit onto the head which is not an easy thing to do with this design.

The next two drawings are even more exciting. The man and the car are designed as one so that the man’s head and arms flow into his car-body. Littlejohn takes superb advantage of this idea and creates some super-stylized lines of action that incorporate the whole design. Take a look at those rhythmic s-curves in the bottom still; it begins from the tip of man’s hat and carries through to the front of the car. Beautiful! This line-of-action concept is evident somewhat in the Italian spots, but it’s not near as inventively executed as this Sohio spot. Even more importantly, Littlejohn pays careful attention to the overall shapes in his drawings. Creating appealing abstract shapes in a still drawing is difficult enough; creating appealing abstract shapes in constant movement with considerations like direction, tension and anticipation requires true skill. In the image below I’ve highlighted the silhouettes to show the large shapes that he drew.

These three stills have an endless wealth of animation design knowledge. For example, notice how in the second still, Littlejohn gives the gas station attendant an underbite even though that’s a feature the character doesn’t have in the earlier still. Not only does the underbite help to create volume in a relatively flat design, but it also serves a functional purpose by breaking up the clunky line that would have otherwise gone straight from the bottom of his nose into his arm and hands.

The primary reason, in my opinion, that so much of today’s stylized animation rings hollow is because nobody ever follows through on the animation. Regardless of whether a show is animated traditionally overseas or if it’s done in Flash, most contemporary TV series creators think their job is done once they’ve created a pretty model sheet and slapped on a bit of color styling. These few stills illustrate however that model sheets are often the least important aspect of stylized animation—what the animator does with those designs is what truly counts. I’ll try to post some actual examples of Littlejohn’s animation soon.

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.

Thanks to doing this book, I’ve probably had the opportunity to see more commercial/industrial animation from the 1950s than just about anybody else. But even so, I know that I’ve seen only a fraction of the work produced during that period. The sad fact is that most of the commercial animation from that era is inaccessible. Who knows where it is. Perhaps locked away in corporate storage, perhaps at a film archive, perhaps in some animator’s garage or in some collector’s basement. I know it’s out there, it’s just a matter of finding it. Below are some cartoons I learned about while writing the book which I still haven’t seen. These were written up in BUSINESS SCREEN magazine, a trade publication from the 1950s that dealt with industrial film production. (Click on the images for larger versions.)

After designer/director Abe Liss left UPA-NY as its creative director, he worked at Transfilm before starting up his own studio, Elektra, in 1956. Below is one of the Transfilm theatrical commercials he directed for a welfare organization. It was designed by Cliff Roberts.

Jack Zander, who had been a Tom & Jerry animator and who I believe is still alive, had a successful East Coast commercial animation studio called Pelican Films. This is a theatrical commercial for Pepsi that his studio produced.

Here’s another Pelican production, a 12-minute film for the US Army Reserve. No idea who the designer was, but it was produced in 1954.

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.

50s-era photos of Ray Favata from a print ad campaign for Phillies Tips. An ad agency friend had asked him to be in the ad, even though Favata wasn’t a smoker.

While researching CARTOON MODERN, I had the opportunity to find out about a lot of designers from the 1950s who I previously wasn’t aware of. One of these individuals was Ray Favata. Ray worked on the East Coast for his entire career. I had the pleasure of visiting him and his wife, Carol, in upstate New York in November 2004. In the early-1950s, he started in animation at Tempo Productions, a studio that was co-owned by David Hilberman, one of UPA’s founders. After Tempo was shuttered by the Hollywood blacklist (I’m too lazy to look up the exact date right now, but it was around ‘53-54), Favata started working at other studios, like the short-lived East coast division of John Sutherland Productions and Academy Pictures.

In 1957, Gene Deitch recruited him to work at the revamped Terrytoons, and Favata was the animation director of the terrific industrial film DEPTH STUDY (for CBS Television) and boarded the second (unproduced) FLEBUS short. After Terrytoons, Favata teamed up with Bill Tytla to start a new commercial animation studio. In the 1960s, the studio became Ray Favata Productions and the studio continued into the 1980s, producing mostly commercials and also the SESAME STREET series “Billy Joe Jive.” Favata himself continued working in animation into the ’90s, and I think he even pitched in on the design of J.J. Sedelmaier’s 50s-styled spot for Home Savings Bank.

Here’s a small sampling of Favata’s work from the 1950s.

Two storyboard panels (and a still) from an early-1950s Tempo commercial for Clark’s chewing gum. This is early in Favata’s career, and his drawing style is still somewhat tight. The drawings, while displaying a nice sense of posing, feel more like illustrations than characters that are designed for animation. The commercial won an award from the NY Art Director’s Club.

Another award-winning Tempo spot designed by Favata.

Stills from various mid-1950s commercials designed by Favata for Academy Pictures.

A page of character suggestions taken from a 1950s instructional booklet on creating TV commercials. (Thanks, Shane)

A 1958 drawing for TOP CEL, the newsletter of the New York animators’ union.

A late-1950s commercial for Cheerios. Favata’s design was animated by Bill Tytla in this commercial.

Illustrator Leif Peng comes through again, this time with a 1959 SATURDAY EVENING POST magazine ad for Timken roller bearings. The ad uses images from a mid-1950s television commercial designed by Paul Kim at the NY commercial studio Academy Pictures. In the late-1950s, Kim teamed up with designer Lew Gifford, and they started Gifford-Kim Animation, which existed well into the 1970s and maybe even the ’80s. As far as I know, Kim is still alive, though I tried hard to track him down for the book and was never able to find him.