Cartoon Modern

When I first started this blog in 2005, there wasn’t a whole lot online about Fifties animation. Recently, however, a number of animation directors have been posting about design-oriented ’50s cartoons on their blogs. Here’s a roundup:

Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi discusses the modern color in the 1954 Disney short Donald’s Diary.

Michael Sporn offers a nice set of frame grabs from UPA’s animated inserts for the 1956 TV special Our Mr. Sun.

Ward Jenkins offers this incredible Flickr set of pre-production art and stills from the 1951 Tex Avery-Tom Oreb collaboration Symphony in Slang. The cleaned-up 35mm frame scans are particularly impressive.

There’s a ton of rare content posted on this blog but today’s entry is one of the rarest of all. In Summer of 1955, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City hosted an exhibition called “UPA: Form in the Animated Cartoon.” With the exception of Disney, no animation studio had ever received such a comprehensive tribute up to that time.

I, or nobody else for that matter, had ever seen photos of the exhibition or had much of an idea of how the animation material was presented. A few months ago though, while I was working on the forthcoming photo book Inside UPA, Tee Bosustow and I discovered a set of photos from the exhibition. Now, for the first time since people actually attended the show in the mid-’50s, we can get a sense of what the UPA tribute at MoMA was like. The photographs below were taken by Soichi Sunami, a well-known East Coast art photographer who was commissioned to take these for the museum.

Part 1 of the Exhibit was called “An Album of Attitude.” It starts off with a series of montage images combining UPA artwork, studio ephemera and outside influences on the artists.

This first montage has three gag drawings by Fred Crippen on it, among other things.

This second collage compares the real-world art and film influences that inspired various UPA cartoons.

An entire montage was dedicated to John Hubley’s Rooty Toot Toot. Hubley’s storyboard drawings are particularly impressive here. Note that in the credits roll, Hubley’s last name is hidden by the shattered record. One has to assume this was intentional since Hubley was persona non grata at UPA in 1955.

This wall features animation drawings from Rooty Toot Toot, from a scene with the lawyer Honest John. On the far right are strips of backlit strips of film.

Part 3 of the exhibit was called “UPA and the Community.”

Here is a closeup of a couple of the commercial and industrial film displays in that section.

This wall features various examples of pre-production art including color keys from the CBS industrial film Tune in Tomorrow (1954, far left) and examples of Bobe Cannon’s timing bar sheets (center).

Mister Magoo was UPA’s most popular character and he garnered his own section in the exhibit.

A close-up of the previous photo shows this character design progression of Mister Magoo from 1949 through 1955.

Storyboards from UPA shorts: at left are T. Hee’s boards for The Jaywalker (1956), and at right are Aurie Battaglia’s boards for The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy (1955).

This room of the exhibit featured zoetropes. A scene from Bobe Cannon’s short Fudget’s Budget is painted onto the wall.

There’s no denying that many of the later Mister Magoo shorts are feeble, especially when compared to UPA’s early Magoo films, but some cool artwork can still be found in the late-period Magoos. Below are a couple eye-catching backgrounds from Scoutmaster Magoo (1958), which was one of only a couple Magoos directed by Bobe Cannon. Background credit on the film goes to Jules Engel and Ervin Kaplan though I’m unsure which of them did these particular paintings. Be sure to click on the top one to get a big view of the opening pan from the short.

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)

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.

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.

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.)

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 wouldn’t go so far as to call UPA’s feature 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS a good film, but there is a lot of nice artwork in it. By the late-50s, UPA had squandered its reputation as a progressive modern animation studio, and the dumbed down storytelling and general immaturity of this film proved to be the final nail in its coffin. After production on this film, nearly all of the studio’s top artists departed, including their three primary background painters—Jules Engel, Bob Dranko and Bob McIntosh. In this post are some of Engel’s thumbnail color scripts for one of the film’s scenes. (As usual, click on them for larger versions.) There’s also an earlier post I did HERE with more concept art from the film. The final image in this post is a still from the finished film to give an idea of how the final bgs were executed. Which color styling do you like better—Engel’s color scripts or the finished backgrounds? There’s no right answer, I’m just curious to hear your thoughts.

David Weidman (b. 1921) started in animation at John Hubley’s Storyboard studio in the early-1950s. He worked for a while at UPA on the THE BOING BOING SHOW and the concept piece above is from a short for that series called OLD MCDONALD. Most of the cartoon was designed and directed by Bob Dranko. I’ll try to post the actual cartoon here sometime in the next few days. I posted this photo of Weidman on Flickr a few days ago. The photo was taken in the early 1960s when he was painting backgrounds on CALVIN AND THE COLONEL. You can buy vintage prints and posters by David Weidman at his website. The site also has the article about him that was published recently in SWINDLE magazine. The article is incorrect on the chronology of where he worked, but otherwise it’s a pretty interesting read.

Here’s the first clip that I’ve managed to upload to YouTube. It’s the opening and closing titles that Rod Scribner animated for UPA’s last theatrical series “Ham and Hattie.” He probably animated this sometime around 1957. Scribner is obviously having a lot of fun animating these characters, which he designed himself. Note how he really pushes the graphic construction of the faces. Most animators of the period had a tendency to treat the “big nose/eyes-on-the-side design” as a flat shape, but Scribner isn’t afraid to make the design dimensional (especially in the tallest character) and show the construction of the character in 3/4 and front views as well as the standard side view.

PS - There’s a bit of a glitch in the middle of the video. I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Rod Scribner in 1962 at Playhouse Pictures

Rod Scribner (1910-1976) is generally considered one of the great all-time animators. The animation that he created at Warner Bros., particularly under director Bob Clampett, is classic in every regard. What many don’t know about Scribner, however, is that he was also one of the great stylized animators of the 1950s. Scribner had an innate understanding of design and of how to move around highly stylized characters in innovative ways. This put him heavily in demand during the decade, and he animated commercials at many studios including Animation Inc., Storyboard, Playhouse Pictures, John Urie and Associates and United Productions of America (UPA).

From approximately 1956-1958, Scribner worked in-house at UPA, where he directed and animated three shorts for THE BOING BOING SHOW (”The Lost Duchess,” “One Wonderful Girl” and “The Armored Car”) as well as animated dozens of commercials and the studio’s new theatrical titles. The frame grabs below are from “The Lost Duchess,” in which Scribner offers his distinctive take on the conventional big-nosed/eyes-on-the-side-of-the-head characters and devises a completely original way of moving these characters around.

(click on images for larger versions)

(click on image for larger version)

There’s many designers who are as mysterious to me today as when I first started working on the book. Charleen Peterson is one of them. Here’s everything I know about her:

- She was recruited from Chouinard Art Institute.

- She worked at UPA from 1954-1956. She may have worked there longer, but I haven’t been able to confirm beyond 1956.

- She was married to story artist Charlie Frazier.

- Her only UPA credit that I’ve found is that she was the designer of MEET THE INVENTOR: ROBERT FULTON, a short that aired on the CBS TV series THE BOING BOING SHOW (1956). The piece was directed by Aurelius Battaglia, and it’s made in a simple but effective cut-out style.

It’s funny because during the course of research, I asked a number of UPA veterans about her, and the response was always, “Oh yes, of course I remember Charleen!” But nobody could ever remember what she actually did at the studio. Then I found a photo of her, which is below, and it became obvious why she was so fondly remembered by the other artists. If ROBERT FULTON is any indicator, she was a pretty good designer too. I have no idea whether she continued working in animation after UPA or whether she’s still alive, but perhaps somebody out there knows?

Frame grabs from MEET THE INVENTOR: ROBERT FULTON

Mid-1950s photo of Charleen Peterson

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.