originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/762354...
The history of animation is long and many, many different schools and traditions can be found within it. Perhaps you might recall a few we’ve covered: the Kanada school, the Zagreb school, the 90s realists, not to mention all the different styles that are associated with this or that studio or director.
We could imagine perhaps them all being arranged in a great tree. Something like this, perhaps, but more international. If you were to create such an animation cladogram, one of the most significant speciation events would surely come in the 1940s, when a group of disgrunted Disney animators went off to found United Productions of America.
What made the UPA so unique? One aspect is how they drew: inspired by Soviet animation of the era and contemporary artists they leapt to highly graphical, modernist styles. Big, simple shapes, flat colours and exaggerated proportions, lines blending into shapes and vice versa. All in huge contrast to the strict ‘solid drawing’ that prevailed at Disney, which took its inspiration from more 18th and 19th century styles.
But more important still, for animation history, was how they moved. ‘Limited animation’ is an unfortunate term, drawing a circle around anything that isn’t Disney or close to it, but it’s the term we have: more limited drawing counts, held frames, irregular timings that fit the composition.
And while this no doubt helped save costs, that was not the primary motivation. It was a distinctive style which the studio pursued even when they had animators who could draw in the Disney way, like this example of Art Babbitt’s animation actually discarding many of his original drawings.
The UPA was not seeking to create an illusion of life and make you forget that you’re looking at drawings - but to compose the movement in time in a new, expressive way.
Equally novel was its subject matter. While Disney had, at the time, mostly created affirming fairy tales or slapstick comedies, the UPA focused largely on modern settings and subjects, with the slightly cynical edge that had largely disappeared from animation since Fleischer went under - as well as a much stronger sense of left-wing politics, producing iconic anti-racist films for the unions and satirising reactionary old dudes in one of their most popular series Mr Magoo.
And this new, radical approach struck a chord. Disney was old hat; the UPA were the new avant-garde, making animation proper to the modern 1950s, or even radicals defying the bourgeois sensibility of Disney. When Richard Williams moved to a more classical full animation style in contrast to his earlier modernist work, he was decried by the young animators in Zagreb as betraying the movement.
In modern times, when the UPA style feels just as dated - something to parody in 50s styled retro art like the Fallout series - this probably all seems a bit wacky. But it is pretty safe to say that modern animation was pretty much made in this conflict. Even if the ‘UPA style’ itself is old hat, its DNA remains in just about every living style of animation. It’s like… the Tiktaalik of animation. (Only the most obscure evolutionary biology analogies here on Animation Night!)
Indeed, the UPA was a huge influence on many parts of the world: early anime in the hands of Osamu Tezuka, whose approach to limited animation would give rise to everything anime; the avant-garde Zagreb school; midcentury British animation like Yellow Submarine; and perhaps more familiar to animation fans today, it continues to influence animators like Craig McCracken (Powerpuff Girls, Wander Over Yonder) and Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Primal etc. - see AN35) whose approach has been dubbed a UPA revival. In its time, it incubated artists like Faith and John Hubley.
But, in modern times, it’s hard to find out a lot about the major works of the UPA… or at least it used to be, until my animation writing senpais at AniObsessive wrote some excellent guides: one on the early UPA work in the 40s and 50s, another on three mid-fifties cartoons, on the ‘UPA style’, and even on specific pieces. Thanks to them, I don’t have to do any homework at all!
I won’t list everything here - it would be redundant to the AniObsessive pieces! - but here’s the plan tonight. We’ll dive into the vaults and explore the defining pieces of the UPA, from the classic Hubley pieces like Gerald McBoing-Boing and Rooty Toot Toot through the 50s developments like Tell-Tale Heart and Mr Magoo. Basically, the program is everything listed in AniObsessive’s An Intro to the UPA piece.
I’ll go live now and hopefully start rolling the films pretty soon - see you at twitch.tv/canmom!
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