Shouts for UPA

“What was all the shouting about?”

That was the rhetorical question Leonard Maltin wrote in Of Mice and Magic when it came to the UPA cartoon studio. It was rhetorical because it set up the response from critic Gilbert Seldes, writing in the May 31, 1952 issue of The Saturday Review. Maltin published excerpts of the article but we’ll reprint it in full below.

Seldes’ main complaint seems to have been that cartoons should look like cartoons, not the “illusion of life” espoused by Disney (something praised by critics not too many years earlier). He also favours the UPA attempts at light humour and whimsy. Certainly “Gerald McBoing Boing” was an excellent short in all facets, from colour to camerawork, while “Rooty Toot Toot” combines interesting artwork and movement, and has its humorous moments as well. Later, Magoo became more blind than bombastic and the one-shots became increasingly coy and child-like instead of wry.

But this article was written, arguably, when the studio was at its peak—and the very same day director and UPA vice-president John Hubley was fired as fall-out from the McCarthy witchhunt.

DELIGHT IN SEVEN MINUTES
THE best way to identify United Productions of America is to say: "They're the people who made 'Gerald McBoing Boing'." And the best way to identify the quality of their product is to say that every time you see one of their animated cartoons you are likely to recapture the sensation you had when you first saw "Steamboat Willie," the early "Silly Symphonies," "The Band Concert"—the feeling that something new and wonderful has happened, something almost too good to be true.
Twelve times a year UPA releases, through Columbia, one of these seven-minute masterpieces; current or soon to be seen are "Rooty Toot Toot" (based on Frankie and Johnny), "Willie the Kid" (which is a travesty of the Wild West legend), and several episodes in the career of Mister Magoo, who plunges with supreme confidence into all sorts of adventures although he is so near-sighted that he doesn't know himself in a mirror. Also on view is the film "Man Alive," a serio-comic film about cancer released by the American Cancer Society. And recently the Roxy Theatre paid UPA the significant compliment of showing "Man on the Land," a documentary prepared for the oil industry, for its sheer entertainment value.

In a sense, the UPA product is not so much new as it is a return to the first principles of the animated cartoon, those fundamentals which Disney understood and exploited more fully than anyone before him, and which he has abandoned. They are so simple that the name of the medium, animated cartoon, comprehends all the essentials, since a cartoon is a drawing that deliberately distorts certain salient features of the subject and animation is an exaggeration of normal movement or expression. As Disney has come closer and closer to photographic realism, he has subtly violated the character of the cartoon (which is a drawing on a flat surface) by giving it depth and, in a brilliant combination of art-work and machinery, has substituted movement—remarkably lifelike—for animation.
The UPA cartoons are flat; whatever sense of depth you get comes from perspective, lines drawing your eyes to a small door in the background, and by color—as the door opens you get a flash of blue in contrast to the sepia or gray of the surrounding walls. And because they use one drawing for every two or three frames of the film, instead of Disney's one for each frame, the figures move less smoothly, they have a galvanic animation.
The delight which these pictures gives is, however, not merely pleasure taken in any return to the primitive. The positive virtues of UPA are their impudent and intelligent approach to subject matter and a gay palette, a cascading of light colors, the use of color and line always to suggest, never to render completely, a great deal of warmth, and an unfailing wit. Some of the cartoons recall stock episodes—tubas grunt and Mr. Magoo steps off a girder into thin air—but the best of them are as fresh in concept as in execution.
In "Willie the Kid," for instance, the brigand on a tricycle is commiting a hold-up or a rescue in the West and a split-second later is in his own backyard dealing with his mother and a moment later is out West again. In "The Oompahs" the conventional musical instruments of animated cartoons appear—and suddenly they are engaged in a baseball game which is all spots and shapes of color dancing against the geometry of the diamond, giving you some of the enchantment of Len Lye's color experiments on film. In "Family Circus" a lesson in child psychology is taught, sympathetically and humorously, through a dream sequence in a circus.
So far UPA has released nothing longer than seven minutes for theatrical use; the company will be represented by animations which are part of the Stanley Kramer production of "The Fourposter," and a plan for a feature picture, using Thurber's "Men, Women, and Dogs," has been long considered. Past experience indicates that feature-length animations are the first step toward the decline of the imagination, but the exuberance and copiousness of the UPA talents will, I believe, protect them. To be gay and intelligent and inventive all at once is a rare phenomenon. I, for one, hope UPA goes on for ever. —GILBERT SELDES.