More, more, more! I want to see more!
John Sutherland Productions churned out some pretty attractive and imaginative animation/partially-animated short films for industrial customers in the late 1940s and the 1950s. They were big-wheel industrial customers with money to spend on top-quality work. Sutherland was able to wave plenty of cash at artists from MGM, Disney, Warner Bros. and even UPA to get them to make pro-corporate films.
Some have surfaced on line over the years, but every time I peer through old issues of Business Screen Magazine, I realise many of the Sutherland cartoons must be hiding in film cans somewhere.
Sutherland took out full page ads to push his cartoons, usually explaining what awards they won or how widely seen they were. In the publication’s 1957 Review, some ads feature a “Film of the Month.” One that got profiled twice in ads was The Littlest Giant. You can see the design work in the frames below. Fairly average stuff for the mid-1950s. The copy below came from an edition of Business Screen published in 1957.
"The Littlest Giant" (13 1/2 minutes; Technicolor: animation) shows how important consumer finance is to the national well-being by pumping more than 3 billion dollars into the country's economic blood stream every year and by making it possible for the consumer to buy goods and services out of future income, thus increasing both the individual and the national standard of living — already the highest the world has ever known.
Designed for distribution to schools and colleges, this film is also scheduled for a highly successful general public audience acceptance via television and motion picture theatres. Additionally, prints will be made available all over the U.S. for community group screenings, civic and service clubs, churches and the like.
"The Littlest Giant" is an excellent example of the way in which economic information can be made concise, understandable and entertaining when experience and professional craftsmanship is applied to the problem. This motion picture, produced by the studio with the greatest number of credits for successful economic education films, is another example of the Sutherland touch.
This film won the National Consumer Finance Association "Chris" award at the Columbus Film Festival.
Business Screen also reviewed the film in its issue of December 15, 1956.
When the Average American Needs Help
A Financial Hand for Mr. Smith
A Lesson in Credit from the National Consumer Finance Assn.Sponsor: National Consumer Finance Association.
Title: The Littlest Giant, 13½ min., color, produced by John Sutherland Productions, Inc.
This film joins two other motion pictures in the NCFA film program, Every Seventh Family and Who Gets the Credit. Like its forerunners, The Littlest Giant seeks to show the important role of the state- regulated small loan company in our economy.
Little, animated Edgar Q. Smith is shown in the title role of the average consumer, whose mass makes up the most important giant in the land. Smith, like most of us, lives on his fellow man's confidence—credit. His bills come monthly, his house is mortgaged and he buys his car on time. And when he needs cash, down he goes to one of the 9,000 small loan offices and takes out one of the ten million small loans processed every year.
Does he pay a pretty sizeable interest? You best he does. The NCFA explains this by illustrating the cost of making small "retail" loans, as against the cost of making a whop ping big "wholesale" loan to the Big Deal Corp.
And don’t forget, the film says, that if it weren’t for the friendly small loan office on the corner, the loan shark would have easy pickings.
The Littlest Giant tells a complex story, but with animation and an easy continuity it simplifies the basically complicated story of finance, rate strictures and the historical background of the consumer finance company.
Modern Talking Picture Service will distribute the film, as it does other NCFA pictures.
The February 1956 directory in Business Screen lists both George Gordon and Carl Urbano as its animation directors; both had been at MGM in the early ‘40s. The company made both animated and live action films (and some with elements of both). It lists as recent productions: Behind Your Telephone Bill (AT&T), The Dragon Slayer, Spray’s the Thing (DuPont, both animated), Meet Mrs. Swenson (GE; live action), The Conservation Story (Richfield Oil, some animation), Tops in Transmission (GM), The Rising Tide (Union Carbide), Beauty with Brains (GE), The Living Circle (United Fruit, part animation), Bananas? Si, Senor (United Fruit, animated), Working Dollars (NY Stock Exchange, animated), along with spots for Lucky Strike, Delsey Tissue, Kool-Shake, Zerone-Zerex, Ajax and Meadowgold Ice Cream.
Not mentioned in the list is one of the studio’s finest animated shorts released that year, Destination Earth, with designs by Tom Oreb, and the live action Voice Beneath the Sea and Egypt Reborn. As you can see, the studio was extremely busy with some wealthy corporate clients.
When I wrote this post about two years ago I said "Perhaps The Littlest Giant will surface yet. It was released on VHS with other Sutherland shorts." I now understand it is on a blu-ray set put out by Steve Stanchfield and his fine little company and available through Amazon. I have not seen it, but you should. Whatever you may think of the corporate propaganda contained in them, the Sutherland animated films are worth being sought out.
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