UPA Fudgets

Fudget’s Budget won first place in the animated short subject category at the Venice International Film Festival in 1955. Donald Heraldson, in his book Creator of Life, A History of Animation (1975, Drake Publishers), describes the animation gimmick employed:

“Fudget’s Budget” used backgrounds that were psychologically interlaced with the animation — graph paper. Family members would come and go, like stock market statistics, by vanishing in and out of the graph paper backgrounds.

Here’s an example from the start of the cartoon. George Fudget is formed from a question mark on a title. He is a straight line that expands to human outline form (one drawing every two frames).



Irene Fudget comes into the scene in between lines on a graph. We’ve skipped some drawings but you can get the idea of how the animation worked.



An article on future styles in animation in the April 1959 edition of the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound points out

Movement now rarely involves the whole figure...In Fudget’s Budget (’55) a couple twice get up to dance, “because they enjoy it,” then return to sit completely motionless at their nightclub table. This deliberate alternation of stylised movement and total immobility can be used to obvious satirical effect.

Yet the article isn’t altogether praising this type of movement, calling the limited animation in UPA’s Ham and Hattie series “humourless stiffness.”

Pamela Anne King, reporting on the Edinburgh Film Festival in the October 1955 issue of Films in Review proclaimed Fudget’s Budget “an ideal cartoon for this inflationary decade” but admitted the Scots in the audience didn’t really get it because the short was “a bit too tangibly American.” And Ernest Callenbach, in his review of Flebus in the spring 1959 edition of Film Quarterly, termed Fudget’s Budget “UPA’s last creative gasp.”

The cartoon was directed by Bobe Cannon, straying away from his seeming preference for shorts starring children. He co-wrote the cartoon with Tee Hee and Tedd Pierce. Adam Abraham, in his superb book When Magoo Flew noted:

Hee’s own financial troubles inspired the film, which presents Mr. and Mrs. Fudget as neon-outline figures on ledger paper to suggest a world composed of numbers and sums. Hee worked closely with Jules Engel to accomplish the film’s look.

George Bruns provides an old-time, barroom-like piano score that is jaunty enough to lessen any pretensions the film may have had. Gerry Ray, Alan Zaslove and Frank Smith are the credited animators.