We're Not Disney

Walt Disney had been praised in the 1930s (with some help from his publicists) for the creation of Mickey Mouse and his foray into feature-length cartoons. As theatrical animation approached 1950, people—certainly film critics—wanted something different.

They got it, thanks to UPA.

The studio’s art looked modern. The stories seemed more mature. And critics tired of what some people called “slapstick violence” pitting animated humanised animals against each other.

Among the commentaries about the studio’s work was a one-page article in the May 21, 1952 issue of Pathfinder, the magazine for American Boy Scouts.

Movies: no more cats hitting mice?
UPA’s Gerald and Mr. Magoo typify the new school of cartoons with ‘intelligent freshness’
Two years ago Theodor Seuss Geisel, a La Jolla, Calif., advertising man, writer and cartoonist, wrote some cute verses about a boy whose vocabulary was limited to the sound of a gong. All the little fellow could say was “boing.”
Children’s records made from Geisel’s verses were a flop, although as “Dr. Seuss” he had written and illustrated successful children’s books including And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street and 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Undismayed, Geisel took the verses and the story idea to United Productions of America, a cartoon studio started seven years ago by Stephen Bosustow, a former Walt Disney artist. Bosustow liked the story and bought it for $500, the second cartoon ever to command so high a price.
Heart Tugs. The tragedy of Gerald’s peculiar speech affliction—other children would not play with him and his teacher sent him home from school—plus his winsome smile and three-pronged forelock (added by cartoon director Robert Cannon) won the hearts of millions of moviegoers.
Geisel and Cannon provided a happy ending for the cartoon called Gerald McBoing-Boing: Gerald tries to run away from home, but is stopped by a radio scout who hires him to be the station’s chimes. After that, Gerald rises to fame and fortune.
His creator’s story had a happy ending too. Last spring, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected Gerald McBoing-Boing as the best cartoon of 1950.
Myopic Star. But UPA had another ace up its artistic sleeve—nearsighted Mr. Magoo, an amiable old fumbler with good intentions. Already eight Magoo pictures have been shown, and currently a ninth (Fuddy Duddy Buddy) is in the making. Magoo, who was developed by UPA artist-director John Hubley, is good enough to rate marquee billing in many a movie house, a rarity generally reserved for Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny.
Meanwhile, Cannon, who did not want to make McBoing-Boing into a series, was persuaded by public reaction to the original cartoon to cast around for a new story. Last week he was hard at work putting the final touches to Gerald’s Symphony (to be released next fall), in which Gerald replaces an entire symphony orchestra.
What is the secret of UPA cartoon successes? Cannon explains:
“We are not interested in making cartoons of cats hitting mice over the head with clubs. That sort of thing is dead. We are trying to bring an intelligent freshness to cartoons, plus an application of modern contemporary art.”



Another one-page summary can be found in the Feb. 1, 1952 edition of The Art Digest in a story written by the film advisor to CBS.

UPA, Magoo & McBoing-Boing by Arthur Knight
The cartoons of Walt Disney have dominated American screens for the past 20 years, setting both the artistic and technical standards for the dozen or more companies that are at once his competitors and his imitators. The imitators press close. As soon as the Disney studios invent a new character, a reasonably exact facsimile appears in the cartoon series of the competition. Disney introduces the Multiplane camera, a device to give the illusion of depth to his two-dimensional world, and variations of that camera immediately turn up everywhere.
But much as they try, the imitators never quite overtake their master. Disney has always been willing to spend more money, to take more time, to shoot higher than any of the others. Clearly, the only thing that any new outfit coming into the field could do would be to attempt something that Disney himself does not. And that is just about the story of United Productions of America, more familiar as UPA, the creators of “Gerald McBoing-Boing’” and “The Near-Sighted Mr. Magoo.” What the UPA people have set out to do—what the Disney studios have been neglecting —is to make cartoons.
Somewhere along the line, after the tremendous push that Disney early gave to the entire animation field, the first principles of cartooning seem to have gotten lost. The cartoon, whether in art or in the funny papers, is a simplification the details of which may be distorted for emphasis. The cartoon makes no attempt to imitate life: rather, it exaggerates and satirizes and underscores. In the animated cartoon especially, this freedom of the artist to depart from pure representation into pure imagination becomes the very basis of the form. Why attempt to draw a world that can be photographed so much more easily? Yet Disney and his imitators have been moving persistently toward an increased naturalism in their cartoon films. They draw water that shimmers like water, rain that falls like rain, people who move like people. They even photograph live action, laboriously tracing its outlines to guide the movements of their cartoon people. Inevitably, the art of the cartoon has been lost in the woods of its technique.
With the old established companies blindly following Disney’s lead, it is impossible to guess where all of this might have ended. But UPA, founded in 1945 by Stephen Bosustow, was set up in conscious reaction against both the Disney style and the Disney method, the method of a large-scale movie factory. Himself a former Disney artist, Bosustow gained additional cartoon experience in the creation of visual aids for industry before the War. From simple illustrations he moved to slide films, then on to animations. During the War his “Few Quick Facts” for the Army newsreels and his Navy training films were outstandingly successful in getting information across to troops painlessly yet tellingly. UPA still does considerable work for both the Armed Services and for industry.



The keynote of the UPA films is simplicity, a technique which Bosustow relearned from the poster and the training illustration, and which he then returned to the cartoon film. One of the first UPA subjects to receive nation-wide attention was “Brotherhood of Man,” an ingenious and effective film argument for inter-racial, inter-cultural amity. As designed by John Hubley and Paul Julian, it emphasized the two-dimensionality of its characters, played with line and form and color. In many of the sequences, characters were no more than simple outline sketches.
In 1948 the young studio signed with Columbia Pictures to make a series of cartoons for theatrical distribution. At first they were constrained to use the sort of characters that turn up in conventional cartoon series—crows, foxes, bears, the usual barnyard personnel. But UPA refused to make its characters cute and cunning. “The Ragtime Bear,” for example, was a goggle-eyed, shaggy, simple-minded creature who only wanted to be left alone so that he could play his banjo. But soon the irascible Mr. Magoo—the first authentic caricature of a human in cartoons since “Koko the Clown”—put in his appearance, and he was followed by the prize - winning “Gerald McBoing-Boing.” UPA began to parody popular ballads, to satirize the gangster films, prepared modern versions of fables and legends. The animals have now all been returned to Disney and his confreres.
In all of UPA’s pictures, the creators’ familiarity with art, and particularly with modern art, is immediately apparent. In the recent “Family Circus” there is a dream sequence executed in a style reminiscent of the works of Klee or Miré. “The Oompahs,” their newest, tells the story of a family of brasses —Papa Tuba, Mamma Melophone and Junior Trumpet. All are delightfully stylized and grouped in patterns.
This is no accident, this familiarity with modern art. Many of the key figures on UPA’s small but gifted staff are men who have already won honors in the art world. John Hubley, now vice-president and supervising director of the organization, has exhibited at the Los Angeles and San Francisco Museums. Abe Liss, their production designer, is both a sculptor and painter. Paul Julian, designer and color expert for UPA, exhibits at the Los Angeles Museum and the Ferargil Galleries in New York. C, L. Hartman, an animator, has exhibited both at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington. While Jules Engel, UPA’s color expert, won the purchase prize at the San Francisco Museum in 1950.
This same consciousness of modern art influences UPA’s choice of composers for their pictures. No baby-voiced sopranos lift their voices in soupy song hits here. The music is neat, efficient, expressive. It may be tuneful, but never hit-tuneful. Its writers are often the young moderns.
It is significant that the public has not merely accepted but welcomed these daringly different cartoons. A whole world of art separates their style from Disney’s, yet the mere appearance of the brightly colored UPA “Jolly Frolics” title card these days sets audiences twittering with the same delighted anticipation that once greeted a “Micky Mouse” or a “Silly Symphony.” A UPA industrial cartoon sponsored by Timken Bearings was so clever that it has been shown successfully in many regular theaters. “Bailing Out,” one of the UPA instructionals for the Navy, won acclaim at both the Edinburgh and Venice film festivals a year ago. And, as final proof of its popularity, UPA has grown in six years from a six-man outfit to an organization now employing over 75 people, has progressed from a cramped loft in a three-story walk-up in downtown Hollywood to a new, handsomely styled building in Burbank.
Does this mean that American movie audiences have suddenly acquired a taste for modern art? It would almost seem so—at least, for modern art presented in this manner. For although UPA’s pictures are shown simply and purely as hilarious and ingenious cartoons, the public is responding not only to their humor but to their freshness, their originality, their high imagination as well. Their reception strongly suggests that the American public, increasingly apathetic in the presence of the conventional cartoon, fully appreciates the stimulus of the UPA approach, an approach that is at once modern and basic.

UPA didn’t remain the darling of animation for long. Attention was being turned from theatres to television. The studio’s artists seemed to have been more hung up on design for design’s sake instead of entertainment. A CBS TV show with Gerald failed; its potential audience wanted to (and did) watch Mighty Mouse beat up cats in chopped-up old cartoons.

By then, John Hubley had become a victim of the nefarious blacklist. Soon Columbia lost interest in distributing its shorts. Internal squabbles resulted in Herb Klynn and others quitting to start Format Films. Then Bosustow was ousted after selling the studio to investor Hank Saperstein. By the mid-‘60s, Saperstein declared “Animation’s dead,” got rid of his studio’s equipment and artists, and was satisfied with re-packaging used cartoons.