UPA (United Productions of America)
HISTORY
Introduction
• UPA was founded in the wake of the Disney animators' strike of 1941
• Among them was John Hubley, a layout artist who was unhappy with the ultra-realistic style of animation that Disney had been advocating.
• The points at issue concerned working conditions
• There were resistance to the studio's basic approach to animation
• Along with a number of his colleagues, Hubley believed that animation did not have to be a painstakingly realistic imitation of real life; they felt that the medium of animation had been constrained by efforts to depict cinematic reality.
• UPA's big break came in 1949, when Bosustow made a deal with Columbia Pictures to provide the cartoons for them to release.
• UPA had fallen heir to Columbia's cartoon properties, such as Tito & His Burrito and Flippity & Flop, but preferred to develop properties of its own.
• UPA’s original stories like Rooty Toot Toot stand out from the thick crowd of theatrical cartoon shorts — which included an ever-increasing amount of UPA's own influence.
• UPA Pictures' legacy in the history of animation has largely been overshadowed by the commercial success of the vast cartoon libraries of Warner Brothers and Disney.
Characteristics of UPA animation
• The UPA style was characterized by flattened perspective, abstract backgrounds, strong primary colors, and "limited" animation. Instead of using perspective to create the illusion of depth in a drawing, UPA's cartoon objects looked flat, like the blobs of color that they were.
• UPA's innovations include limited animation, by which fewer and simpler drawings were used to make animation effects. Because it allowed great saving in production cost But as originally conceived, it was less a cost-cutting shortcut than a choice of styles.
• Instead of filling in backgrounds with lifelike detail as in, say, a forest scene in Bambi, UPA presented backgrounds that were broad fields of color, with small squiggles to suggest clouds and trees.
• Instead of varying the shades and hues of colors to imply the colors of the natural world, UPA's cartoons contained bold, bright, saturated colors.
Reduced movements in UPA animation
• First, the amount of movement within the frame was substantially reduced. Rather than have a cartoon woman move her entire head in a shot, a UPA cartoon might have her just blink her eyes.
• Second, figure movements are often repeated. A character waving good-bye, for instance, might contain only two distinct movements which are then repeated without change. Full animation, in contrast, includes many unique movements.
• Third, UPA uses fewer individual frames to represent a movement. If, for example, Yosemite Sam were to hop off his mule in a movement that takes one second, full animation might use 24 discrete frames to represent that movement. Limited animation, in contrast, might cut that number in half. The result is a slightly jerkier movement.
Techniques used to produce cartoons on a reduced budget
• Cels and sequences of cels were used repeatedly — animators only had to draw a character walking once.
• characters are split up into different levels: only portions of a character, such as the mouth or an arm, would be animated on top of a static cel.
• clever choice of camera angles and editing.
• use of camera techniques such as panning to suggest movement. A famous implementation of this is the "crash" technique, which involves the camera shaking rapidly back and forth to simulate a shock wave.
• "smear animation:" movement is rapid and portrayed in only three frames: the beginning state, the ending state, and a "blur" frame similar to that of a picture taken with a camera that had a low shutter speed.
• cel reversal (simply using a mirror image of the cell to represent the opposite angle). Many cartoon characters are drawn symmetrically to expedite this technique.
• the visual elements were made subsidiary to audio elements, so that verbal humor and voice talent became more important factors for success ("talking heads").
• silhouette helped avoid having to keep track of shading on an animated character or object.
• sliding a cel across a background to suggest movement.
• Stock footage: sequences that are reused frequently. This is the case of the character transformations in the Magical girls subgenre of Japanese anime series. Filmation used this strategy for much of its productions.
• extensive recaps of previous episodes or segments, to cut down on the amount of new material necessary (used often in serials).
• The most egregious case of limited animation, known as Syncro-Vox, involved pasting a film of the moving lips of a real-life person over a still frame of an "animated" character to give the appearance that the character is doing the talking. Cambria Studios held a patent on the technology, and as such, it was primarily used on their productions, such as Clutch Cargo.
• Chuckimation, another notoriously low-budget process, simply moves various "animated" figures by hand or by throwing them across a space. Most commonly used with stop-motion animation, it usually does not allow for characters' mouths to move.
ROOTY TOOT TOOT
Summary
The short retells the classic popular song "Frankie and Johnny". Frankie is on trial for the murder of her piano-playing lover, Johnny. The prosecuting attorney accuses her of shooting Johnny "rooty toot toot/right in the snoot." Nellie Bly the singer ("She's no singer!" shouts Frankie) claims she witnessed the shooting. The case is looking bad for Frankie until her lawyer, Honest John the Crook, spins a wild story about involving innocent Frankie, a jealous Johnny, and an incredible ricochet. The jury convenes and finds Frankie "not guilty." Frankie is thrilled, until she sees Honest John dancing with Nellie Bly. She quickly picks up Exhibit A (the gun) and shoots Honest John "rooty toot toot/right in the snoot" in front of the entire court room.
GERALD MCBOINGBOING
Summary
The story describes one Gerald McCloy, who at the age of 2 years old begins "talking" in the form of sound effects, his first word being the titular "boing boing." His panicked father calls the doctor, who informs him that there's nothing he can do about it. As the boy grows up, he picks up more sounds and is able to make communicative gestures, but is still incapable of uttering a single word of the English language. Despite this, he is admitted to a general public school, where he is chided by his peers and given the derogatory name "Gerald McBoing-Boing." After startling, and angering, his father, he decides to run away and hop a train to an unknown location. However, just before he catches the train, a talent scout from the NBC Radio Network (as identified by the NBC chimes) discovers him. He is then hired as NBC'sfoley artist, performing shows for a division of the company labeled "XYZ" on the microphones, and becomes very famous, with the last scene showing him riding with his parents in a very expensive automobile among throngs of fans.
THE TELL TALE HEART
Summary
The plot focuses on a murderer whose increasing guilt leads him to believe he can hear his victim's heart still beating beneath the floorboards where he buried him. Seen through the eyes of the nameless narrator, the surrealistic images in the film help convey his descent into madness.
A surrealistic take on Poe’s story, the entire cartoon is presented from the point of view of the mad narrator (voiced by James Mason). You see everything as he does and the world of this cartoon is asymmetrical, dark, bizarre and utterly nightmarish. “The Tell-Tale Heart” utilizes UPA’s “limited animation” technique, but implements the lack of movement and dimensions in a far more creative and atmospheric manner than their typical children’s material. There’s a lot of camera work in this cartoon, as we pan across paintings of the vast and imposing old mansion (as the audience, we’ve been implanted inside the madman’s body, after all) and they use several lighting techniques to mask portions of the background paintings, revealing them slowly or suddenly depending on the narrative flow, to create a terrifying illusion of movement and horror even when, well, nothing is actually being animated.
Comments
• There are lots of unnerving overlays of things such as veins, webbing out across the frame, or the slow lengthening of the old man’s shadow creeping across the dusty floor, or the pulsing beat of some wet organ flashing momentarily across the screen.
• For an animated film with only a limited amount of frame-to-frame animation in it, Director Ted Parmelee ingeniously gets the most out of what he can and the result is something unique and darkly beautiful.
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” was considered so abnormal and disturbing in its day that it was the first cartoon to ever be rated X in Great Britain.
Significance
• UPA had a significant impact on animation style, content, and technique, and its innovations were recognized and adopted by the other major animation studios and independent filmmakers all over the world.
• UPA pioneered the technique of limited animation, and though this style of animation came to be widely abused during the 1960s and 1970s as a cost-cutting measure, it was originally intended as a stylistic alternative to the growing trend (particularly at Disney) of recreating cinematic realism in animated films.
• It was an artistic attempt to break away from the strict realism in animation that had been developed and perfected by Walt Disney. While Disney's animation methods produced lush and awe-inspiring images, it was felt that realism in the medium of animation was a limiting factor. Cartoons did not have to obey the rules of the real world (as the short films of Tex Avery and their cartoon physics proved), and so UPA experimented with a non-realistic style that depicted caricatures rather than lifelike representations.
• UPA studio made the first serious effort to abandon the keyframe heavy approach perfected by Disney.
• Their first effort at limited animation, Gerald McBoing-Boing, won an Oscar, and it provided the impetus for this animation method to be accepted at the major Hollywood cartoon studios, including Warner Brothers and MGM. However, the real attraction of limited animation was the reduction in costs: because limited animation does not require as many drawings as fully keyframed animations, it is much less expensive to produce.
• The 1950s saw all of the major cartoon studios change their style to limited animation, to the point where painstaking detail in animation occurred only rarely.
Bibliography
Books
- Brown Arthur: Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from Cartoons!
- Animation art: from pencil to pixel, the history of cartoon, animé & CGI
- Barrier, Michael (1999): Hollywood Cartoons. Oxford University Press.
- Maltin, Leonard (1987): Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Penguin Books.
- Solomon, Charles (1994): The History of Animation: Enchanted Drawings. Outlet Books Company.
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