In the late 1940s, a team of American animators on a quest to counteract the influence of Disney, joined up with Disney renegade Stephen Bosustow to form UPA (United Productions of America). Artists followed their own inclination in the more abstract or stylized art forms, some of them basing their designs on Matisse's linear, graphic style. The UPA style, insofar as one style existed was certainly economical; the artists employed the vaguest suggestion of background, furniture or properties necessary for their action. As in the classical Chinese theater, if a door or table were needed for momentary use, it would be sketched in for the duration of the action, vanishing the moment it was deemed no longer necessary. Otherwise, backgrounds were quite blank.
The UPA group stayed together for only a few years, but the collective experience of working together was a strong influence on each member's future independent work. UPA was considered an off-Hollywood springboard for these valiant independents. The more celebrated UPA films - Bob Cannon's Gerald McBoing Boing (1950) and Madeline (1952), John Hubley and Pete Burness's Mister Magoo films, Hubley's 1952 effort Rooty Toot-Toot were all clearly based on their design, products of the Fifties, but their origins lay in the collaborative work of UPA in the late 1940s. UPA was fortunate in securing distribution for their films through Columbia; and thus the initial Mister Magoo films - Fuddy Duddy Buddy and Ragtime Bear (respectively 1949) - were screened along with films like Jolson Sings Again (1949).
 |
| Undeniably from the UPA laboratory. |
The broad distinction between the Disney style and the UPA school of animation has been analyzed by John Smith an animator of Halan and Batchelor's studio in Britain in the following terms:
'In Disney's cartoon films, the rich, even, sugary coloring of the bulbous forms are matched by movements that resemble a bladder of water .... The sentimentality of mood is matched with cute,coy easy movement....excessive distortion and squashing UPA artists favor simplicity of form and movement, the essence without the frills. Acid colors and sharp forms are matched by movement the way cane or wire would move - springy, whippy, staccato. The wit and cynicsm of these cartoons is acted out in slapstick of a high but blase kind.'