A Shorts History

The majority rules popularity of short cartoons that supported the normal live-action feature films segued into the larger film corporations to found their own exclusive animation units. For example, violence of action prevailed to the point of being burlesque at Warner Brothers. In the 1940s, a great number of cartoon series would rival the popularity of Disney features - with work at once more subversive and more anarchically vital than anything his studio could possibly devise.

Walter Lantz would be renowned for creating Woody Woodpecker and Paul Terry for Terrytoons. Chuck Jones and Tex Avery composed the characters of Bugs Bunny for Warners and would stay at that studio from 1938 to 1952, working in the wooden animation building, that was coined 'Termite Terrace.' Chuck Jones worked his ever-loving tush off on many established cartoon characters, which included the iconic Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester and Tweety Pie. He would even direct a propaganda entry in 1944; Hell Bent for Election, on behalf of the final election campaign of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Jones would also develop the fearful rivalries of Wile E. Coyote and Mimi the Road Runner; the road runner is the State bird of Arizona and Mimi emerged as an extraordinary, ostrich-like bird, virtually indestructible, with the capacity to tear along highways in the desert at supersonic speeds - leaving a plume of smoke in the aftermath.

                     Roadrunner, Roadrunner, going faster miles an hour...





Fritz Freeleng reveled in the unending pursuit of the diminutive bird Tweety Pie by the scrappy scavenger-cat Sylvester, who without fail, receives  the brunt of Tweety Pie's destructive stratagems. At MGM, William Hanna, Joseph Barbera and Fred Quimby would create the savagely fought cat and mouse wars of Tom and Jerry.

                        Defying laws of nature, the mouse would almost always win.




These films would usually consist of six minutes of unadulterated mayhem, in the incarnation of cumulative gags enduring about sixty seconds each, in which the 'pursuer' aims to get the '
pursued' - only to be foiled by the superior wits of his targeted victim.








The characters, drawn without practically any moulding to suggest body vulnerabilities are subject to every form of catastrophic destruction under the great big yellow ball in the sky. They are often trampled by massive, descending weights, pressed into the ground in ludicrous shapes, or flattened against walls in hard-line geometric patterns. For the highly schematic figures, no physical destruction is plausible. The crudity of the gags flowed with unrelenting mischievous ingenuity from their inexhaustible creators. The main factor in this form of animation is perpetual movement. Chuck Jones once mused ; 'Movement is how animation acts. What makes a cartoon character significant is not how it looks. It's how it moves.'

                      Fischinger journeys the abstract in Allegretto


The signature pictorial style of cartooning represented by Disney and his rivals did not go without challenge in the USA. European animators of the Twenties and Thirties, such as Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Anthony Gross and Len Lye, were pudding proof that animation could make effective use of many forms of art, irrespective of being stylized and abstract. Consequently, the more stylized they were, the more the drawn characters appeared to belong naturally and organically to the art world of animation. The labor dispute at Walt Disney's studios in 1941 had had some effect. Gradually the artists who had led the protests left to work on their own. New styles of animation would surface and evolve during the war years. Bill Hurts, John Hubley and Bob Cannon all respectively worked in the Air-Force Motion Picture Unit during the war, and experimented with new concepts. Stephen Bosustow worked for Hughes Aircraft and produced films regarding industrial safety as well as a propaganda film in 1945; Flat Hatting, exclusively for the US navy.

UPA    In the late Forties, a team of American animators, hell-bound to counteract the influence of Disney, joined with ex-Disney renegade Stephen Bosustow to form UPA ( United Productions of America).  The artists would follow their own inclinations to the abstract and stylized art forms, some of them basing their designs on Henri Matisse's linear, graphic style. The UPA style, insofar as one example existed, was spare and economical; the artists each employed the vaguest suggestion of background, furniture or properties necessary for the 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 and vanishing the moment it was no longer needed. Otherwise, backgrounds were quite blank.


The UPA group would stay together only a few years, but the collective experience of working together was a strong influence on each member's later, independent work. UPA was indeed 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 Peter Burness's Mister Magoo films, Hubley's Rooty-Toot Toot (1952) were each products of the Fifties, but their origins lay in the collaborative work of UPA in the late Forties. UPA was fortunate in safeguarding distribution for their films through Columbia and thus the initial Mr Magoo films - Ragtime Bear and Fuddy Duddy Buddy (both 1949) - were released along with films like Jolson Sings Again (1949)


The broad distinction between the Disney style and the UPA school of animation has been analyzed by John Smith, an animator of Halas and Batchelor's studio in Britain, in the following terms :


         'In Disney cartoon films, the rich, even sugary co louring and 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 they came or wire would move - springy, whippy, staccato. The wit and cynicism of these cartoons is acted out in slapstick of a high but blase kind.'