Friday, August 31, 2012

Check It Out: THE UPA JOLLY FROLICS COLLECTION (Part The Last - I Promise)






Paul Julian took one of his few directorial credits (while also doing his usual work as designer and colorist) on the 1955 entry Baby Boogie.  Ann Whitfield provides the voice of a little girl asking one of the most loaded questions a parent can hear:  "Where do babies come from?"







The Jaywalker was released by Columbia pictures the same year (1955) as The Man With The Golden Arm.  Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak are nowhere to be seen -- not even Arnold Stang.  But like Otto Preminger's film, Robert Cannon also tells a Shocking Story of a Pitiless Addiction.  There's even a great jazz score, this time by bandleader Billy May.  May the tale of Milton Muffet stand as a warning to the ages . . .





Based on a short story by the writer Percival Wilde, The Rise of Duton Lang is the story of a French scientist whose career would be more successful if he devoted less time to eating.  It's also the story of the fellow telling the story while cadging drinks off an American tourist.  He's not quite as successful as usual . . .






Trees/Jamaica Daddy was the first of four UPA cartoons featuring the characters of Hamilton Ham (a world-traveling shape-shifter) and Hattie, a sweet little girl in a straw hat.  It was also the last of the studios cartoons to be nominated for an Oscar.  Within two years of its release in 1958, UPA, following the poor performance of its first feature-length film, 1001 Arabian Nights (featuring Mr. Magoo), was sold by Stephen Bosustow to producer Henry Sapirstein.  Sapirstein led the company away from the dwindling theatrical market and into television (except for the very nice 1963 film Gay Purr-ee, featuring great voice work by Judy Garland and Robert Goulet), resulting in two well-received television specials (Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol and Uncle Sam Magoo, both for NBC), a syndicated Mr. Magoo series that didn't do as well, a syndicated series based on the Dick Tracy comic strip (not a big success, and hardly an artistic triumph, but at least free of Warren Beatty and Madonna), and The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo for NBC, which was cancelled after one season.  About this time, UPA dropped out of animation altogether and became the American distributor for Toho Studio's giant-monster epics, which they continued to be until at least, I think, the film Godzilla 2000.  This relationship with Toho allowed Sapirstein to get American distribution rights to a Bond rip-off called Key of Keys.  Sapirstein handed it over to Woody Allen, who applied a new English soundtrack, some songs by The Lovin' Spoonful, and a new title; What's Up, Tiger Lily?  Since then, the company has drifted through various corporate hands, landing most recently in the animation division of Dreamworks, which is a subsidiary of Paramount, which is a subsidiary of . . .  Not a happy ending, exactly, but at least we have some beautifully restored memories.



Thursday, August 30, 2012

Check It Out: THE UPA JOLLY FROLICS COLLECTION (Part Two)








John Hubley was essentially forced out of UPA, along with writer Phil Eastman, in 1952, after the former refused to testify in front of HUAC about his, or others, alleged Communist ties (that this ritual resembled the show trials that were a regular part of life in the Soviet Union never seemed to occur to the idiots running the committe).  This changed the dynamics of the company somewhat, and the dominant director at the company became Robert Cannon, whose career had started at Warner Brothers, where he worked frequently with Chuck Jones (Jones and Cannon were responsible for, if nothing else, the mind-blowing entry The Dover Boys).  Cannon won the studio their first Oscar (for Gerald McBoing Boing), and he continued to produce gentle comedies about daily life and ordinary people, including this one, Willie The Kid, where the hero makes The West safe for women and children -- and then goes in to take his nap . . .





I first heard Ludwig Bemelmans' 1940 children's book Madeline when my Kindergarten teacher read it to the class.  If Seinfeld was the sitcom About Nothing, then Madeline does the same for kids literature and is all the more charming for it.  The closest thing to a Big Event in the book is the title character's bout of appendicitis.  The rest is simply the minor happenings in the lives of some convent-school girls in Paris, twelve little girls in two straight lines . . .





One of the more inventive and unpredictable directors at UPA was Ted Parmelee, who, almost back-to-back, made The Emperor's New Clothes and The Tell Tale Heart.  The former is just about the best telling of Hans Christian Andersen's story of hubris and unintentional nudism I've ever seen, pared down to the basics, visually striking, and featuring wonderful voice work by Hans Conreid, who keeps five distinct characters up in the air at once.  The last line, when the humiliated monarch yells "SHUT UP!!!" is hilarious and poignant at the same time . . .







The Tell Tale Heart is as much the work of background and colorist Paul Julian as it is Parmelee, and his settings for this story of insanity and murder would make it unsettling even without James Mason's brilliant reading of the story.  This was, originally, going to be released in 3-D, but either the fad had passed by the time that Columbia got it into theaters, or everyone involved regained their senses and realized that it didn't need any gimmicks to scare the hell out of audiences.





One of the unrealized ambitions of UPA president Stephen Bosustow was a feature-length film based on the works of James Thurber.  The closest that he got was this 1954 short based on the Thurber story "The Unicorn in The Garden," from Thurber's 1940 book Fables For Our Time.  It was directed by William Hurtz, normally a background artist (and later the creator of the wonderful animated credits for Jay Ward's syndicated show Fractured Flickers), and he caught the genuine charm of the story.  And, alas, the undercurrent of misogyny that was part of almost everything Thurber wrote.





Even people who dislike it in general concede that The Man on The Flying Trapeze is visually striking.  And indeed it is, with beautiful backgrounds by Paul Julian.  Personally, I think it has a lot more going for it, including the wonderfully sad-sack hero, Wesley, voiced by Jack Mather, and a great score by Lou Maury that rings wonderful variations on the old music-hall staple.  The plot, about Wesley's sweetheart Fifi, making her way up a ladder of men towards show-biz success, is handled in a nicely off-hand manner, and with considerably more wit than , say, All About Eve.



Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Check It Out: THE UPA JOLLY FROLICS COLLECTION (part one)



I rob from the Rich and I give to the Poor
Then I rob from the Poor when the Rich need more
I rob from the Rich again, but alas --
I never give a thing to the Middle Class . . .

Robin Hood's archery skills are suspect at best, the (new) Sheriff of Nottingham is something of a klutz, and the fondness of the Merry Men for tea and crumpets have left them decidedly out-of-shape.

Robin Hoodlum was meant as something of an audition for animation studio UPA (United Productions of America) to see if they could produce theatrical shorts for Columbia Pictures, which had recently shut down their own animation studio, Screen Gems.  Within a month or two of its premiere in December of 1948, this "audition" was nominated for an Academy Award.  Not bad . . .





UPA was required to turn out two more theatrical shorts featuring Columbia's established characters Fox and Crow, who had appeared in Robin Hoodlum, but they were also allowed to introduce a character of their own, a crotchety near-sighted gentleman that director John Hubley said was partially inspired by an uncle of is.  Quincy Magoo.  The rest is history.





A story of the quest for gold, love, and baked beans, The Miner's Daughter was one of the first UPA cartoons that was truly theirs alone -- no Funny Animals, no borrowed characters, and sparing use of dialogue in a form was often packed wall-to-wall with verbal and visual jokes.  The plot and characters could very well derive from a B-movie starring Judy Canova, but the handling is gentle and whimsical in a way that was very much a UPA hallmark.





Having already scored several Oscar nominations during their relatively-brief association with Columbia Pictures, UPA won the first of three for Best Short Subject (Cartoon) for their 1951 production Gerald McBoing Boing.  The story, written by Ted Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss), had started life as a comedy record narrated by popular radio and voice-over actor Harold Peary.  The story was adapted by Bill Scott and Phil Eastman (who, as P. D. Eastman, would become a very popular kids' author himself) and composer Gail Kubik, who had also scored the record, did similar duties here.  Any resemblance to a typical cartoon of the time had completely disappeared by now, although within a year or two, just about every animation studio in town would be struggling to copy UPA . . .





Rooty Toot Toot is one of only two cartoons I can think of with a credit for choreography (the other being Ballet-Oop, also made for UPA).  Director John Hubley and his animators worked with L.A.-area dancer Olga Lunick to create dances for this mini-musical based on the old song "Frankie and Johnny" (the music was by pianist/arranger/bandleader/voice coach/songwriter Phil Moore, the lyrics by Alan Alch, and the uncredited vocals by singer Annette Warren and voice actor/singer Thorl Ravenscroft).  The story of one man, two women, and a loaded gun.  A lot of fun and not a bad argument for gun control, either . . .