Origins

UPA was founded in the wake of the Disney animators' strike of 1941, which resulted in the exodus of a number of long-time Walt Disney Animation Studios staff members. Among them was John Hubley, a layout artist who was unhappy with the ultra-realistic style of animation that Disney had been utilizing. 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. Chuck Jones' 1942 cartoon The Dover Boys had demonstrated that animation could freely experiment with character design, depth, and perspective to create a stylized artistic vision appropriate to the subject matter. Hubley, Bobe Cannon, and others at UPA, sought to produce animated films with sufficient freedom to express design ideas considered radical by other established studios.

In 1941, Zack Schwartz, David Hilberman, and Stephen Bosustow formed a studio called first Industrial Film and Poster Service, where they were free to apply their new techniques in film animation. Finding work (and income) in the then-booming field of wartime work for the government, the small studio produced a cartoon sponsored by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1944. Hell-Bent for Election was directed by Chuck Jones and was produced for the reelection campaign of FDR. The film was a success, and it led to another assignment from the UAW, Brotherhood of Man (1945). The film, directed by Bobe Cannon, advocated tolerance of all people. The short was innovative not only in its message but in its very flat, stylized design, in complete defiance of the Disney approach. With its new-found status, the studio renamed itself United Productions of America (UPA).

Initially, UPA contracted with the United States government to produce its animation output, but the government contracts began to evaporate as the FBI began investigating Communist activities in Hollywood in the late 1940s. No formal charges were filed against anyone at UPA in the beginnings of McCarthyism, but the government contracts were lost as Washington severed its ties with Hollywood.^[2]

Columbia Pictures and success

UPA entered the crowded field of theatrical cartoons to sustain itself and gained a contract with Columbia Pictures. Columbia had historically been an also-ran in the field of animated shorts, and it was not satisfied with the output of its Screen Gems cartoon studio. The UPA animators applied their stylistic concepts and storytelling to Columbia's characters The Fox and the Crow with the shorts Robin Hoodlum (1948) and The Magic Fluke (1949), both directed by Hubley. Both were nominated for Academy Awards, and Columbia granted the studio permission to create its own new characters. UPA responded, not with another "funny animal", but a star that was a human character, a crotchety, nearsighted old man. The Ragtime Bear (1949), the first appearance of Mr. Magoo, was a box-office hit, and UPA's star quickly rose as the 1950s dawned.

With a unique, sparse drawing style that contrasted greatly with other cartoons of the day, not to mention the novelty of a human character in a field crowded with talking cats, mice, and rabbits, the Mr. Magoo series won accolades for UPA. Two Magoo cartoons won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons): When Magoo Flew (1954) and Magoo's Puddle Jumper (1956).

UPA scored another hit with Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950), based on a record by Dr. Seuss. Gerald McBoing-Boing won UPA the Academy Award in 1950; UPA cartoons would receive a total of fifteen Oscar nominations between 1949 and 1959. In December 1950, UPA announced plans for a feature-length film based on the work of cartoonist and humorist James Thurber.^[3] The film was to combine live action and animation and was tentatively titled Men, Women and Dogs, but it was never completed.^[4] (Only one of the Thurber pieces intended for this feature, The Unicorn in the Garden, was eventually released as a short subject.)^[5] Shorts such as The Tell-Tale Heart and Rooty Toot Toot featured striking, sophisticated designs unlike anything offered by competing studios. The "UPA style" began to influence significant changes at the other major animation studios, including Warner Bros., MGM, Famous Studios, and even Disney, ushering in a new era of experimentation in animation.

Turning to television

In 1955, Steve Bosustow secured a CBS contract for UPA to produce a television series (The Boing-Boing Show aka The Gerald McBoing Boing Show),^[6] which premiered in December 1956. Supervised by Bobe Cannon, this production offered an array of styles and brought then-new talent to the studio, such as Ernest Pintoff, Fred Crippen, Jimmy Murakami, Richard Williams, George Dunning, Mel Leven, Aurelius Battaglia, and John Whitney, among others. However, audiences did not embrace UPA's experiment in television entertainment; as a result, the show vanished from the airwaves in 1958. Further, as the major Hollywood studios began cutting back and shutting down their short film divisions in the late-1950s and early-1960s, UPA was in financial straits, and Steve Bosustow sold the studio to a producer named Henry G. Saperstein. Saperstein turned UPA's focus to television to sustain the studio. UPA adapted Mr. Magoo for television and produced another series based on the comic strip Dick Tracy. UPA was forced to churn out cartoons at a far greater quantity than the studio had done for theatrical releases or even the CBS television series. Despite this however, quality was languishing, and UPA's reputation as an artistic innovator faded.

UPA's style of limited animation was adopted by other animation studios, especially by television cartoon studios such as Hanna-Barbera Productions. However, this procedure was generally implemented as a cost-cutting measure rather than an artistic choice that UPA originally intended. A plethora of low-budget, cheaply-made cartoons over the next twenty years effectively reduced television animation to a commodity, partly popularizing the notion of animation as being made only for children rather than a medium for any age group to enjoy (with the exception of shows like The Flintstones), and notoriously going against UPA's original goal to expand the boundaries of animation and create a new style for the medium.

One bright moment in the UPA television era came with Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962), which inspired the format of Magoo's next television endeavor, the 1964 series The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. Christmas Carol captures the spirit of Charles Dickens's 1843 book and is considered a holiday classic, ranking alongside A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!.^[7][8]

UPA produced only two full-length feature films in their tenure: a 1959 feature starring Mr. Magoo entitled 1001 Arabian Nights, directed by ex-Disney animator Jack Kinney; and Gay Purr-ee in 1962, written by Chuck Jones and his wife Dorothy and directed by a friend of Jones, Abe Levitow.

Abandoning animation and Toho Studios

Saperstein kept UPA afloat in the 1960s and beyond by abandoning animation production completely after the animation studio closed permanently in 1970 and sold off UPA's library of cartoons, although the studio retained the licenses and copyrights on Mr. Magoo, Gerald McBoing-Boing and the other UPA characters. This led to UPA contracting with DePatie-Freleng Enterprises studio to produce a new animated series called What's New Mr. Magoo? in September 1977.

Columbia Pictures retained ownership of UPA's theatrical cartoons. The studio's TV cartoon library was licensed by Classic Media in New York, and then in 2007 merged into Entertainment Rights in London.

In 1970, Saperstein led UPA into a contract with Toho Studios of Japan to distribute its "giant monster" (see kaiju and tokusatsu) movies in America. Theatrical releases, and especially TV syndication, of the Toho monster movies created a new cult movie market for Japanese monster movies, and long-running television movie syndication packages such as Creature Double Feature exposed the Toho movie monsters to young American audiences, who embraced them and helped them maintain their popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

When Toho began producing a new generation of monster movies in the late 1980s, beginning with Godzilla 1985, UPA capitalized on its Toho contract and helped introduce the new kaiju features to the Western world.

Because of its long association with Toho, UPA is better known to cult-movie fans today as Toho's American distributor rather than a pioneer of animated cartoons, but the legacy of UPA is an important chapter in the history of American animation. UPA continues to license the American library of Godzilla movies, even today. UPA's contract with Toho also resulted in Saperstein producing Woody Allen's first feature film, What's Up, Tiger Lily?.

Henry Saperstein died in 1998. On January 1, 2000, UPA shuttered its operations, with the assets sold by the Saperstein family, which would later result in the founding of Classic Media by May 2000.^[9] On July 23, 2012, DreamWorks Animation purchased Classic Media for $155 million and, as a result, UPA is now owned by DreamWorks Animation, which would be acquired by NBCUniversal in 2016. Although DreamWorks Animation (and later, Universal Studios) now owns the ancillary rights to most of the UPA library, UPA itself (with DreamWorks Animation/Universal) continues to hold the licensing rights to Mr. Magoo, and Saperstein was executive producer to Disney's unsuccessful live-action feature Mr. Magoo in 1997.

Bibliography

• Abraham, Adam (2012): When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA. Wesleyan University Press.
• Amidi, Amid (2006): Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. Chronicle Books.
• Barrier, Michael (1999): Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford University Press.
• Maltin, Leonard (1980): Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. McGraw Hill.
• Solomon, Charles (1989): Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. Alfred A. Knopf.
• Shapiro, Susan P (1980): Detecting Illegalities: A Perspective on the Control of Securities Violations. Yale University