#Faith Hubley

[yusuke1234]

Artists I like

[shihlun]

John & Faith Hubley

- Cockaboody

1974

[oldshowbiz]

1977.

[canmom]

Animation Night 190: the UPA

The history of animation is long and many, many different schools and traditions can be found within it. Perhaps you might recall a few we've covered: the Kanada school, the Zagreb school, the 90s realists, not to mention all the different styles that are associated with this or that studio or director.

We could imagine perhaps them all being arranged in a great tree. Something like this, perhaps, but more international. If you were to create such an animation cladogram, one of the most significant speciation events would surely come in the 1940s, when a group of disgrunted Disney animators went off to found United Productions of America.

What made the UPA so unique? One aspect is how they drew: inspired by Soviet animation of the era and contemporary artists they leapt to highly graphical, modernist styles. Big, simple shapes, flat colours and exaggerated proportions, lines blending into shapes and vice versa. All in huge contrast to the strict 'solid drawing' that prevailed at Disney, which took its inspiration from more 18th and 19th century styles.

But more important still, for animation history, was how they moved. 'Limited animation' is an unfortunate term, drawing a circle around anything that isn't Disney or close to it, but it's the term we have: more limited drawing counts, held frames, irregular timings that fit the composition.

And while this no doubt helped save costs, that was not the primary motivation. It was a distinctive style which the studio pursued even when they had animators who could draw in the Disney way, like this example of Art Babbitt's animation actually discarding many of his original drawings.

The UPA was not seeking to create an illusion of life and make you forget that you're looking at drawings - but to compose the movement in time in a new, expressive way.

Equally novel was its subject matter. While Disney had, at the time, mostly created affirming fairy tales or slapstick comedies, the UPA focused largely on modern settings and subjects, with the slightly cynical edge that had largely disappeared from animation since Fleischer went under - as well as a much stronger sense of left-wing politics, producing iconic anti-racist films for the unions and satirising reactionary old dudes in one of their most popular series Mr Magoo.

And this new, radical approach struck a chord. Disney was old hat; the UPA were the new avant-garde, making animation proper to the modern 1950s, or even radicals defying the bourgeois sensibility of Disney. When Richard Williams moved to a more classical full animation style in contrast to his earlier modernist work, he was decried by the young animators in Zagreb as betraying the movement.

In modern times, when the UPA style feels just as dated - something to parody in 50s styled retro art like the Fallout series - this probably all seems a bit wacky. But it is pretty safe to say that modern animation was pretty much made in this conflict. Even if the 'UPA style' itself is old hat, its DNA remains in just about every living style of animation. It's like... the Tiktaalik of animation. (Only the most obscure evolutionary biology analogies here on Animation Night!)

Indeed, the UPA was a huge influence on many parts of the world: early anime in the hands of Osamu Tezuka, whose approach to limited animation would give rise to everything anime; the avant-garde Zagreb school; midcentury British animation like Yellow Submarine; and perhaps more familiar to animation fans today, it continues to influence animators like Craig McCracken (Powerpuff Girls, Wander Over Yonder) and Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Primal etc. - see AN35) whose approach has been dubbed a UPA revival. In its time, it incubated artists like Faith and John Hubley.

But, in modern times, it's hard to find out a lot about the major works of the UPA... or at least it used to be, until my animation writing senpais at AniObsessive wrote some excellent guides: one on the early UPA work in the 40s and 50s, another on three mid-fifties cartoons, on the 'UPA style', and even on specific pieces. Thanks to them, I don't have to do any homework at all!

I won't list everything here - it would be redundant to the AniObsessive pieces! - but here's the plan tonight. We'll dive into the vaults and explore the defining pieces of the UPA, from the classic Hubley pieces like Gerald McBoing-Boing and Rooty Toot Toot through the 50s developments like Tell-Tale Heart and Mr Magoo. Basically, the program is everything listed in AniObsessive's An Intro to the UPA piece.

I'll go live now and hopefully start rolling the films pretty soon - see you at twitch.tv/canmom!

[oldfilmsflicker]

new-to-me #728 - Witch Madness

[domusinluna]

Moonbird, a sweet animated short by Faith and John Hubley, 1959

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[sivavakkiyar]

Music by the Oscar Peterson trio and Ella Fitzgerald!

[l-ultimo-squalo]

The Cosmic Eye (1986)

[tootern2345]

Various animation loops taken from Michael Sporn’s blog. Splog

1. Bert and Harry Piels animation drawing by Lu Gauriner

2. Loop of Spellbinder rowing from John & Faith Hubley’s letterman. Animated by John Gentilella

3. Run cycle of Letterman running by Tissa David

[aquariumdrunkard]

Skydance :: The Fusion of Jazz & Animation

Faith Hubley’s experimental short film Skydance opens with a simple message: “Reaching for life in the cosmos.” Animated in Hubley’s unmistakable visual style with sound provided by playwright and musician Elizabeth Swados, Skydance blended jazz and animation. A further blurring of the lines between mediums can be experienced with a new book edition of Skydance, published by Anthology Editions. Part abstract art book, part storybook, it’s a remarkable 2D adaptation of Hubley’s one of a kind film.

[glowing-disciple]

Sounds like you need Adventures of an Asterisk by John and Faith Hubley.

Or maybe Seers and Clowns.

Or heck, just watch everything the Hubleys made. Won’t take long.

we need less representation in media. we need abstract shapes moving around. We need sounds of unclear provenance

[nomallmovieschicago]

25 October 2024

Film: FAITH HUBLEY PROGRAM FOURTEEN (dir. John, Faith, and Emily Hubley, USA, various)

Forum: MoMA   Format: Digital and 16mm

Observations: We're in town for a long weekend in NYC to visit friends and to catch up on some cultural events. MoMA has been involved in a major restoration of Hubley films. This was the final program in the series, which included the provocative "Seers and Clowns" (dir. Faith Hubley, 1994), plus Emily Hubley's first (1980) and most recent (2024) shorts, and some fabulous home footage of the family clowing around on Long Island c. 1965-67.

[trusswork]

childhood play

The child who plays privately by themselves is trying to achieve something -- this general fact may be difficult to discern, or easy to forget, and it is almost impossible to see what particular thing the child is trying to do, because it is so inward and dependent on an unseen world. Nevertheless, when a child plays alone, just as much as or even more than when they play with others, they are trying to make something come right. Thus a child can become frustrated with a doll or a toy all by him or herself, and this will often have nothing to do with some physical problem (eg, balancing blocks, or making a train go - those are achievements of a cruder kind). There is simply something that the child wants to happen, is causing to happen, or sees happening or potentially happening in their play, the animation or retreat of some part of the play's world. A truck can very tragically fail to be in the right place, no matter their efforts; a stuffed bear can fail to be quite as near or far from a child's heart as the child desires at that moment; and this can end in tears that seem to come from nowhere. (Maurice Sendak's Kenny's Window shows this happening better and more truly than perhaps any other book.) A particularly sensitive child may find these same problems enacted in play with more abstracted toys such as sticks, rocks, pieces of string, paper, and so on. An extremely sensitive child will see the whole world as animate and frustrating in this way.

John and Faith Hubley's 1958 animation “Cockaboody,” set to audio of the couple’s children playing, emphasizes this world of the shifting, sometimes uncooperative toys and invisible companions. In a different way, it reminds me of Tove Janssen’s Moomins books; the child, Moomintroll, changes his moods to himself easily; or completely forgets about something he is preoccupied with, and then later remembers it and is just as enthusiastic as ever.

Edward Lear’s poem “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” set by composer Elena Langer and premiered by the BSO, March 2024: as Langer notes, it is a nonsense poem taken very earnestly and set accordingly, by a writer and artist whom Langer compares to Shelley or Byron. Before that, the orchestra played Ravel's Mother Goose suite, and it made me think how precisely symphonic childhood can be in our time -- between toys, records, stuffed animals and dolls, weather and seasons, other children and grown ups, rooms in a house, and so on -- in growing up, there seem to be fewer such simultaneous ingredients in life sometimes.

"The Noontime Witch," this dark middle European fairy tale in a setting by Dvorak -- on the same BSO program -- seems to reveal more about motherhood than many such tales: the intense, overflowing frustration with a child, the furious need to protect it, and the danger of protecting it too much.

[originalharmonysalad]

John and Faith Hubley - The Tender Game (1958) – 2014 Remastered Version

John and Faith Hubley's wonderful 1958 film The Tender Game, featuring the music of Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson.

[thinkbolt]

Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass Double Feature (Paramount, 1966)

Directed by John & Faith Hubley, won the 1967 Academy Award for best animated short. Features the tunes Spanish Flea and Tijuana Taxi.

[oldshowbiz]

John and Faith Hubley and the International Association of Animators.