Skip to main content

Watch the Oscar-Winning “Gerald McBoing-Boing” (1950): It’s Ranked as the 9th Greatest Cartoon of All Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNsyQDmEopw

To understand how revolutionary this short film from 1950 was to contemporary viewers, just consider the previous four decades (or so) of animated films. There were talking animals, singing animals, bouncing animals, and in Disney films humans based on rotoscoping live action. From its humble and humorous beginnings, animation was striding towards realism as fast as it could. But in the first minute of this adaptation of a Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel story, you can see that’s all been tossed out the window, a window shaped like a trapezoid.

This animation from the renegade studio United Productions of America (UPA) ushered in the space age look that suited the dynamic post-war American economy. The pace of life was frantic, sleek, modern, and the animated characters and backgrounds follow suit: laws of perspective are gone. Backgrounds are suggested with one or two objects, and color is impressionistic, not realistic. The characters are cute, but drawn with an economy of line.

Which would all suit a story by Dr. Seuss that already existed as a children’s record, told in his familiar rhythmic rhyming style.

The Gerald of the title is a young boy who doesn’t speak in words, but in sound effects. His parents freak out, a doctor can’t help, and his classmates and school reject him. But like many a Dr. Seuss story, Gerald’s problem is actually a gift, and the film concludes in a positive way, celebrating difference. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Short that year, beating out the established studios of Warner Bros., MGM, and Disney. It paved the way for the more minimal animation of Hanna-Barbera (Gerald’s dad has a proto-George Jetson look) and opened the door for more abstract films from the National Film Board of Canada, and influence the Klasky Csupo studio and others in the 1990s animation rebirth.

UPA was formed from the exodus of several top Disney animators after a creators’ strike in 1941. Head among them was John Hubley, a layout artist who bristled against Disney’s realism and wanted to branch out. At first known as Industrial Film and Poster Service, the studio made films for the United Auto Workers and for the Army, making educational films for young privates with the Private Snafu series after Warner Bros stepped aside. Chuck Jones helped direct these shorts. Anti-Communist sentiment put an end to government work, and, so by the late 1940s, UPA decided to take on the big studios with theatrical shorts and after “Gerald McBoing-Boing” was a hit, they continued with the Mr. Magoo series, several McBoingBoing sequels, and a TV version of Dick Tracy.

The studio dried up in the 1960s and instead of animation teamed up with Toho Studios in Japan and helped introduce a generation of American audiences to kaiju (giant monster) films like Godzilla by re-cutting and distributing many of their films.

Along with its Oscar, “Gerald McBoing-Boing” is now part of the Library of Congress’ Film Registry as a significant American Film and often gets voted as one of the greatest animated films of the 20th Century. (It was voted the 9th best animation of all time, by 1,000 animation professionals.)

Lastly, Gerald’s last name lives on as the inspiration for the “happy mutants” zine and website, boingboing.net.

Related Content:

Watch 66 Oscar-Nominated-and-Award-Winning Animated Shorts Online, Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

Chuck Jones’ 9 Rules For Drawing Road Runner Cartoons, or How to Create a Minimalist Masterpiece

Legendary Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health Care (1949)

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Watch the Oscar-Winning “Gerald McBoing-Boing” (1950): It’s Ranked as the 9th Greatest Cartoon of All Time is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3na6lYV
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more