+11: Reviving America's 'Worst Animation Studio'
+11: Reviving America's 'Worst Animation Studio'
Digging into the best of the Terrytoons renaissance.
Welcome to the 11th bonus issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter! Glad you could make it. To our new members — thank you, and we hope you’ll enjoy our Thursday issues.
Today, we’re looking at an iconic moment in animation history — the rebirth of the studio Terrytoons. Back in the ‘50s, its working conditions and output were among the poorest in the industry. Then a new creative director, Gene Deitch of UPA, arrived. To quote Cartoon Modern, “Under his leadership, a hitherto bottom-rung animation studio was transformed into a classy exponent of the modern approach.”
Alongside that story, you’ll be able to watch highlights from Terrytoons’ Deitch era. Many of these films are unknown outside animation history circles — but they’re full of eye-grabbing ideas that set them apart from UPA, and from most mid-century modern cartoons in general. Even now, they’re absolutely worth studying.
Let’s start!
Welcome to the 11th bonus issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter! Glad you could make it. To our new members — thank you, and we hope you’ll enjoy our Thursday issues.
Today, we’re looking at an iconic moment in animation history — the rebirth of the studio Terrytoons. Back in the ‘50s, its working conditions and output were among the poorest in the industry. Then a new creative director, Gene Deitch of UPA, arrived. To quote Cartoon Modern, “Under his leadership, a hitherto bottom-rung animation studio was transformed into a classy exponent of the modern approach.”
Alongside that story, you’ll be able to watch highlights from Terrytoons’ Deitch era. Many of these films are unknown outside animation history circles — but they’re full of eye-grabbing ideas that set them apart from UPA, and from most mid-century modern cartoons in general. Even now, they’re absolutely worth studying.
Let’s start!
Not many people in animation have had careers like Gene Deitch. After working as an illustrator, he joined UPA in the mid-1940s — and turned its New York branch into one of the hottest TV ad makers of the ‘50s. Then he found himself in communist Czechoslovakia, where he directed the first Oscar-winning cartoon animated outside America.
These were just a few of Deitch’s adventures. Another one happened in New Rochelle, New York — where he served as the creative director of Terrytoons. Deitch guided the studio through one of the unlikeliest turnarounds in animation.
That unlikeliness is worth pausing on. Although popular and prolific in its day, Terrytoons doesn’t take up a ton of room in the public mind now. You can find hundreds of its cartoons on YouTube, some with millions of views, but they’re hard to really love. Here’s how Cartoon Modern explains it:
The studio had produced theatrical shorts primarily for 20th Century Fox since 1930, its films virtually indistinguishable from one another, busted out in assembly-line fashion with the speed and efficiency of a factory producing soap or cereal — and with an equal disregard for artistic ambition. The Terrytoons cartoons of the 1950s were hopelessly outdated relics, relying on rote gags and stories, formulaic characters like Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle, and a standard of animation that could best be described as “If it moves, let it go.”
It wasn’t just that Terrytoons had missed the UPA wave. The cartoons weren’t great by the standards of any era. Even historian Michael Barrier, often a critic of UPA, has remarked on Terrytoons’ “visual squalor.” Working conditions weren’t much better — Cartoon Modern called the studio building “sweatshoplike,” and Deitch heard that its New Rochelle location was a way to dodge unions and underpay the staff.
And yet, not even two years after releasing a cartoon as anonymous and dated as The Clockmaker’s Dog, Terrytoons would deliver one as unique and strange as Flebus:
The reasons came down to Deitch, and to the unusual way he went about revitalizing Terrytoons.
It started in June 1956. Parent company CBS hired Deitch into “the newly-created post of creative supervisor of Terrytoons,” per Broadcasting-Telecasting. CBS had recently bought the studio and wanted to revamp it. With Deitch in charge, the Terrytoons building was remodeled, and the studio’s filmmaking wasn’t far behind.
But Deitch didn’t fire the old team, whose members had been there for years — some of them since the ‘30s. “As old-hat as many of them were,” Deitch later wrote in How to Succeed in Animation, “I was determined to reform them, not replace them.”
To that end, Deitch hired a talented team of younger artists and writers to join the existing staff. One of them was cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who remembered his time at Terrytoons like this:
… we, the new blood, were thrown in with veteran animators dating back to Popeye, Betty Boop and Oswald the Rabbit, men who had grown old in the business and were content to knock out junk just as long as they could get in their weekend game of golf. Their ambitions did not go beyond surviving the guerrilla band of arriviste hotshots …
The tension between the “old guard” and the “new blood” was palpable — many Terrytoons veterans perceived Deitch and his team as invaders. “At times the air was so thick, according to one newcomer, ‘there was nothing to do but go into your own office and close the door,’ ” wrote Leonard Maltin in Of Mice and Magic.
Yet the strife had its upsides, at least creatively. Animators familiar with mid-century modern design knew that it moved in certain ways. UPA had set the template. The animators at Terrytoons were from another time, though, and hadn’t internalized UPA motion. Since Deitch and his newcomers were modern designers, an odd and compelling blend emerged. Cartoon Modern again:
… the shorts feature modern high-style characters, yet they are often animated in the haphazard Terrytoons style of old, with little attention afforded to the integrity of shapes or creating styles of movement that complement the design. These disparate approaches to filmmaking don’t work against one another so much as they lend the Deitch-era Terrytoons a peculiar charm all their own.
Terrytoons characters from the Deitch era are graphic shapes that nevertheless move in uncontrolled, energetic ways. It’s something to see.
There were quite a few characters, too. Deitch more or less abandoned Terrytoons’ old roster in favor of a new one — although he did use the old Dinky Duck to parody the studio’s formulas in It’s a Living, one of his proudest achievements there.
Among Deitch’s new characters were Clint Clobber, an angry superintendent, and the more famous Tom Terrific. There was also John Doormat, whose cartoons play on “battle of the sexes” themes popular at the time. In a clever subversion of the standard fair, though, the outline for Doormat’s character makes it clear that his marriage has a subconscious purpose. “He is dominated because it’s what he really wants,” it says.
That modern theme of psychoanalysis takes center stage in Flebus. Directed by Ernie Pintoff, who’d later win an Oscar for The Critic with Mel Brooks, its whole story and punchline lean on psychiatry. Flebus is a modern man, living in a world of impossibly modern visuals.
Another modern character is Sidney — a neurotic elephant, and a clear ancestor to Bing Bong from Inside Out. His excellent second film, Sidney’s Family Tree, received Terrytoons’ first Oscar nomination in years. Both that film and his debut (Sick, Sick Sidney) showcase the talents of animator Jim Tyer, the Terrytoons veteran who adapted best to the Deitch era.
“It was just beautiful what he [Tyer] did with that character, Sidney,” inker Doug Crane said. “Almost everybody in the studio loved it; it just seemed like the most incredible thing.”
It wasn’t just the animation that got these films praise, though — it was also the modern element, the psychology of it. As one magazine writer put it:
Films like Flebus and Sidney’s Family Tree have been the talk of international film festivals. They offer something new — animated psychology. The characters have complexes — and the studio uses artists like cartoonist Feiffer to explore them.
That sense of interiority might come through best in a little film called The Juggler of Our Lady, seen below:
The Juggler of Our Lady originated in three places — first as a medieval story about a tumbler, then as an 1800s adaptation about a juggler, then as R. O. Blechman’s illustrated book from 1953. The film draws directly from that third one.
Deitch wrote that he’d come across Blechman’s book and seen a chance in it to use CinemaScope to its fullest. The ultra-wide format was new, and cartoons were still exploring it — including many of the ones at Deitch’s Terrytoons. He felt that animating Blechman’s book in its original drawing style would open a new frontier:
… with every word, including the title and copyright notice hand written in Bob’s tiny and shaky style, I thought that here was the greatest opportunity I would ever have to really work the CinemaScope format, playing off those tiny timorous figures against the vast expanse of that very wide screen!
Deitch claimed to have spent a year calling Blechman on the phone, trying to get this film greenlit. Terrytoons’ reputation preceded it — Blechman was nervous that his work would be butchered. In the end, he joined the film’s team as a layout artist to ensure that his vision came through. Per Cartoon Modern, director Al Kouzel animated the entire film himself to keep the style consistent.
The result? “Perhaps the finest UPA film not made by UPA,” wrote Adam Abraham in When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA.
Released in April 1958, The Juggler of Our Lady is an unqualified masterwork. From the visual style to the cinematography to the story, it feels years ahead of its time. The interior life of the juggler is so rich, and is portrayed with such a personal flair, that the emotional range in this film would fit a modern-day Oscar nominee.
Deitch wouldn’t have a chance to explore these ideas further at Terrytoons. The same month that Juggler premiered, he lost his job at the studio — the old guard had defeated the new blood. Deitch pinned blame especially on Bill Weiss, a Terrytoons manager who’d undermined him almost from the minute he walked in.
The methods that Deitch employed in Juggler would, a few years later, win him an Oscar for Munro — adapted from Feiffer’s comic of the same name. But, at the time, Deitch considered the Terrytoons venture a failure. He’d jumped at the “chance to make the world’s worst animation studio into the best,” he wrote. In the end, he managed only a brief and miraculous renaissance.
That’s all for today! Thanks for sticking with us — your support is making this newsletter better week by week. With your help, we recently acquired another rare book for our library of sources. You’ll see the first results of that buy this Sunday.
As always, Thursday issues go out to a smaller, more tightly-knit community than Sunday editions. If you have any thoughts about today’s piece, or ideas for what we should cover in the future, feel free to let us know in the comments or by email! We’ll be in touch as soon as we can.
Hope to see you again soon!