A Tiny Juggler on a Big Screen

All about a classic.

A still from The Juggler of Our Lady (1957)

We’re back! It’s the first Animation Obsessive issue of 2025, coming off our holiday break. We’re prepped and excited to start. Glad you could join us.

Before we get into it, we need to mention Los Angeles. This is an awful time for animation workers in the city — many have lost their homes to the fires, including folks like Levon Jihanian (Over the Garden Wall), whose gorgeous art we’ve shared. Cartoon Brew has a list of fundraisers for those affected and we encourage you to take a look, spread them and donate if you can. We’ll boost them again on Sunday.

After just two weeks, 2025 is already a challenging year for the animation world. The fires aren’t yet out as we write this, and not much we can say seems appropriate to the moment. For that reason, we’ve decided to cover one of our favorite animated films — whose story grapples with the feeling of hopelessness.

This film comes from mid-century New York, and it adapts a graphic novel by R. O. Blechman — a god among cartoonists. His book twisted a medieval legend into a satire with real emotion at the center: The Juggler of Our Lady (1953). A few years later, in 1957, he had a hand in its animated version. And that’s our topic today.

Now, here we go!

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It was a book thrown together in a few hours, as R. O. Blechman remembered. Yet it made him.

The era was the early ‘50s, and he was in his early 20s. He was an illustrator fresh out of school, hustling for work in Manhattan. A publisher asked him for a story about Christmas, and a friend suggested Le Jongleur de Notre Dame.¹

The tale follows a street performer who becomes a monk — but isn’t much good at it. His brothers prepare tributes to Mary; his attempts are useless. So, he performs. In the end, it’s plenty.

Blechman knew the story, although it wasn’t his own background. He’d gone to the Christian Oberlin College without truly belonging: he was Jewish, and not devoutly. (“Compulsory chapel was held every Wednesday noon, another reminder that Oberlin was not my world,” he later wrote.)

Even so, he related to this character. As he explained:

The juggler desperately performing before an indifferent world might have served as the parable of my own life. I knew that this was an ideal story to adapt. I set to work immediately. Clearing the kitchen table of everything but the white paper, and Will Durant’s Age of Faith as reference, I started the book that evening, and finished it the same night.

In his squiggly, scratchy style, he drew a modern take on the story. It was about him, almost — and the whole alienated, neurotic, mid-century condition in which he found himself. It was funny. It was moving and inspiring. The publisher liked it.

A lot of people did. The Juggler of Our Lady was a hit written up in dozens of papers and magazines. “One of the most charming of recent picture books for young and old readers,” wrote one critic. “It has to be seen to be believed,” noted another. “Drawings are in the Thurber manner,” explained a third, “so simple as to seem capable of being done by a child, but the art lying in expression and movement.”²

The book also entered the hands of John Hubley, then running an animation studio in Manhattan after his expulsion from UPA by the Hollywood blacklist. “I didn’t know who he was. He invited me to lunch,” Blechman said.

Soon, Hubley was paying him $150 per week (close to $1,800 per week today) to storyboard ads. The Museum of Modern Art was down the street from the studio, and Blechman would visit on his lunch breaks. He was now in New York animation.³

A spread from Blechman’s Juggler of Our Lady (1953)