'Truth and the Budget Have the Last Word'
Plus: news.
Welcome! Glad you could join us. It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan:
1. An introduction to two independent greats.
2. Animation newsbits.
Now, let’s go!
1. The Hubley films
An animated sequence went very, very big on social media last year.
It’s about two people in a relationship. At one point, they sit in a rowboat. At another, they have an awkward conversation while wearing masks. Nothing major happens, but their interactions sound natural, unscripted — and they’re animated with artful drawings and a real sense of life. That was enough to hook millions.
The clips came from a little-known ‘70s movie called Everybody Rides the Carousel (watch). It was made for TV, but it doesn’t feel throwaway. In fact, handling this section of the film were two great animators: Barrie Nelson and Tissa David.1
Those artists had already worked a lot, on earlier projects, with the directors of Everybody Rides the Carousel. And the sequence turned out so well for a reason. The film was a Hubley production, after all.
John and Faith Hubley always brought something special to their work. It was never phoned in — even the ads they made on the side, to pay the bills, were left-field and human. Across the Hubleys’ decades together, their films won three Oscars. And they made those films outside America’s big studios.
Back then, from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, an indie animated film wasn’t a simple proposition. It was often impossible to get one funded and distributed. Even the Hubleys had to scramble, deep in debt. “[Y]ou spend a certain percentage — let’s say 20, 30, 40 percent of your day — dealing with matters that have nothing to do with the pure creative,” John said.2
But they kept doing one of these unusual films each year. John noted that “you have to make what you want to make.” For Faith, the less commercial of the pair, it was non-negotiable. “If you are going to grow, stay alive, remain sensitive and valid, you have to keep working seriously,” she said. “If your value in life is to be always doing what comes along, you are abandoning your responsibility as an artist.”
This thinking led them to work like Everybody Rides the Carousel (a lucky commission from a network), whose artistry and humanity still touch people.
That film is only a slice of the Hubley story, though. In this issue, we’re putting together an introduction to their careers — and a viewing guide for their films (with links to watch in bold).
When the Hubleys married in 1955, they’d already been friends for years. They’d worked together, too. Their first collaboration was the educational film Human Growth (1947).3 Faith, who edited it, came from Hollywood’s live-action side. John was an animation guy; he designed its animated inserts.
Faith took many roles in Hollywood: coordination, script, sound. John was a name at UPA, where he did socially engaged and graphically fresh cartoons. Some saw him as a “genius.”4 With creations like Mr. Magoo, John told modern stories in the language of modern art. He rebelled against what he called Disney’s “18th-century watercolor” aesthetics and “sweet sentimental chipmunks and bunnies.”
As the Red Scare began to rage, though, John landed in trouble over his one-time membership to the Communist Party. In 1952, he was blacklisted in Hollywood.5
So, he opened an advertising studio, Storyboard, as a refuge. When Faith married him, Storyboard’s purpose became indie animation.6 It was a must for her: “I have much stronger feelings than John about the risks of spending one’s life in advertising,” she said. They promised in their wedding vows to do one film per year, however they could. (“We make one for them,” John noted, “and one for us.”)7
In 1956, they relocated their studio to New York — leaving the Hollywood ecosystem behind. “As a country, we paid a heavy cost [for the blacklist],” Faith said. “But personally, it allowed us great freedom. I don’t know if Johnny ever would have left Hollywood. I don’t know if we would have had as creative a life.”
The Hubleys’ first indie animated film was The Adventures of * (1957), funded by the Guggenheim. Faith described it as the tale of “a child’s vision, the slow erosion of the vision, and how it can only be regained through the eyes of one’s child.” And, visually, it was revolutionary.8 Here’s John:
Because it was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and because they were dedicated to breakthrough art … [it] was mandatory to come up with a new technique in animation. We worked at ways of getting something that was never done and came up with this wax resist. … Take the animation, then we cover the drawing. Turn another piece of paper over and you take a wax candle, like a real paraffin, heavy paraffin and rub it very hard over that shape. And then you wash watercolor ink over it and what happens is you get a natural resist from the wax ... [We were getting] this wonderful texture on this thing and then double-exposing it over backgrounds that were also painted in the same technique … It’s like a painting coming to life.9
The Adventures of * set the tone for their work together. It would be unorthodox, non-Hollywood — movies like canvases. And it would focus on the real and the human, pushing back against the phony corporatization of the mid-century.
As mentioned, that spirit appeared even in the Hubley commercials, made to fund their personal films. Take their major one for Maypo cereal. John had long hated the “prosaic hard-sell dead spots on the air,” and he felt that ads should have the “human elements” that inspired “people to watch TV shows in the first place.”10
The Maypo ads derived from unscripted, improvised audio recordings, spliced into narratives. Faith said, “[W]e just loved the idea of doing something natural and truthful with a non-professional actor.” Here, they worked with Mark Hubley, their young child. The campaign seems to have been a tax write-off for a failing product; the Hubleys got lots of money and unusual freedom.11
But the result, which debuted less than a year before The Adventures of *, had a warm authenticity. People loved it. Maypo’s sales spiked dramatically, and the Hubleys were hired for a whole series of ads — Late for School, Marky’s Sister, the one about Uncle Ralph. “It supported our personal films,” Faith said.12
Take The Tender Game (1958), a short romance. Although the Hubleys weren’t animators themselves, they appreciated the craft — and they hired legends like Bobe Cannon to make their designs move. Paired with music by Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, it’s beautiful.
The involvement of jazz was key — John and Faith loved it, and they had friends in the jazz world. Benny Carter was a regular collaborator, as was Dizzy Gillespie. (“We have a mutual admiration society,” Gillespie wrote.) The Hubleys’ Harlem Wednesday, from 1957, is just Carter’s jazz over modern paintings of mid-century Harlem life. But that’s enough.13
By the time the Hubleys released Moonbird (1959), their films were clearly different. Once again, it was a visual experiment — paint on paper, double-exposed over backgrounds — with a grounding in reality. It’s based on an edited recording of their sons Mark and Ray (“Hampy”) at play. Bobe Cannon and Ed Smith brought the soundtrack to life with world-class animation.14
Here was the new breed of animated film — self-funded and personal. Moonbird won the Oscar for animated shorts in 1960, a first for indie animation. As John stood at the podium, he said:
I must share this with five people: Bob Cannon, Ed Smith, Faith Elliott and Marky and Hampy.15
By the early ‘60s, Hubley films were known to those in the know, worldwide. Animators in the USSR looked at their experiments with a touch of envy. The painterliness of films like The Tender Game and Moonbird was a topic of discussion in places like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Disney was popular, but the Hubleys got the respect.16
It was painful for John, during the UPA years, that his films didn’t win Oscars. With Moonbird, Hubley family productions began to succeed where he’d failed. Animator Shamus Culhane felt that Faith brought “a lyric quality, a subtle tender approach to filmmaking ... a poetic approach” that John didn’t have at UPA.17
Figuring out exactly what each Hubley contributed to the films is difficult, and it changed project by project. John said that “all of the films, right from the beginning of our stuff, from Guggenheim on up, have always been a very close collaboration, creatively and on every other level.” He hesitated to break it down too much.18 Faith gave it a try:
We collaborate on the story. John does most of the backgrounds and I do some. I do the character rendering. We both work on the soundtracks. As a trained editor, it’s easier for me. The statement, the content, is made jointly.
Recently, their son Ray pointed out just how essential Faith’s work was on the sound side. “As I look at it, I see that Faith editing together these improvised dialogue tracks ... it approaches being something like a writer for the films,” he said.19
Temperamentally, Faith was an energetic go-getter; John was more neurotic and moody. She noted that he was a hypochondriac, and prone to bouts of depression after a project. The two of them were known to argue relentlessly over their work. (“I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with fighting,” Faith said.)
Yet the collaboration only grew stronger. They kept pushing boundaries and making the films that Hollywood couldn’t. Take The Hole (1962) — a gorgeous, funny piece built on a conversation between Dizzy Gillespie and George Mathews. It tackles nuclear war with a human touch. It won another Oscar.
Despite the acclaim, the Hubleys’ films mostly struggled. Moonbird didn’t pay off until the ‘70s; The Hole wasn’t widely seen. John’s dream was to make features, but their first, the visually stunning Of Stars and Men (1961), was a flop that wrecked their finances. Even some festival audiences were skeptical. Faith recalled “banging doors and loud hisses” when it screened at Annecy in France.20
The Hubleys’ studio sank further underwater over the years. Creatively, though, they didn’t slow down. Windy Day (1968) was a project with their daughters Emily and Georgia, and one of their most impactful films. It was shot on layers of underlit vellum. Meanwhile, Zuckerkandl (1968) is a hilarious jab at mid-century America, about a philosopher who argues for “the disentangled life.” A follower of his says:
Imagine … a community all the members of which are unconscious. Let neither choice nor thought nor action destroy this paradise, this nest of softly cooing doves, unconcerned by what people will say because they know that people will all say the same thing. Be unconscious. Be detached. Don’t get involved.
The Hubley films always had a cause — not always openly stated. Zuckerkandl is one of their loudest, and it feels like a response to the Vietnam War. A few years earlier, Faith had told the press, “We make most of our films funny. Everything is really so futile that all you can do is laugh and do your best.”21
By necessity and by design, a Hubley production was a small production. There wasn’t much money to go around, for one — but John and Faith were also resisting the industrial approach. “We try to keep the staff at half a dozen,” Faith said. “This work is highly personal and it suffers terrifically if it gets farmed out to strangers.”
They had a stable of people who worked with them again and again. It wasn’t uncommon for a single animator to handle a whole film. That was the case with Tissa David, who animated their Eggs (1970) and Cockaboody (1973) by herself.
In the ‘70s, David was a go-to animator for the Hubleys. They used her often in their shorts for Sesame Street and The Electric Company: Glad Gladys, Cool Pool Fool, Penguin Rhythms, The M Who Came to Dinner. David was a master at the human warmth the Hubleys needed — and at working with limited frames. She’d learned her craft at UPA, and she stayed committed to the style. As she once said, a low budget:
... does not inhibit me at all. I love simplicity in animation. Even if I had a high budget I would do simple animation.22
When the opportunity to create Everybody Rides the Carousel came along, the Hubleys hired David to animate a good deal of the film. It’s a semi-educational, feature-length story about people’s development. CBS funded it and gave it a half-year schedule, but John and Faith treated it the same as an indie project, and involved their Yale class in the making of it.23
Carousel was one of the Hubleys’ last films together, before John’s death. And it was among their closest collaborations. Faith said she had a large hand in directing Bill Littlejohn’s animation (“I wanted to act out some of the characters”), and that more of her own painting appeared on screen than usual.
Littlejohn was the Snoopy animator — a top-tier artist. Many were hired to Carousel. Tissa David took the lead on the sixth section, with the young couple. Working alongside her, as noted at the start, was Barrie Nelson (Windy Day).
And, in that sixth section, you find all the hallmarks of Hubley animation.
First, the voices. On YouTube, where the film’s views exploded last year, one commenter wrote, “I love the way they talk so naturally. It doesn’t sound like acting. It sounds like we’re listening to a home movie.” The reason: Carousel was another Hubley improv recording edited into a soundtrack.24 (One of the actors for the couple was a young Meryl Streep, in her debut film role.)
Second, the technique. This isn’t traditional cel animation. Michael Sporn, who worked on Carousel, wrote that David’s scene with the masks was done with vellum, light and multiple exposures. “Each stage [of the film] had its own technique and color scheme,” he noted.25
Third, the design and animation. The mask sections get away from Disney’s ideas: once again, it’s like painting in motion. And David’s animation isn’t literal or naturalistic — the characters act with human warmth, but they also transform in unreal ways. All of it was needed for the special “realism” that the film demanded. Like John Hubley wrote at the time:
In the sequence dealing with intimacy versus isolation, it becomes clear to a couple that their relationship is moving toward a deeper commitment to each other. Each must be prepared to share identity with the other. Each feels threatened, their faces turn inward, and masks appear. The masks continue a superficial relationship while the real faces, still turned inward, voice thoughts and feelings about the conflict. They drift apart, unable to remove the masks. When the two do away with their masks on a second try, and make real efforts at intimacy, they succeed in sharing. They reach maturity; the figures become abstract, Matisse-like. The enactment is a ballet — a series of arms, legs, torsos and heads flowing in a dance of love. A literal love scene at this point would be cartoon-like in the old sense, and would therefore present not realism but a flat and ineffective caricature. …
Artists around the world are defying the old “linear shape” order in graphics. Let’s hope they also defy the limitations of the fairy tale and confront contemporary issues. May we be fortunate enough to see the development of visuals that are generated by dramatic and psychological imperatives — to continue to reveal human vulnerability and to increase the understanding of human relationships.26
Everybody Rides the Carousel fell into obscurity, and it isn’t available in restored condition. Even the version that Criterion streamed a few years ago didn’t look great. The copies that went viral last year are bleary; it’s almost hard to tell what’s happening.
But none of that kept people away. The scenes in the sixth part of Carousel are rich with those qualities Faith Hubley cited: they’re “natural and truthful.” At a time when the Hubleys aren’t discussed much, and social media seems like a poor fit for their slow and thoughtful films, millions and millions stopped to watch Carousel on Instagram.
The honesty, uniqueness and personal touch that the Hubleys fought for decades to keep in their films — the very reasons they went indie — are still reaching people. They had to scramble and struggle for those things, but they’re in there, and they’re immortal. In a Hubley independent production, Faith once said, it was “truth and the budget” that had “the last word.” It’s fortunate for us all that they kept finding enough of both.
2. Newsbits
We lost Sam Kieth (63), the virtuoso comic artist behind The Maxx, adapted into an animated series in the ‘90s.
In America, OpenAI is shutting down its Sora video generator. (Also, Disney backed out of its billion-dollar investment in the company.)
Smear Frame published a fascinating meditation on the closure of several college animation programs in America. It’s a new animation newsletter we’re following.
In Japan, Sunao Katabuchi (In This Corner of the World) put out a short called Map of Fukufuku on YouTube. With 5.6 million views so far, it’s been a hit.
Also in Japan, Studio Ponoc reportedly came on board Mfinda. The team is best known for Mary and the Witch’s Flower.
In France, the Annecy Festival revealed its lineup of shorts for 2026. Included are Black Box by Anton Dyakov and Winter in March by Natalia Mirzoyan (two members of the Russian animation diaspora), and Night Song by Karla Castañeda, who worked on del Toro’s Pinocchio.
The Glassworker reached Blu-ray in Britain. It’s well worth a look — check out our past coverage here and here.
In Russia, there’s been a fallout from Suzdalfest’s cancellation of the Grand Prix award for Leonid Shmelkov’s Restlessness, seemingly for political reasons. See coverage here and here.
A film from Argentina, Carlos Montaña (2022), just landed on YouTube. Director Ita Romero has spoken about the film’s relationship to Argentina’s past and her own father.
Last of all: we looked into the trickery that made Disney’s first features so magical.
Until next time!
See Screening Room, the Hartford Courant (March 13, 2000), Animation: A Creative Challenge and Pat McGilligan’s interview with Faith Hubley. Those last three were used several times, and the final two a lot.
The original 1947 version of Human Growth can be seen on the Internet Archive.
John had been moving in this creative direction for years. See two articles he wrote or co-wrote in the ‘40s: “Animation Learns a New Language” and “The Writer and the Cartoon.” For the “genius” line, see Funnyworld #18.
The saga is explored in the book When Magoo Flew, a key source.
Early on, Storyboard had branches in Hollywood and New York City. In mid-1956, John closed the California studio and moved Storyboard entirely to New York, where it was revamped as a “small individualized organization.” See Broadcasting-Telecasting (July 16, 1956) and this letter.
See Making Movies: Student Films to Feature for the last Hubley quote. Storyboard opened in early 1954, per Broadcasting-Telecasting (July 11, 1955).
For information about Adventures, see Variety (May 1, 1957) and New York Magazine (April 12, 1993). Michael Sporn noted that it was influenced by the abstract expressionists in New York on his blog.
See John’s interview in Walt’s People (Volume 11).
For these quotes, see Broadcasting-Telecasting (June 11, 1956) and Sponsor (December 14, 1957).
Much of the Maypo section today was drawn from the book Cerealizing America. We previously told the story of these ads here.
See Newsweek (March 14, 1960) and Faith Hubley’s interview with the Onion AV Club.
See Gillespie’s memoir and Cartoon Research.
You can watch John Hubley accept the award for Moonbird on YouTube.
These international mentions of the Hubleys’ work appeared in Cinema Art (October 1961), Filmkultúra (1962/14) and articles from the ‘50s and ‘60s reprinted in The Zagreb Circle of Animated Films 3 (“Autora I 15 Pitanja,” “Od Disneya do Gopa”). Chuck Jones compared Disney’s popularity and the Hubleys’ credibility in Funnyworld #13.
See Culhane’s memoir Talking Animals and Other People, used a couple of times.
The quote comes from Michael Barrier’s interview with John Hubley, also used a few times. For other details in this section, see the books Women Who Make Movies and I Can’t Do What? — both used several times.
From Introducing John and Faith Hubley, a Criterion Channel interview with the Hubley children.
The mixed reception to Of Stars and Men was recorded in Hommage à Alexandre Alexeïeff et Claire Parker and Funnyworld #19.
For the quote, see The Gazette (October 20, 1966), used a few times. For more about Zuckerkandl, see the Los Angeles Times (December 27, 1968).
See David’s interview in Sporn-o-Graphics (October 1991).
Michael Sporn mentioned the film’s six-month deadline on his blog.
I’m going to have to watch all the links to their animations. Thanks!
They proved that making money doesn't always equal success. Although, they were forced to leave Hollywood due to the Blacklist. The Hugĥbleys were able to turn adversity into triumph by doing things their way. They enriched themselves artistically and that's the best kind of wealth for an artist.