UPA Animation and the Environment: A Celebration of the New DVD UPA Cartoon Box Set

The UPA and the Environment: A Modernist Look at Urban Nature

            At the same time the Disney Studios were producing animal rights-driven animated features, a new animation studio was born, United Productions of America, a studio that drew its stance on ecology from its technology-driven modernist perspective that is reflected in both the narrative and aesthetic content of its animated films. United Productions of America (UPA) grew out of the 1941 strike at Walt Disney Studios that enticed three ex-Disney artists, Stephen Bosustow, Zack Schwartz, and Dave Hilberman to leave Disney and challenge its anti-union culture. Since the UPA studio also grew during the World War II era, they first produced industrial films for the then liberal policies of the federal government.

As the “Industrial Films and Poster Service,” for example, their company name before UPA, they produced an election film for Franklin Delano Roosevelt entitled Hell-Bent for Election (1944) and a human rights film about race relations, Brotherhood of Man (1946). Both of these films not only demonstrated their support for Roosevelt’s governmental programs, but also illustrated the studio’s own leftist politics and, at least to a certain extent, its modernist aesthetic. Hell-Bent for Election immerses a pro-FDR political message in a Chuck Jones-directed cartoon “with the same self-conscious use of both modern design and film techniques (matched dissolves, odd angles…)” (Barrier 511). The backgrounds in Hell-Bent for Election described as “very designed and abstract” (Barrier Hollywood Cartoons 511) anticipate the later work of UPA, the “stylization of movement, of what Hilberman called ‘a different kind of animation that came out of the stylized characters’” (Barrier 514).

UPA embraced a philosophy that advocated making the presence of the animator transparent and foregrounded stylized representations of figures and setting within a modern technologically driven socio-cultural context manifested in the abstract. UPA’s aesthetic contributes to a modernist view of culture driven by a Bauhaus-like vision of balance rather than existential doom, especially that found in Gyorgy Kepes's Language of Vision. Kepes asserted that “Visual language … must absorb the dynamic idioms of the visual imagery to mobilize the creative imagination for positive social action, and direct it toward positive social goals (14). The artists at UPA embraced this philosophy of the activism driven by an abstract image refined to its most elementary structure. For Kepes, art should serve society as “a positive popular art, an art reaching everybody and understood by everyone” (221). UPA saw animation as the popular art that could best serve society’s needs.

            

Although it grounds earlier political cartoons like Hell-Bent for Election and Brotherhood of Man, this philosophy is most evident in shorter animated works like Gerald McBoing Boing (1951) and Rooty Toot Toot (1952). We assert, however, that it continues to resonate in two of the animated feature films produced by UPA, 1001 Arabian Nights (1959) and Gay Purr-ee, a film that highlights urban nature through both its narrative and aesthetic, foregrounding the interconnections between nature and a culture driven and constructed by technology. 1001 Arabian Nights builds on the modernist narrative of Gerald McBoing Boing in which human nature becomes subsumed by technology, even within the fantasy world of the “Arabian Nights.” Gay Purr-ee takes a more blatant human and organismic approach to ecology as it heightens the modernist aesthetic of Rooty Toot Toot in a narrative valorizing pastoral nature over corrupt urban technology.

            Created by children’s book author Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel) and the writer for Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bill Scott, Gerald McBoing Boing centers on Gerald, a boy who can only speak in sound effects. Instead of inhibiting his success, however, Gerald’s “defect” becomes an asset when a radio station hires him as its sound effects department. This premise embraces an environmental message that takes an ambivalent stance toward technology. Although Gerald does find his sound effect voice beneficial when a mysterious corporate officer stops him at the railroad tracks and hires him to work for the radio station, he is shunned by friends and family and nearly runs away from home to escape their scorn. In Gerald McBoing Boing, technology becomes a tool only when it subsumes the language that would make Gerald human and connect him with both the human and natural worlds.

The aesthetics of Gerald McBoing Boing foreground the immersion in a modernist perspective and hark back to UPA’s mid-1940s Bauhaus-like philosophy behind Brotherhood of Man. Gerald echoed the ideas that had shaped UPA’s films in the middle forties, the ideas that Gyorgy Kepes had advanced in Language of Vision. Cannon and Hurtz avoided the violence of Warner Brothers and the conservative aesthetic of Disney to produce “inventive stylization of movement in Gerald McBoing Boing; it shows up, for instance, in the way a doctor’s slightly gawky legs accent his rigid verticality” (Barrier 525).The goal for Cannon and Hurtz was to, as Hurtz put it, “boil[ ] it down” (qtd. in Barrier 525). UPA emphasized this minimalist aesthetic rather than narrative and conveyed its political stance in the same way abstract modern art communicates its message—through visual symbol and metaphor.

The same thematic and aesthetic philosophy underpinning Gerald McBoing Boing guides 1001 Arabian Nights. Gerald McBoing Boing has clear connections to Mr. Magoo, the protagonist of 1001 Arabian Nights. In 1001 Arabian Nights technology plays a vital role in building not only the stylized aesthetic, but also in driving a narrative in which Magoo’s bumbling character assists his hapless son only because technology intercedes. The sophisticated design and color of the film augments a narrative in which the technology of a genie in his bottle, a flying carpet, and a magic flame supersede bumbling and incompetent human and nonhuman nature. Yet technology does not serve as a tool for destruction in 1001 Arabian Nights. Instead, it serves to preserve and protect humans and their natural world and illustrates the interconnected interdependence between culture and the nature of humanity. The supernatural, however, most powerfully facilitates this “technology,” so its connection to the modern world is diluted. 

Gay Purr-ee, on the other hand, highlights a pastoral nature like that contrasted with the corruption of urban space and depicted, if briefly, in Rooty Toot Toot. Rooty Toot Toot is arguably one of the best cartoons to come out of UPA. It tells the story of Frankie and Johnny through song and from the perspective of two lawyers, a bartender, and Nellie Bly, Frankie’s rival for Johnny’s love—all in a Technicolor stylized courtroom setting complete with judge and jury. Although the lawyer prosecuting Frankie for Johnny’s murder, the bartender, and Nellie Bly all tell their tale within the confines of the bar in which Johnny is shot, Frankie’s defense lawyer paints a pastoral image of Frankie’s home that highlights her innocence and her connection to nature and connects Rooty Toot Toot with Gay Purr-ee.

Although Maltin asserts that Gay Purr-ee is “too labored” and “too coy,” (Seven Minutes 336) and Newsweek claims “There seems to be an effort to reach a hitherto undiscovered audience—the fey four-year-old of recherché taste” in its review of the film (qtd. in Maltin 336), Gay Purr-ee continues stylistic and thematic patterns found in Rooty Toot Toot, especially in developing its Technicolor pastoral and urban settings. The feature’s modernist aesthetic highlights a dynamic landscape that valorizes both urban and rural nature. But the film’s narrative, as in Rooty Toot Toot, validates the pastoral as a space where the natural world can thrive.

Lymelife

Lymelife (2009) is a family melodrama/coming of age film that focuses on the lives of two families deep in the surburbs of Long Island in 1979. Both homes are wildly disfunctional with the teen children trying to stay afloat while their parents go through a number of confusing and explosive relationship gyrations.

One family's father figure, Charlie Bragg (Timothy Hutton), is attempting to recover from a full blown case of Lyme Disease that he believes was caused by one of his deer hunting expeditions. He wanders through the back woods near his home with a high powered rifle looking for the deer that gave him the disease and aimlessly firing at paper targets stuck to trees oblivious to the fact that he could be shooting an innocent bystander meandering through the forest. Ultimately, this Lyme Disease becomes emblematic of the deterioration of the ideal suburban life both families attempt to build. In Lymelife, nature fights back.

The disease, a product of deer ticks from a deer population that now migrates through suburban developments like large squirrels, has ended Charlie's interest in work, his wife and his family. He veers between feeling laid low by the flu, wracked by headaches and anger from medical misdiagnosis that has allowed the disease to fully develop in his system and now is almost impossible to eradicate through the ingestion of numerous prescription drugs.

His emotional and physical condition has left his wife Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) at loose ends and his daughter ( Emma Roberts) an emotional victim of the family disintegration. Melissa works for Mickey Bartlett (Alec Baldwin) an up and coming contractor and is deep in an affair with him. Brenda (Jill Hennessey) is married to Mickey, knows of all his affairs, and has decided to continue their marriage, because she is a devout Catholic and frozen in despair about making any concrete moves that might disrupt her home.

The older Bartlett son Jimmy (Kieran Culkin) has solved his problem with the family disasters by joining the Army. His younger brother Scott (Rory Culkin) is 15 and while bearing the brunt of the home front troubles can't seem to connect the dots that everyone else in this universe has completed. This includes the Bragg daughter Adrianna (Emma Roberts) who likes Scott while he adores her, but prefers, since they are age compatible, to bury her sorrows with the Bragg disaster by chasing "older" boys. While the friendship between Scott and Emma will grow with all the appropriate complications and the adults will be forced to admit to some of their problems and attempt to work them out, the looming fear of disease and of invading nature still confronts al the principals in a variety of ways.

Brenda's fear of the tick borne disaster has led her to duct tape. She attempts to seal off Scott's arms, legs, neck and head with the all purpose tape. No ticks will work their way into her son's body if she has her way. Everyone one else is oblivious to the "dangers" of the natural world and even Brenda walks through it without taking the very precautions that humiliates her son on a daily basis. Her problems can only be solved by religion, confession and contrition, none of which interests her husband or her children.

Mickey is near his dream of a large development that will make him rich, leave his problems behind and cause his family to reconnect in the new home he has built on the edge of the woods near their present home. Jimmy's return to visit is a reason for him to straighten out Scott about every aspect of his life, including an introduction to violent reactions to anyone who has bullied his baby brother while he was away. Scott lets his brother's new found confidence rub off on him and now is able to respond physically and sexually to those he finds repellent and attractive.

While all the principals finally admit to acknowledging the endless and emotionally dangerous changes that have occured to them, Scott and Adrianna have tentatively decided to see if they can begin a relationship that will be free of such disease and lunacy. But everywhere they go, they are still wedded to the strange combination of developed landscape that is still bordered to the wild and many of their deepest discusssions occur along the railroad tracks that pierce the center of their world. The duct tape that Scott's mom has desperately wrapped around him still lingers, but its slow disapperance also means that the fear of disease has not yet paralyzed him or Adrianna, perhaps suggesting a connection with the wild world of nature can help redeem suburbia.

What is *La Cienega* (The Swamp, 2001)?

In La Cienega (The Swamp, 2001), first-time filmmaker Lucrecia Martel tells the story of two families: the once-rich pepper farm owners led by Mecha (Graciela Borges), a middle-aged and alcoholic mother of four, and the middle-class city dwellers led by her cousin Tali (Mercedes Morán), also a mother with four children. The film intertwines each family’s narrative, examining the roots and consequences of the choices each protagonist makes.  Ultimately, within the family conflicts explored in the film, the bifurcation between rural and urban and the nature and culture associated with them become blurred, revealing the power of “nature” in both worlds.

The title of the film, The Swamp, establishes its connection with nature, not only as a setting but also as a catalyst for characters’ actions. The title is the name of the town near the Bolivian border where Tali and her family lives, but it also describes the mud in the mountains in which animals become trapped and die as well as a life that has become paralyzing for people who are now resigned to eke out an existence in the foul and putrid atmosphere of a literal and figurative swamp.

In the film’s opening sequence, for example, images of drunken adults sitting motionless around a stagnant filthy swimming pool are juxtaposed with shots of an ox stuck in the deep mud of a literal swamp and unable to move. Pool and swamp become one here, a trope that is reinforced when Mecha falls while attempting to collect wine glasses, and no one comes to her assistance except Momi (Sofia Bertolotto), Mecha’s daughter, and Isabella (Andrea López), her maid.  The adults look on without emotion, just as Mecha’s son Joaquín (Diego Baenas) and his friends watch the ox. The boys in the mountains hold guns, while the adults at the pool hold wine glasses. The sultry heat of "the swamp" connects with the sensual siesta and shower scenes interspersed throughout the film, as well. 

The name of Mecha’s hacienda, La Mandragora, also connects the film and its intertwining families with the natural world. Mandragora is a red pepper farm and decaying mansion owned by the protagonist and her husband, Gregorio (Martín Adjemián), but it is also the name of a plant, the mandrake, a member of the nightshades family with hallucinogenic and sedative qualities, an explicit connection with the sedated figures of decadence around the pool. In fact, when Mecha goes to the Gringo doctor in town after her fall, they must pump her stomach in order to give her needed tranquilizers. This connection between humans and nature embodied in the mandrake is taken further by the shape of the plant, as well. The roots sometimes contain bifurcations causing them to resemble human figures.

The trip to the clinic not only connects the nature of the mandrake with the culture of a Gringo doctor’s sedatives. It also explicitly connects Mecha with Tali, highlighting their parallel family lives that also mirror the threatening natural world around them. Tali has also brought her son, Luciano (Sebastian Montagna), into the clinic for stitches, illustrating his connection with Mecha and foreshadowing his fall at the end of the film. According to Martel, “Family is a living and self-sufficient organism where the bodies, apart from their ties to blood, are linked in time, weariness, lunch time, bathrooms, in situations where the body is less exposed to social convention.” This reading of “family” ties it with both the natural world and a human nature that may mean consequences become fated rather than a product of free will.

Connections with the natural world are also embodied in the soundtrack of The Swamp. The almost constant sound of thunder announcing a storm parallels Mecha’s fall onto wine glasses and the light bulb explosion in Tali’s house, for example. In both Mecha’s and Tali’s households, a storm is threatened by the hidden conflicts between spouses, as well. Mecha’s husband, Gregorio, tries to recapture his lost youth both by dying his hair and, it is suggested, pursuing extramarital affairs. Tali, for example, reveals that Gregorio formerly had a sexual relationship with Mercedes (Silvia Baylé ), Mecha’s oldest son Jose’s (Juan Cruz Bordeu) current roommate and lover. Both Mecha and Gregorio drink excessively throughout the day, seemingly to cope with lost power and wealth. In Mecha’s household, “La Mandragora,” Mecha controls her husband, with whom she has lost respect, and daughter Momi (Sofia Bertolotto) and servant Isabel (Andrea López) serve as rational strongholds, maintaining order in an otherwise chaotic drunken adult world.

Tali’s husband, Rafael (Daniel Valenzuela), on the other hand, counters any attempts by Tali to extend her power outside the home. Tali’s plan to travel to Bolivia to buy more inexpensive school supplies is quietly usurped by her husband when he secretly buys them himself. In a scene near the end of the film, Rafael ignores Tali’s questions about papers to cross the Argentine border, and Tali’s internal turmoil is illustrated only by the crash of an exploding light bulb. Rafael’s dominance is established as the norm, then, by Tali’s reactions to his quiet authority. All of these conflicts seem fated in the context of the film, especially since the “fall” that opens the film is repeated several times by different figures, highlighting the inevitable of a loss of innocence or grace.

As reviewer B. Ruby Rich declares, "In La Cienaga, Lucrecia Martel melds personality and geography, performance and mise-en-scene` into a singular whole, fused by a unity that uses camerawork and editing rhythms to incorporate the audience into the world of the film with visceral precision and physical acuity. The routines of daily life are condensed into stencils of behavior and the essence of human nature distilled into a toxic elixir: a life-and-death struggle that emerges, as nature and nurture slug it out, storm clouds mass, and disaster endlessly threatens. Viewers cannot watch the film without feeling the heat or checking the sky for rain"

The film’s last line emphasizes the inevitability of this threatened disaster: “I didn’t see anything,” Momi tells her sister, words that refer not only the image of the Holy Virgin but of life and death itself. 

*The Secret World of Arrietty* and Nonhuman Nature

Based on Mary Norton’s children’s book, The Borrowers, The Secret World of Arietty (2010) tells the story of Arrietty Clock (Bridget Mendler in the U.S. version), a young Borrower, who lives under the floorboards of a Japanese country house. Arrietty eventually befriends Sho/Shawn (David Henrie in the U.S. version), a human boy with a heart condition since birth, who is living with his great aunt, Sadako/Jessica (Gracie Poletti in the U.S. version). When Sadako's maid, Haru (Carol Burnett in the U.S. version), becomes suspicious of the floorboard's disturbance, Arrietty and her family must escape detection, even if it means leaving their beloved home.

The taglines for The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) tell us the rules governing the Clock family, a trio of borrowers, the four-inch tall people who live anonymously in the human family's residence, borrowing simple items to make their home: “Do not be seen by humans. That's been the law of children of the under-floor.” They also, however, introduce the stance toward animal rights and environmentalism showcased by the film. Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, written by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa, and produced by Studio Ghibli, The Secret World of Arrietty brings the environmental themes and vivid natural landscapes prominent in the Ghibli films alive for popular Japanese, UK, and U.S. audiences.

The film most blatantly espouses an animal rights theme. In the context of Arrietty, most humans see borrowers as pests, as unwanted animals that must be trapped, exterminated, or banished from the home. Because of this bifurcation between the human (“bean”) and borrower world, Arrietty’s father, Pod (Will Arnett in the U.S. version) warns her to stay away from all “beans,” even those who seem friendly.

Arrietty connects with Shawn from the beginning of the film, when he inadvertently sees her gathering herbs and flowers in his new home’s garden. Shawn has moved in with his Aunt Jessica to prepare for surgery for his weak heart, since his divorced parents are too busy to care for him, so he is immediately established as a sympathetic character. During Arrietty’s first borrowing mission, too, Shawn sees her when she and her father attempt to borrow a tissue from a box. Although she remains calm, she drops a sugar cube by accident.

When he returns the cube, Arrietty’s father again warns her to stay clear of beans, an argument that becomes even more powerful when Haru discovers the Clock’s under-board home because Shawn reveals their “door” by accident when he replaces the Clock’s kitchen with a more elaborate one from a dollhouse his grandfather had built for his mother and, possibly, another borrower family. Haru believes borrowers are pests who must be caged or exterminated because they steal from the home like rats, so she calls an exterminator company and captures Arrietty’s mother (Amy Poehler) as proof of the borrowers’ infestation.

Ultimately Shawn and Arrietty successfully free her mother and remove all evidence of the borrowers’ home, but now, since rules regarding “bean” and borrower interaction have been broken, the Clocks must leave and find a new home. As Arrietty tells Shawn, “Human beings are dangerous. If we’re seen, we have to leave.” Although Shawn and his aunt sympathize with the borrowers’ plight, the existence of “beans” like Haru, who see borrowers as pests that must be eliminated, maintain the bifurcation between borrowers as “animals” and humans. Our sympathy for the Clocks, though, is reinforced because they look and act just like humans, providing them with evidence for borrower rights putting them on equal footing with ourselves.

The environmental message of the film is emphasized by the pastoral setting of the home and the vivid natural environment surrounding it that is so effectively recreated via both hand drawn animation and computer generated imagery. As Manohla Dargis of The New York Times explains, “The world outside, unsurprisingly for Ghibli, is lush and inviting, by turns a dense jungle and an impressionistic landscape washed in gradations of green flecked with red, yellow, and purple.” In this fertile landscape, “characters pop against a painterly meadow.”

Although the Clocks connect with the natural world more effectively than do the”beans” by utilizing its herbs and, in the case of Spiller (Moises Arias in the U.S. version), grasshopper legs and fur clothing, they too battle its elements and other creatures, including a crow and multiple insects. In The Secret World of Arrietty, the Clocks are constructed as more human than animal despite Haru’s reaction, so even in the photorealistic visuals of the film, as Dargis explains, “the human touch deepens the story’s themes of loneliness, friendship, the need for home and for being, literally, held," demonstrating the dominance of the film’s animal rights rather than environmental bent.

YERT: Your Environmental Road Trip

YERT (2011) is a documentary that focuses on the concept of environmental sustainability and how this idea is being acted on by ecoactivists in all 50 states. To study this problem three filmmakers jammed themselves into a Ford Hybrid SUV and, except for traveling to Hawaii by air ( or so it is assumed), motored to every state, seeking out individuals and groups who are trying to find ways to live well by thoughtfully and creatively dealing with the problems of global climate change, resource consumption, carbon and garbage generation, food production and living arrangements.

The narrative is complicated by the fact that two of the filmmakers Julie and Ben Evans find themselves pregnant two months into the trip. Along with the third filmmaker, Mark Dixon, they suddenly are asking even harder questions about how they will complete their journey. Can Julie stay the course? Will she be willing to do the incredibly hard living that being crammed into a tiny SUV, filled with film equipment, food, clothing, two unshowered men and all their generated garbage, places upon her? As the filmmaker/researchers scour every state for answers to their environmental concerns, they meet people who open their houses to them every step of the way. They interview eco-pioneers, who through a variety of ways, are attempting to redefine the way Americans can live and prosper through intelligent restructuring of their work and lives.

YERT introduces us to people who study land issues, are ecoactivists, who promote well being through better eating, green farmers, windfarmers, green architects, ecovillage promoters, urban acricultural pioneers and a host of others who are all finding cutting edge ways to reimagine how living in the USA can be made greener and more sustainable. For example, the eco-travelers encounter Bill McKibben on his walk for climate change. They also explore the benefits of plant-covered green roofs in the Midwest, both on top of skyscrapers and assembly plants. The film explains that more than 3.5 million square feet of rooftops are now green.

The three examine alternative approaches to meeting our basic needs throughout their trip. They document housing innovations, for example, including mud huts in Nebraska, rock houses in Idaho, and Earth ships in New Mexico. They also explore alternative living conditions, including a communal eco-village in Ithaca, New York. Food is examined in multiple ways, as well, first in terms of its conflict with fuel in ethanol production, and then in relation to sustainable salmon fishing encouraged by Indigenous people in Washington state. They also visit Polyface Farms, where sustainable agriculture is practiced as an alternative to the industrial complex highlighted in films such as Food, Inc. (2009). Energy consumption takes center stage in many of the environmentally-friendly projects they visit, including a wind farm in Rosco, Texas and solar roadways made of garbage in the Southwest.

Basic questions about our individual environmental footprints are answered in complex ways as we are introduced to a variety of ideas, geographical solutions, inventions, philosophical and economic responses. We get a quick and new history of the USA along with visual representations of how varied the country is and how enormous its space remains. It's all done with humor, good cheer and open ended queries. There is no one answer to the dynamic problems presented to us by ever increasing global consumption, waste production and all the problems that these activities produce. But there are a lot of people out there working in a variety of ways to see what they can do to make changes that will have a positive impact on the land, air, water and people in this country.

YERT presents us with images of devastation as well as ones of hope. We see the destruction of mountain top removal and the lone protestor who refuses to leave his Appalachian homestead, though it cost him his marriage, most of his land and his heritage. YERT takes the time to personalize the struggles of individual Americans who see new avenues to solve intractable problems. It's not all pretty, but it is always interesting to see problems created over time that now need quick and efficient solutions. Cramming 50 states and hundreds of hours of filming down to a 113 minute film obviously means that the filmmakers had to make hard choices boiling down all their information into their feature length work. Except for the fact that we never see our explorers ever visit a gas station, their journey opens us up to all sorts of possibilities we might not ever imagine without taking a year's time to explore the country, look at it's problems, possibilities and the people who are thinking and acting on them.

YERT is a film that will never find national theatrical release, but it is winning awards at a number of film festivals and is being "roadshowed" all over the country to groups that want to see it. Hopefully it will make it to a national cable release so that millions of viewers will find out what happened to Julie Evans and her own personal adventure while she was making this film with her two eco-explorers. These three eco-travelers illustrate well how humans can become a "welcome species, not a dominant one."