[Editor’s Note: United Productions of America was an animation studio that in its 1950s heyday rivaled Disney with a more sophisticated and modernist style, before it lost its way, the victim of blacklisting and other problems. We were happy to learn recently that Kevin Schreck, whose Persistence of Vision was one of the best documentaries ever made about animation, is directing Animation Mavericks, a film about UPA. We asked him to recommend three UPA shorts that someone unfamiliar with the studio’s work should watch to get a basic education about the studio in around half an hour. This article is edited from a recent conversation.]

UPA had to make a lot of Mr. Magoos, their famous cartoon about a near-sighted, ornery old man, to keep Columbia Pictures and their commercial connections happy, and some of those Magoos are great, but they’re not on my Top-Three list. To a certain extent, when you’ve seen one Magoo, you’ve kind of seen them all. It’s the same joke every time. Some land better than others. Some look better than others. Some move better than others. 

But the films that made my list are just completely iconoclastic. They were made by mavericks. They’re all by different directors, and they demonstrate that UPA always wanted to do things their own way and to make a profit doing so. There really was no defined UPA style, they were doing stuff that nobody else was doing, and it’s really hard to pin down what UPA was. I think these choices, listed here in no particular order, show why UPA matters to me. 

The Telltale Heart (dir. Ted Parmelee, 1955)

UPA’s loose but aesthetically faithful adaptation of Poe’s story is a straight up gothic horror film, one of the few and one of the earliest horror films in animation history. There’s not a single laugh in there other than maybe a wry, dry, darkly funny thing, but nothing winking to the audience, saying, Don’t worry, folks, this is a cartoon. In fact, there’s a disclaimer at the beginning, warning the audience about the type of film this is. The script is not from Poe’s short story, it was rewritten, but it sure as hell feels like the spirit. It was actually intended to be in 3D, and you get a sense of that with the parallax and the way the elements shift in that sort of multiplane way. I don’t think it quite has the two-story multiplane depth that Walt had at Disney; it’s very limited animation, but it contains incredible environments that are inspired by German expressionism and surrealism and other modernist influences. It’s quite haunting. Watch it on YouTube.

Fudget’s Budget (dir. Robert Cannon, 1954)

Often overlooked; but nothing else looks like Fudget’s Budget. It’s a film about a lower middle class American family trying to balance their budget. This doesn’t sound like much fun, but it’s very charming, it looks great, it’s set in a world of graph paper, and it moves at a good clip. The film does things with the medium that nobody else was really doing, at least at the time. And they do it with panache. Watch it on YouTube. 

Rooty Toot Toot (dir. John Hubley, 1951)

John Hubley directed the first Mr. Magoo in 1949; then in 1950, Gerald McBoing Boing, an acclaimed UPA cartoon about a little boy who speaks in sound effects, for which Hubley was producer and supervising director, won the Academy Award. Gerald McBoing Boing is not a slapstick cartoon. It’s a coming-of-age story about being an outsider. I’ve had people say to me, wow, this is a great portrayal of neurodivergence in childhood. We didn’t have the language for that kind of thing back then, but there is something in Gerald that comes from a very genuine place. I think Hubley thought, Now I’ve got to make the ultimate UPA cartoon. He wanted to go even better and bigger than Gerald. Gerald is a very approachable, accessible, enjoyable movie, but Rooty Toot Toot is very edgy, and successfully so, and it’s very hip. This is a maverick thinking, what if we did the Frankie and Johnny story, which is about murder and revenge, and very grown-up themes in a courtroom? 

Walt Disney, this is not, decidedly so. Rooty Toot Toot is pure John Hubley. It’s a jazz operetta where the choreography through animation is ballet. Hubley hired a choreographer, Olga Lunick, who was a ballet dancer. And he had these talented old animators, like Art Babbitt and Grim Natwick, working on it and giving their fluidity to designs that are unlike things one would have seen in animation at the time. Hubley’s drawings are much more inspired by what one would see in art galleries, Saul Steinberg, Picasso, it’s almost like a Rothko, or Kandinski-esque. I’m not just trying to name-drop sporadically here; Hubley was not trying to make this look like a Disney film. He breaks all the rules. Rooty Toot Toot is an assault on conventions. He puts red characters against a slightly different shade of red background, and white characters that are transparent moving through a sea of white background, and green on green and blue on blue. It shouldn’t work, but it does. 

People who know nothing about animation see Rooty Toot Toot for the first time, and they can tell that this is different. It’s pretty impressive that something from 1951 still has that effect. The film did not win yet another Oscar; it lost the prize to Tom and Jerry. I just admire how unique it is, how independent it is from anything else. Watch it on YouTube.

^^^

Kevin Schreck is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and film educator currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He was the recipient of both the Jerome Hill Award for Exceptional Work in the Documentary Tradition and the recipient of the Award for Contribution to the Film and Electronic Arts Department of Bard College in 2011. At the age of twenty-three, Kevin’s first major feature-length documentary, Persistence of Vision (2012), made its world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and has since screened at over one hundred international film festivals and institutions to virtually universal acclaim. His subsequent films include Tangent Realms: The Worlds of C.M. Kösemen (2018), The Duck of New York (2023), Antarctic Voyage (2024), and Enongo (2025).

As an educator, Kevin has led filmmaking masterclasses and guest lectures at major universities in Australia, Denmark, and across the United States. Since early 2018, he has been a teaching artist and mentor at Reel Works, a non-profit, after school program which provides free film education to New York students from underrepresented communities and low-income backgrounds. Kevin was also the Visiting Documentary Filmmaker for the fall semester of 2023 at Robert Morris University, teaching a class on documentary production.