100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Rooty Toot Toot / John Hubley
USA / 1951
A certain rivalry was rumoured to exist between the two main directors at UPA and, after Robert Cannon’s much feted Gerald McBoing Boing (also 1951) John Hubley probably felt he had to try and top it somehow. Rooty Toot Toot was a more sophisticated affair, probably UPA’s most grown up, thematically if not visually.
Paul Julian’s designs were certainly amongst the best examples of the company’s modernist stylings and the animation was in the limited cut down UPA style, a direct reaction against Disney’s super fluidity. And no wonder Hubley and the his compatriots rebelled against all to do with the House of the Mouse. After spending their early career there they had participated in the strikes against poor pay and conditions. Walt Disney fought back with many tricks including hiring thugs to break up the picket line and testifying against the strikers at the Governments House Committee Against Anti-American Activities, part of the ‘witch hunt’ against communists led by Senator Joseph McCartney. Disney denounced his employees Herbert Sorrel, William Pomerance, Maurice Howard and David Hilberman as communists and ringleaders. Producer Hilberman and later the talented Hubley teamed up to form United Productions of America and their revenge was served cold in the form of a string of critically acclaimed short films that made the Disney style seem outdated overnight.
UPA’s designs were characterised by the flat, angular shapes with a refreshingly loose connection between the colours and the lines and paint spilling out over the borders at will and Rooty Toot Toot is a clear example of this. The character driven story is a brilliant piece of “beat” animation inspired by a jazz version of the traditional song “Frankie and Johnny,” telling of a murder from several different perspectives with cool, jazz age characters prowling languidly around each other like panthers, and every movement, line, and colour fitting the music like a glove.
The idea of simplified graphical characters and uncomplicated animation techniques were soon picked up by Hanna Barbara and other producers to fill the new medium of TV, all be it with the individual style and charm of UPA replaced by the industrial approach needed to mass produce cheap animation. Six years later Disney himself would release his own modernist influenced masterpiece in Sleeping Beauty, which like Fantasia was one of his great pushes for the critical acclaim that he craved and a response to the UPA artists who had challenged his classical approach and changed the course of animation history.
Hilberman had left UPA by 1946 but even so in the subsequent years of this unsavoury period in American politics UPA came under pressure to fire anyone associated with left wing or ‘Anti-American’ views. Gerald McBoing Boing writers Phil Eastman and Bill Scott were sacrificed along with Hubley, perhaps the chief creative force. A period of decline followed for the studio. Hilberman was blacklisted in the USA and moved to England, Hubley would go on to have a glittering career in independent animation.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome but please don’t shoot us, it’s only a list!