U.P.A.

About ten years ago, United Productions of America or Upa as the company is better known as, started releasing cartoons in which the artist, instead of disguising the characteristics of the medium in which he was working, actually admitted and exploited its conventions In Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty Toot Toot and Willie The Kid, amongst others, we saw a move away from the idea of cartoons as children's fare to a more sophisticated and wry adult approach. Sometimes there was also the breakdown of the long association of animation with the belly laugh; more ambitious attempts at serious story-telling were made. The Tell Tale Heart was a fine and suitably horrific adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's story, while The Unicorn In The Garden was quite successfully based on the Thurber parable.

Unfortunately, Upa became more and more conventional and Disneyesque in their techniques and churned out one Mister Magoo vehicle after another, culminating in a feature length cartoon a couple of years ago called Magoo's 1001 Arabian Nights in which the wit, satire and charm of the earlier works had reverted to the old fashioned saccharinestyle of the earlier cartoonists.

A scene from Zagreb Film's All the Drawings on the Town