John Hubley's "Harlem Wednesday."

In the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was nodding his head in demagogic agreement with himself, animation pioneer and Hollywood blacklist member John Hubley was tapping his toes to the rhythm of jazz. His experimental animation seemed uncontainable wildly singular visions that owed more to Hans Hoffman than Max Fleischer. Hubley (whose films are currently touring the country to celebrate his 100th birthday) gave audiences intimate glimpses into the lives of those who were often ignored by major animation studios, and tackled topics such as nuclear war, agnosticism, and social justice. While children hunkered down in front of big, boxy televisions to watch Silly Symphonies, John Hubley was recording his children's voices and using them to create socially-conscious animated films.

Hubley tackled topics such as nuclear war, agnosticism, and social justice.

Hubley started his career painting backgrounds and layouts for Walt Disney Studios in 1935, when he was 22-years-old. He worked on the first classic Disney film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," and acted as art director for "Bambi," "Dumbo" (uncredited), the "Rite of Spring" section of "Fantasia," and "Pinocchio." Of these projects, "Rite of Spring" best hints at the ambitious, idiomatic vision of his personal projects that was percolating just beneath the surface: the harmonious marriage of music and animation, and the lush, boundless backgrounds, and Hubley's penchant for breathing life into nebulous entities. "Rite of Spring" has a massive, cosmic scope, of course; Hubley would scale down these aesthetic peculiarities and funnel them into intimate exposs on quotidian life.

After leaving Disney during the strike of 1941, John Hubley joined the United Productions of America, for whom he created the Oscar-winning "Mr. Magoo." In 1952, Hubley was forced to leave UPA consequent of his blacklisted status. He subsequently founded Storyboard Studios, which acted as an alias, and started turning out wildly popular animated commercials. Though they didn't bear his name in the credits, Hubley's animated ads were wholly his own, stamped with his invisible signature; they felt simultaneously out of place within the advertising establishment and, somehow, in some inexplicable way, connected to each other, coursed by a common thread that tethered them to the unnamed artist behind the animation, like episodes of a television anthology.

Hubley's famous 1956 "I Want My Maypo" commercial featured his young son's voice, which lent the ad an authentic air (the child's whininess is undeniably that of a child who wants his Maypo). Hubley's triumph was unexpected, as the commercial was intended to be a failure: Heublein, Inc. planned on dumping their money into a bomb of a commercial for the poorly-selling Maypo in order to create huge loses and get tax-deductible expenses, so they hired Hubley, known for being independent, uncompromising, and antipodal to a capitalistic enterprise's desires, with the simple instructions of making a "slice of life."

The commercial didn't bomb, of course it increased sales by an average of 78%. In the wake of this immense success, animated commercials proliferated, and the cowboy hat-wearing child, dubbed Marky Maypo, became a household name.

The irony of churning out commercial advertisements while maintaining the aspirations of an artist wasn't lost on Hubley: In his ten-minute live-action short "Date With Dizzy," a Hubley stand-in instructs iconic trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie on scoring (or "dubbing," as he calls it) a short commercial for an instant rope ladder. Gillespie and his band watch the cartoon with ambivalence (it's all very silly, as one might expect from a commercial for an instant rope ladder), and they break into a swinging number, which, while aurally stunning, has very little to do with selling instant rope ladders.

The director hangs his head in desperation as Dizzy's quartet lets the music flow. The commercial director tries, in vain, to get Dizzy and crew to play more commercial-apt music, but the real artist remains incorruptible, even as he tries to work with the careerist, whose inability to appreciate art is obvious. Hubley's subversion was subtle but not invisible: The mockery of commercials, capitalism, and the usurpation of art for the sake of the almighty dollar in Hubley's short burns like a freshly-struck match.

"Date With Dizzy" acts as a lens through which we can decipher the filmmakers career. As John Sayles aptly notes in the recent film issue of The Believer Magazine (which features a DVD of films Hubley made with his wife, Faith, spanning 17 years, including "Date With Dizzy"), Hubley's cartoons feel alive, attuned to the syncopated rhythm of the world. Sayles likens Hubley's effect on animation to that of Miles Davis on jazz. Sayles remembers how Hubley's cartoons and commercials seemed to infiltrate the drive-in theater screen, those sneaky, subtly subversive clips slipping into the otherwise milquetoast pre-programming galre of kiddy cartoons, as the sun receded and the screen glowed in the night. Sayles succinctly describes his pre-filmmaker impression of the cartoons: "It's one of those again!"

Originally posted here:
Why John Hubley Was One of the Best Animators You've Never Heard Of