More UPA Critic Snobbery

It wasn’t until “Gerald McBoing Boing”—and its Oscar nomination—that film critics noticed what UPA was doing and started dragging out the Disney comparisons. We reprinted Aline Mosby’s United Press column of February 22, 1951 HERE. But here’s a syndicated piece dated April 5, 1951 with snootery at its finest.

Strictly Personal
Harris Says Animated Cartoon Can Be Good
By SYDNEY J. HARRIS.
BEST THING I’ve seen in the movies in months has been a new kind of animated cartoon called “Gerald McBoing Boing,” put out by a couple of bright boys who broke away from the dismal Disney influence.
“Gerald McBoing Boing” is witty and mature—and yet absurdly naive enough to appeal to children. I went with a little boy of 10, who laughed so hard I had to take him to the bathroom. Or maybe he took me.
I have long insisted that the animated cartoon has become a debased product since its early years. It is rarely funny, and never original—specializing instead in sadism of the lowest order. The tiresome chases and repeated brutalities represent a libel on the whole animal kingdom.
Now United Productions of America—the impressive company title of the two lads who created “Gerald McBoing Boing”—is planning to do James Thurber’s “Men, Women and Dogs” as an animated cartoon, with a commentary by the master himself.
As a comedy art form, the animated cartoon has tremendous possibilities which have been scarcely scratched so far. There are scores of stories not adaptable to live action that would bring a new era of intelligence and taste to this imaginative field.
Offhand, I can think of St. Eupery’s “The Happy Prince,” Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose,” Twain’s “Jumping Frog,” and a dozen of Saki’s superb “Beasts and Super Beasts” stories. In our time, E. B. White has written some charmingly thoughtful fairy tales.
The crime of the animated cartoonists has been that they confuse simplicity with stupidity. A child’s mind is simple, but not stupid; it wants what it can easily understand (don’t we all?), but it must be something worth understanding. “Everything,” said the Red Queen, has a moral, if you only know where to look for it.”

The problem with such criticism is not that the writer wants cartoons to reach more rarefied intellectual levels; there’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing wrong with young Gerald. The problem is that champions of UPA engaged in a wanton dismissal of any other forms of animated entertainment. Time has shown there’s nothing wrong with Bugs Bunny cartoons—generations of children and zillions of dollars in Warners’ coffers have irrefutably proven that—but intellectuals circa 1951 seized on UPA to denigrate any animation that didn’t appeal to their aesthetic level. They steadfastly refused to consider, let alone accept, the proposition that there was room on the screen for all kinds of cartoons.

Fortunately, and deservedly, the critics’ love affair with UPA was short. At least, I’ve never seen anyone equate Oscar Wilde to “Ham and Hattie.”