Columbia and UPA
Discussion Topic: The Lasting Influence of UPA Animation
Question : The UPA style is exemplified as being economical and stylized. Find a current animation that you feel owes its visual identify to the UPA Studio. Please support your findings with any embedded movie clips and stills.
**Instruction**: This an informal class discussion. Skim read the reading material attached and do a response, add link to the videos; can be found on youtube
Sample from other classmate :
I think a modern cartoon that showcases some elements of the UPA style is the TV show The Fairly Odd Parents. The show features backgrounds with the UPA characteristic uneven rectangles with exaggerated angles, and the limited use of color in the backgrounds. The character designs also have some similarities like extremely large sloping noses on some adult male characters and smaller rounded or pointed noses on child characters. The character’s hands are similar but only when completely open, it’s kind of hard to describe with words but they have very small palms with disproportionately long rounded fingers.
I think the best showcase of the show’s UPA influence is the show’s classic opening theme. Along with featuring the limited coloring for the backgrounds, right off the bat it showcases a neighborhood that is very similar to a typical depiction of a neighborhood in a UPA cartoon, with unevenly drawn houses that are sometimes extremely tall and thin. The staircase part of the opening sequence also showcases UPA’s tendency to have a character be the same color as the background, accompanied by an extremely abstract sense of architecture. There’s also a small shot that I think is more of a direct nod to the UPA style, that features UPA’s abstract form of coloring where they place a circle of color and draw around it.
The actual show features a lot of UPA influences, but opening sequence features the most extreme examples. The backgrounds in the show are a little more literal, and the characters are both flat but are rarely seen in profile in The Fairly Odd Parents, opting to have more of a 3/4 view of each character.
