Cartoon Modern

When writing the other day about the illustration work of Miroslav Sasek, I referred to it as a "classic, mid-century style." I was struck by the fact that I didn't have a name for it, and that I wasn't better able to describe its appearance.

Writer Amid Amidi calls the animated versions of this style "cartoon modern" in his beautiful book, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. (Cartoon Modern blog here.)


According to Amidi, it was a "bold visual style that was derived from the modern arts, assimilating and adapting the principles of Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism into the realm of animation..." (page 7). Artists like Picasso, Matisse, Calder, Shahn, Noguchi and Miro, or illustrators like Saul Steinberg, R.O. Blechman and Ronald Searle were influential.


[Background painting from "Petroushka," directed by John Wilson for Fine Art Films, 1956. Reproduced from Cartoon Modern.]

Realism was abandoned in favor of visual interest. Backgrounds didn't need to be three-dimensional, and painting techniques didn't have to recede but could instead call attention to themselves.


[Background painting, artist unknown, from "Woodpecker from Mars," directed by Paul J. Smith for Walter Lantz Productions. Reproduced from Cartoon Modern.]

One really fine example of this type of work is the classic "Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol," released in December 1962 by UPA studio. I first saw it some time in the mid-1960s, and watched it with my family every year on TV until it disappeared from syndication.

Boomer nostalgia does have its benefits sometimes, because fans of the show have caused it to resurface. I remember watching it with a bunch of other college students around 1980 when our college film club showed it. It finally made its way to DVD, and now there's a new book out giving all the details on how it was made: Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol: The Making of the First Animated Christmas Special by Darrell Van Citters (here's the website for the book).


For me, the visually arresting part of the show is not so much the characters as the backgrounds and objects. (I'm also a big fan of the music, by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill of Funny Girl fame, but that's a subject for another blog post.)


This layout, by Shirley Silvey, transforms Scrooge's sitting room with a modernist vibe.


These vertiginous stairs (painting by Bob Inman, layout by Shirley Silvey) combine flat color and skewed perspective with decorative details.

As I remember them, the backgrounds from the theater and neighboring buildings where Mister Magoo appears as Scrooge would fit right in with Sasek's street scenes of New York.

I guess I'll be using cartoon modern from now on to label that classic, mid-century style.
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A current animator/illustrator whose work references cartoon modern is Ward Jenkins, who maintains an inspiring blog full of images from the past and present.