Background
Hubley was born in Marinette, Wisconsin on May 21, 1914. He was the only child of John Raymond Hubley, a small businessman, and Verena Kirkham.
Hubley was born in Marinette, Wisconsin on May 21, 1914. He was the only child of John Raymond Hubley, a small businessman, and Verena Kirkham.
He graduated from Iron Mountain High School, Iron Mountain, Mich. , in 1932. Then, having always wanted to be an artist, he attended Los Angeles City College and the Art Center of Los Angeles.
In 1936, Hubley went to work at Disney Studios. Disney artists were encouraged to attend classes at night; and it was in these classes, especially in those taught by John Graham, that Hubley sharpened his skills in composition, drawing, painting, and art history. He apprenticed on the studio's first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), beginning as a background painter and moving to art direction, which involved designing both the background and the composition of the shot. For Pinocchio (1940) and Bambi (1942), he was associate art director, and for Fantasia (1941), he designed the "Rite of Spring" sequence, an imaginative vision of the creation of the world.
While Disney training was invaluable to the artists who worked there, the younger members of Disney's creative staff were not always content with the studio's rigid assembly-line production methods or the restrictions on their creative freedom. Hubley and his colleagues pressed for both artistic and economic reform. A strike at Disney Studios in 1941 ended the family atmosphere that had long been a hallmark of Disney's growing empire. Not welcomed back after their participation in the strike, many of the former Disney artists joined army production units. Hubley served in the First Motion Picture Unit, directing United States Navy training films.
In 1945, Hubley, along with several other ex-Disney artists, founded United Productions of America (UPA), a studio formed as a direct artistic challenge to Disney realism. As Hubley put it, UPA style "re-examined animation and its function. . It was greatly influenced by the modern French painting school: Klee, Picasso, Matisse, Miro – in terms of creating forms and shapes other than the literal one. " Hubley supervised the studio's Ragtime Bear (1949), its first theatrical release using the UPA style. The story concerned a nearsighted businessman who vacations with his nephew in the mountains. The uncle, an amalgam based on a stubborn old Hubley relative, the W. C. Fields persona, and actor Jim Backus's vocal characterization, became the irascible Mr. Magoo, UPA's most celebrated character. More interested in working on new ideas than in repeating prior successes, Hubley moved on to other projects, among them Rooty Toot Toot (1952), on which he was supervising director, and the Academy Award-nominated Gerald McBoing Boing (1951), a more collective studio effort based on a character created by Dr. Seuss.
During the period of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and McCarthyism, the pressure from Columbia, UPA's parent studio, to purge UPA of people suspected of Communist affiliation or activity resulted in Hubley's eviction from the studio. Refusing to be a "friendly witness" or to participate in bribery that would maintain his political neutrality, Hubley opened Storyboard Productions. Storyboard specialized in television commercials, a venture that allowed him to continue working, since the use of a "front man" maintained his anonymity. Throughout its existence, Storyboard produced many award-winning spots, including the Maypo series, starring "Marky Maypo, " whose "I want my Maypo!" became a popular and highly successful campaign.
In 1955, Hubley married Faith Elliott, a former film editor, script supervisor, and music editor. Although they made commercials in order to "buy the groceries, " as Hubley put it, they had promised in their marriage vows to make at least one personal film each year, stressing artistic values over those of mass production. In 1956, they produced their first joint film, The Adventures of an *, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum. Adventures was a breakthrough, not only in its goal – to introduce modern, nonobjective art to a wider audience – but also in its technique – eliminating the "inking and painting" process in animation, which resulted in rigid and awkward drawings, and replacing it with the use of wax crayons and watercolors, creating a "resistant" texture that was optically superimposed onto painted backgrounds.
Their films continued to experiment with visual stylization, using multiple exposures and drawing directly on paper to produce a freer style. In addition to their remarkably innovative graphics, the Hubleys approached sound in a unique way, creating their musical tracks first and prerecording dialogue. In three of their films – Moonbird (1959), Windy Day (1967), and Cockaboody (1973) – they recorded the voices of their children, then created visuals to complement the children's worlds of imagination, reality, and play. They also utilized the talents of jazz composers and musicians, among them Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Quincy Jones, always experimenting with the delicate relationship between sound and image.
Throughout this period and after they had stopped making television commercials, the Hubleys worked on many of the animated segments produced by Children's Television Workshop ("Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company"), a commercial effort that allowed them to continue their commitment to more personal filmmaking. The Hubleys produced about one personal film a year, some dealing with political and social issues, such as hunger (Children of the Sun, 1960), war (The Hole, 1963, and The Hat, 1964), the runaway growth of cities (Urbanissimo, 1966), environmental problems (Of Men and Demons, 1970), and the population explosion (Eggs, 1970); others dealt with more intimate concerns, such as young love (The Tender Game, 1958) and childhood (Moonbird, Windy Day, and Cockaboody).
In 1962, the Hubleys produced Of Stars and Men, a fifty-three-minute film based on the works of Harlow Shapley, whose abstract concepts about the universe, time, space, matter, and energy seemed perfectly suited to animation's ability to visualize them. In 1963 the Hubleys conceived an idea for a film using the improvised dialogue of Dizzy Gillespie and George Matthews. The Hole, produced at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, deals with issues that range from insurance to nuclear war, and stands as a quintessential Hubley work, combining improvised dialogue with stylized graphics and sound. It won the Academy Award for best animated short subject in 1963, an honor the Hubleys had previously received for Moonbird in 1959, and were to repeat with the Tijuana Brass Double Feature in 1966. Their films continued to win scores of international prizes, including four more Academy Award nominations.
In 1976 they produced a feature film for CBS, entitled Everybody Rides the Carousel. Based on the work of psychologist Erik Erikson, the film takes the audience on rides that suggest various stages in the life cycle and comments poignantly on questions of human development. In an effort to share their unique approach to art and life with young artists, the Hubleys taught a course on the visualization of abstract concepts at Yale University School of Art. At the time of Hubley's death in New Haven, Connecticut, during coronary bypass surgery, the Hubleys were involved in a collaboration with cartoonist Garry Trudeau, based on the latter's comic strip, "Doonesbury. " "A Doonesbury Special, " a half-hour television program produced for NBC, looks at the way in which 1960's activists attempt to adjust to the realities of the 1970's. The film, completed by Faith, won both an Academy Award nomination and a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
He is remembered as an American animation director, art director, producer and writer of traditional animation films known for both his formal experimentation and for his emotional realism which stemmed from his tendency to cast his own children as voice actors in his films. Hubley films continued to receive global recognition, and in 1985 the Hubley Studio was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a retrospective of their films.
(A boy and his dog travel in geological time guided by a t...)
Quotations: John Hubley summarized his artistic goals by stating, "These aims seem realizable: to increase awareness, to warn, to humanize, to elevate vision, to suggest goals, to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our relationships with each other. "
In the early 1960's, Hubley was elected president of ASIFA (the international association of animated filmmakers), a post he held until his death.
In 1941 he married Claudia Ross Sewell; they had three children and were divorced in 1955. In 1955, Hubley married Faith Elliott, a former film editor, script supervisor, and music editor; they had four children.
