In the book version of Cartoon Modern, I published a couple character layout drawings from the UPA short Magoo Express (1955). (A sidenote: I misidentified the title as Magoo’s Express, which I hope to correct in any subsequent printings.) What’s particularly interesting about these layout drawings is that they use a female character design which was significantly changed for the final film version.
Below are the layout drawings I included in the book along with corresponding stills from the film showing how the design changed:
The redesigned version of the character, Gigi, creates an intriguing mystery—Why was the design changed midway through production?—and it’s a question for which I don’t have any answers. The mystery deepens because the character designer of the film, Sterling Sturtevant (1922-1962), spent a significant amount of time designing the original version of this character. A lot of Sturtevant’s development work exists from this film and I’ve posted some of it below to show how she came up with the design of Gigi:
These concepts led to the initial design of Gigi. Below are the character model sheets and a few character layouts:
This was obviously not just a design concept but likely the final design that director Pete Burness had approved for production. Otherwise, Sturtevant would not have invested so much time laying out the film using this design. My personal feeling, and I have no hard evidence to back this up but it’s the only thing that makes sense, is that the animation crew may have asked for a change on the character design. (I have to double-check, but I also believe that this is the last film that Sturtevant worked on before leaving UPA in 1954. Though it’s somewhat unlikely that her departure would be connected in any way to this film, one cannot completely discount that possibility.)
Sturtevant (pictured at right) was a talented artist and easily the most prolific and influential woman character designer of the 1950s, but one of the problems with the ‘femme fatale’ approach of this design is that the style reaches beyond the range of her drawing skills, not to mention the skills of the animators on the crew who were tasked with bringing the character to life. Director John Hubley had no problem pulling off a similarly designed character in the earlier UPA film Rooty Toot Toot (1952), but Sturtevant’s drawings lack the cohesive strength of a master draftsman like Hubley. There are nice graphic ideas in a lot of the individual poses, but the overall design lacks structure, and the character looks awkwardly drawn and poorly constructed from certain angles.
At some point, Sturtevant was asked to redesign the character and came up with the second version of Gigi that is used in the film (model sheet and concept drawing below). Personally, I like this second design far more than the first attempt and think it’s better suited to the Magoo universe. Unfortunately the animation of the film is a huge disappointment. To be clear, I think either of Sturtevant’s designs could have been a success if they had been followed up by the proper animators. Burness’s animation crew, however, included some of the most conservative animators at the studio, and his animators during this period rarely pushed the graphic element in their animation. (Lead animators on this film were Cecil Surry, Tom McDonald and Rudy Larriva.) The animators on this film resigned themselves to creating stilted and limited movement with little deviation from the layout poses, which is a shame because Sturtevant’s second design of Gigi offers fun graphic shapes and a distinctive posture that could have been exploited by more creative animators.
Magoo Express is not a bad entry in the Magoo series by any stretch of the imagination. Seeing Sturtevant’s development of the female character offers some fascinating insights into the design process on the Magoo series and also shows how the films could have been even better if UPA had invested in stronger and more graphically-aware animators.
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