Paul Julian was
primarily a background artist for the Warner Bros cartoon studio from 1940-1951 (almost entirely, it seems, with director Friz Freleng's unit).
I knew the name from credits, but wouldn't have had the eye to pick out his specific work until this past week, when Joe Dante posted the 1964 short animated film The Hangman, which was designed by Julian (who also co-directed with MGM cartoon producer Les Goldman), at the Trailers from Hell site. I can now clearly pick out Julian's distinctive style when I see it, which I turned out to know already from several places.
First things first - The Hangman is an interesting little piece, now more so for Julian's design than for the content. It's a visualization of a poem by Maurice Ogden that is basically an expansion of Martin Niemöller's more direct and lovely verse "First They Came . . ." Ogden's piece is a pleasant bit of liberal art-tripe out to state a message rather than express a singular point-of-view. Very 50s-60s bourgeois-suburban-concerned (a point-of-view I poke a lot of fun at, but at the same time greatly respect, as I believe it is, in the long run, responsible for a great deal of positive social change -- it's just so damned EARNEST and soppily WELL-MEANING! -- we could really use an equivalent social stratum today . . .).
Julian's design of the filmed poem elevates it several steps (as does the fine narration done of it by the great - and formerly blacklisted - Herschel Bernardi) into true horror and dread. Very limited animation used very well, and a lot more entertaining than the majority of what was being done in the USA in the name of "serious, adult" animation in the 50s-60s.
The print of The Hangman on the Trailers from Hell site is excellent, but unfortunately will only be up there temporarily (if it isn't already gone by the time you read this). It can also be seen on YouTube HERE, in a version stretched horizontally and tinted towards the blue, but with some proper color balance still present, and HERE, in proper aspect ratio but in a massively faded-to-red copy (which is probably closest to how several decades-worth of grade school students have seen it in old Eastmancolor 16mm prints). Ick. Worth watching anyway.
At the Trailers from Hell site, it is mentioned that Julian did the animated titles for several AIP films by Roger Corman. He's only credited with the work on Dementia 13, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Terror, and Not of this Earth, but I'm pretty positive he also did the titles for Gunslinger and Swamp Women (aka Swamp Diamonds), which I know well from their MST3K versions (and which both also star the great, late, lamented Beverly Garland). UPDATE 5/3/10: Just checked back and many of the links in this are dead. I've replaced what I could, but while I found a BETTER, if still red, version of The Hangman, the Swamp Women titles now look pretty awful, and the Gunslinger titles start almost 8 minutes in at the link -- I've added links to the other Corman films as well, which also all start several minutes into the clips, and mostly look awful, sorry)
Some of the drawing in the Gunslinger titles doesn't look at all like his work, but most does, so it may have been a collaboration. These aren't exactly the greatest of films by Corman, but I've always been impressed that he thought enough of even his dopiest films to try and make at least some of the aspects of the production (titles, music, acting and screenwriting when possible) above-average for these sub-B-pictures. You don't hire someone like Julian to do titles for your movie unless you are somewhat serious about what you're doing.
Looking just at this later work by Julian, you wouldn't think "Warner Bros cartoons," and yet if you go back and look at his backgrounds for Freleng you will definitely see his distinctive style there (in his book on Bugs Bunny, Joe Adamson compares the painted skies by Julian in Bugs Bunny Rides Again to Turner, which would seem hysterically laughable until you look closely at the film and realize he has a point).
Even in something like Baseball Bugs, his line and color palette is recognizable. There's a lot of background jokes in this cartoon as well, not only the traditional use of names from around the studio, but there's also two billboards for "Filboid Studge" in the baseball stadium, which is a reference to a short story by Saki (H.H. Munro) - was Julian responsible for this literary reference? I would assume so (it's also the story of a poor painter being taken advantage of by a rich capitalist . . .)
Oh, and Julian was also the voice of the Road Runner - "Beep, beep!" as normally written, though it sounds more like "Meep, meep!" - which came from his warning sound to others as he ran down corridors at the studio.
After leaving Warners, Julian worked for UPA, the legendary studio founded in the wake of the 1941 Disney strike by a number of left-leaning animators, where a great deal of groundbreaking work was created that today seems important, gorgeous, and mostly pretty boring and unfunny (much of it wasn't meant to be funny, but the stuff that was wasn't either).
For me, UPA's high point (and yes, I know some could convincingly argue for Gerald McBoingBoing) is their famous 1954 version of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, created after HUAC had pressured the studio to get rid of many of the "Reds" on their staff, including John Hubley (who went off and made some visually-beautiful, well-meaning, deeply boring and dated films such as The Hole, Moonbird, and the insufferable Cockaboody), Phil Eastman - aka children's book author P.D. Eastman (who had formerly worked at Warner Bros with Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel on the Private Snafu cartoons) - and writer/voice artist Bill Scott (later the co-creator and voice of Bullwinkle).
Julian seems to have picked up the slack at UPA, designing the Poe film as a precursor to The Hangman with maybe a hair more style and a hair less dread:
Julian's style can also be seen in an earlier, 1930s WPA-commissioned mural he painted in the Fullerton, CA post office -- or is it the 30s, WPA mural-style that can be seen in the rest of his work? What came from the time and what from his training? -- he studied at Chouinard Art Institute, a precursor to CalArts; I knew CalArts was always big in animation, but I didn't realize that its history in animation went back so far as to include some of the biggest first-wave names at Disney and Warner Bros.
Looking back at all this, I keep wondering about where the contemporary equivalent is today, or if there even is one. UPA was created as an alternative to Disney - which, as much as other American animation studios of the 20th Century are now known and respected, at the time was The Biggest Game In Town By Far, the one that set the standard, that everyone looked at and reacted to. Other studios didn't "do" Disney only because they didn't have the resources, until UPA came along and did something new because they wanted to.
Today, while there are many contrary voices in animation (animator and animation historian John Kricfalusi being the best), the contrariness is centered on the idea that the major creators today aren't doing their jobs as well as in the past, and the ideal style would seem to be some kind of mixture of all the best principles of the major 20th Century animation studios (including UPA). But what about the artistic "other?"
I know where it is in theatre, and in some of the other arts, but where's that voice in American animation today that quietly works and says with the work, "There are other possibilities"? Where would a Paul Julian fit in today?
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