Character Design Research: UPA Animation

 

Character Design Research: UPA Animation

After initial research on the UPA animation prompt I found a series of informational videos on UPA. The second video in this 3 part series discussed what made UPA Animations so individual and recognisable to the animations that surrounded them at the time. This gave me a fairly good understanding of how I will approached designing my character. And why making choices in its design will bring it closer to the UPA Style.

The idea's of UPA branch from a few key ideas being creativity, ideology and financial necessity. The people at UPA found cheap ways of showing there characters and there art form not shying away from showing the audience what there watching is animation animation, an ideology that would be the core of this style. Animation as Art is the principled idea for UPA. each frame was animation not trying to be realistic instead a picture reminiscent of great painters and comic strip artists.

When it came to designing there animation the core principles laid way to an artistic vision and a need for 3 things Clarity, Precision and Economy. each shape was though about in these terms and as such watching the animations there is as much stuff in the scenes as needed and no more. The artists take less is more to an extreme that allowing them to experiment and create visual stunning animations completely different from one to the next in there prime years. Even with the idea that you have to limit everything from animation to effects to colour. However always following modernist ideas, mainly and whole heartedly the UPA animators followed to modernist idea of self-consciousness around there animations. They where animations and there wasn't an attempt to hid it, instead they embraced it, letting characters morph into squiggly lines as an animated transformation or the characters turn into lines to move across the scene.