paul julian 1

whenever you watch a warner brothers short from the forties and fifties you can spot backgrounds painted by PAUL JULIAN immediately. they stand out because of the choice of colors and their unique style. JULIAN was a fine artist with exhibitions in art galleries. I quote from the book THE ART OF FRIZ FRELENG – …according to julian ‘backgrounds are used both to stage the character and stay behind the character’…and ‘I did a great deal of special design stuff that I kept hidden and various kinds of staging, taking liberties with perspective, and doing what I could to keep the audience’s attention directed toward the main animation with as much elaboration as I could put behind it. I tried deliberately to build the space around the characters so they were, in effect, working in a kind of tunnel…’ further …when the actual painting commenced, julian concentrated on colors, coordinating his efforts with those of the ink-and-painters…he had two six foot tables and could get the whole six minute picture laid out on the table to make sure everything went together smoothly…
the following 5 recreated pan BG’s are painted by JULIAN, they are from the 1949 WB-short BAD OL PUTTY TAT with tweety and sylvester.
later julian left WB and designed at UPA – THE TELL TALE HEART, another stylistic masterpiece.

© warner brothers

paul julian 3

PAUL JULIAN painted these backgrounds for the 1950 released and by FRIZ FRELENG directed WB-cartoon CANARY ROW.

© WB

paul julian 2

I really like a lot of the WB animated shorts, I love ’em because they have a different kind of humor. mel blanc’s voice characterisations are funny anyway. but – when you look at a lot of them single-frame-wise, you will find some of the worst drawings, in animation and in BG. lots of very ugly backgrounds, badly painted, wrong shapes, no composition, colors a disaster. they were apparently not done for ‘art’-reasons, just to have something behind the animation. no wonder, only very few BG’s survived. they threw ’em away. there is such an indredible gap in quality between these BG’s and the disney ones, where you can see that the artists were searching for a special look, were improving their quality, short after short. the only ones from the WB archives where I want to do some ‘restauration’ work are the BG’s PAUL JULIAN did. and even there are a few… well, you will see yourself. just sloppy work! as if they had been in a hurry. this is very interesting for me, because I never really noticed it so badly until I started this archeological restauration work. quality-standard-wise we see a lot of better artwork today. the problem is, most of our s t o r i e s don’t work.

a n y w a y – the recreated ones following are PAUL JULIAN’S backgrounds. he doesn’t have a credit in this short, but his style – even in 1944 – is clearly recognizable. DUCK SOUP TO NUTS, directed by FRIZ FRELENG, a very, very funny cartoon. daffy duck goes over the top…

© WB

update 1

I updated the PAUL JULIAN 1 post from september 26, 2008. tomorrow I will have some more PAUL JULIAN recreated backgrounds.