Style combination · Contrasts
UPA × Zagreb School of Animated Film
The nearest genome and its American parent: Zagreb's founders learned from UPA's flat caricatures, stripped sets and limited movement. But UPA lays its colour on one clean, flat field and pokes gentle fun at American folkways, while Zagreb sets its figures on tinted, often muted grounds of sponged, washed or canvas-textured paint, collages cut-out planes and photographs (even filmed children, in Igra), lines identical men up in rows against one small man, and turns the gag into an absurd, often dark fable of mass society.
Mix them and make something UPA Zagreb School of Animated Film
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
UPA & Cartoon Modern Zagreb School of Animated Film
- Type from Zagreb School of Animated Film
- Colour from UPA
- Form from UPA
- Composition from UPA
- Surface from Zagreb School of Animated Film
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Zagreb School of Animated Film
Pop
Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-drawn title lettering (made part of the picture: the multicoloured, swelling capitals arched on stalks over the professor on the Profesor Baltazar title card, 1967-1978)
Text · UPA
The modern cartoon of United Productions of America (UPA) and the 1950s films, commercials and books it inspired. Former Disney artists who looked to Matisse, Klee, Dufy, Léger and Picasso turned against Disney's illusionism. They flattened character and setting into one plane: caricatures in a clean line, colour laid flat and often slipped off that line, rooms cut to a few shapes on one shade or tilted askew, and limited animation. Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950), its drawings likened to Saul Steinberg's, and Mr. Magoo carried the look to Warner Bros., MGM, Disney and television.
Newsreader; UPA used Playful hand-drawn cartoon lettering and Gestural biomorphic display letters
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from UPA, with a counter-accent from Zagreb School of Animated Film. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
UPA & Cartoon Modern Zagreb School of Animated Film
-
#1c1c1cground · 36% -
#f1e8d2ink · 14% -
#d8a32baccent · 18% -
#d6482caccent · 14% -
#2e8c87accent · 10% -
#e893a4accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #1c1c1c;
--ink: #f1e8d2;
--accent-1: #d8a32b;
--accent-2: #d6482c;
--accent-3: #2e8c87;
--accent-4: #e893a4;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
UPA & Cartoon Modern: Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing are still licensed characters, and the films are not free to copy. Borrow the method (a flat field, a caricature, colour slipping off the line), never the characters, and do not present new work as a UPA film. Leave out the Asian caricature of Magoo's houseboy Charlie, which was dropped in the late 1960s, and gags that mock disability: blind and low-vision groups, including the National Federation of the Blind, protested the 1997 Magoo film.
Zagreb School of Animated Film: The films and their characters remain in copyright and are distributed by Zagreb Film, whose logo is a horse: borrow the method (a flat caricature, an empty or textured field, a row of identical men), never a particular character, film or the horse logo, and never present a generated image as a Zagreb Film work. Made in a state-funded studio of socialist Yugoslavia, these films were, as historians read them, neither dissident nor propaganda: do not recast them as either, and do not dress a design in red stars, party slogans or leader portraits as period decor.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With UPA
- Push Pin Style Contrasts · Its New York contemporary shared UPA's comic, distorted figures and irony but went the opposite way on ornament: Push Pin piled on revived Victorian and Art Nouveau lettering, borders and ornament, while UPA stripped the picture to a figure, a line and a flat field.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Both draw cartoon characters in a clean line with flat colour, but the clear line closes every contour exactly and sets its figures in researched, deep, realistic streets. UPA often lets the colour slip off the line and erases the setting down to a single shade or tilts it into skewed perspective.
- American Mid-Century Modernism Pairs well · Its print parent: Alvin Lustig drew UPA's logo. Both use flat colour, simple shapes and visual wit. Add UPA's caricatured characters and stripped sets to a Rand- or Lustig-style layout when an idea needs a cast of people rather than a single symbol.
- Thaw Modernism (Soviet and Czechoslovak) Contrasts · The nearest genome in the atlas, and close kin in animation: critics found that Khitruk's Story of a Crime (1962) looked more like UPA than Disney, and called it a rare example of Soviet cartoon modern design. It shares the limited movement and the set cut down to its props. But Thaw modernism prints a few clear pastel inks on a light ground and aims at civic, Sputnik-age optimism, while UPA sets one or two caricatures on a single, often saturated, flat field, often lets the colour slip off the line and pokes fun at American folkways.
- Corporate Memphis Contrasts · A distant flat-figure descendant: both distort the body over flat colour, but Corporate Memphis is faceless, smooth and earnest. UPA often keeps a drawn line slipping off its colour, caricatures people and their movements, and pokes fun at them.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Riso's flat spot inks and loose registration naturally reproduce the divorced line, which suits small-run picture books, posters and zines today.
- Rubber-Hose Revival (Cartoon Mascot Graphics) Contrasts · UPA rejected exactly this: it traded rubbery full movement and round bodies for angular caricature, flat modernist sets and limited animation.
- Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation) Contrasts · Same limited-animation logic, but hand-painted, off-register and spare; set against mechanical vector lines and tweened puppets.
With Zagreb School of Animated Film
- Polish Poster School Pairs well · Both built one absurd visual idea under state patronage in the same years; pair a Polish-style painted, hand-lettered metaphor with Zagreb's flat caricatures and empty fields for a film or festival poster.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Riso's flat spot inks and speckled texture reproduce Zagreb's flat cut-out figures over a textured ground, which suits small-run posters, zines and picture books.
- Corporate Memphis Contrasts · Both draw flat, distorted figures, but Corporate Memphis is smooth, faceless and earnest on a clean field; Zagreb caricatures faces, roughens the ground and turns the figure into a satirical small man.
- Thaw Modernism (Soviet and Czechoslovak) Contrasts · Its Soviet and Czechoslovak contemporary shares the flat figures, the reduced set and work for animation, but prints clear pastels on a light ground in a mood of civic, Sputnik-age optimism. Zagreb sets its figures on tinted, often textured grounds and aims satire at technology, war and bureaucracy.
- Flash Vector Cartoon (Newgrounds-Era Web Animation) Contrasts · Textured, earthy, modernist art-house shorts against the even strokes, gradients and portal irreverence of Flash.
- Chinese National-Style Animation (Shanghai Animation Film Studio) Contrasts · Its contemporary among state-funded animation schools: both broke with Disney's full animation and staged short fables in flat figures and empty fields. Zagreb reduces its small men to geometric caricature for ironic satire of mass society; Shanghai takes its figures from ink painting, opera, paper-cut and murals and tells gentle fables and myths.
- Zagreb Modernist Graphics (EXAT 51 to Teatar &TD) Pairs well · The same city and years, with EXAT's Vlado Kristl and Aleksandar Srnec working on Zagreb Film cartoons; set a flat, satirical Zagreb-school figure against a grid of repeated units or letters for a festival poster.