Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950) *****

The UPA studio's most famous film and a seminal work in the history of animation. The story of a little boy (who doesn't speak, but goes "boing boing" instead) benefits from UPA's trademark limited animation and the "graphic art" style of design. The film offers a contrast between the simplicity of its concept and the painstaking complexity of execution: simply drawn characters are set among sparse, but boldly designed backgrounds (there are neither floors nor walls, only rugs and pictures suggest the limits of space), colors are used to convey the mood of characters (yellows and greens for happiness, blues for rejection and pain). The stylistic innovations introduced in this Oscar-winning masterpiece would strongly influence all major animation studios for decades.