Puppetoons

The Puppetoons series of animated puppet films were made in Europe in the 1930s and in the United States in the 1940s. The series began when George Pal made an advertising film using "dancing" cigarettes in 1932, which led to a series of theatrical advertising shorts for Philips Radio in the Netherlands. This was followed by a series for Horlicks Malted Milk in England. These shorts have an art deco design, often reducing characters to simple geometric shapes.

Pal arrived in the U.S. in 1940, and produced more than 40 Puppetoons for Paramount Pictures between 1941 and 1947.^[1]

Seven Puppetoons received Academy Award nominations, including Rhythm in the Ranks (for the year 1941), Tulips Shall Grow (1942), The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943), And To Think I Saw it On Mulberry Street (1944), Jasper and the Beanstalk (1945), John Henry and the Inky-Poo (1946) and Tubby the Tuba (1947).^[2]

The series ended due to rising production costs which had increased from US$18,000 per short in 1939 (equivalent to $416,627 in 2025) to almost US$50,000 following World War II (equivalent to $825,512 in 2025).^{[citation needed]} Paramount Pictures—Pal's distributor—objected to the cost. Per their suggestion, Pal went to produce sequences for feature films.^[3] In 1956, the Puppetoons as well as most of Paramount's shorts, were sold to television distributor U.M. & M. TV Corporation. National Telefilm Associates bought out U.M. & M. and continued to syndicate them in the 1950s and 1960s as "Madcap Models".

Pal also used the Puppetoon name and the general Puppetoon technique for miniature puppet characters in some of his live-action feature films, including The Great Rupert (1949), Tom Thumb (1958), and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1963). In these films, the individual wooden figures were billed as The Puppetoons.

Puppetoon films used replacement animation with puppets. Using a series of different hand-carved wooden puppets (or puppet heads or limbs) for each frame in which the puppet moves or changes expression, rather than moving a single puppet. A typical Puppetoon required 9,000 individually carved and machined wooden figures or parts. Puppetoon animation is a type of replacement animation, which is itself a type of stop-motion animation. The puppets are rigid and static pieces; each is typically used in a single frame and then switched with a separate, near-duplicate puppet for the next frame. Thus puppetoon animation requires many separate figures. It is thus more analogous in a certain sense to cel animation than is traditional stop-motion: the characters are created from scratch for each frame (though in cel animation the creation process is simpler since the characters are drawn and painted, not sculpted).

Some controversy exists in modern times, as the black character, Jasper, star of several Puppetoons in the 1940s is considered a stereotype today. The Jasper series of shorts relied on a small, consistent cast. The titular character was a playful pickaninny, his mother a protective mammy, a Scarecrow who acted as a black scam artist, and the Blackbird serving as his fast-talking partner-in-crime.^[4] He was initially voiced by child actor Glenn Leedy before he was replaced by Sara Berner after the former went through puberty.^[5] Pal described Jasper as the Huckleberry Finn of American folklore.^[3]

Already in 1946, an article of the Hollywood Quarterly protested that the Jasper shorts presented a "razor-totin', ghost-haunted, chicken-stealin' concept of the American Negro".^[3] A 1947 article in Ebony pointed out that George Pal was a European and not raised on racial prejudice: "To him there is nothing abusive about a Negro boy who likes to eat watermelons or gets scared when he goes past a haunted house". The article, though, pointed that this depiction touched on the stereotypes of Negroes being childish, eating nothing but molasses and watermelons, and being afraid of their own shadows.^[3]

Jasper's full name is Jasper Jefferson Lincoln Washington Hawkins.^[6]

At one point, Jasper's popularity was on par with Mickey Mouse's and Donald Duck's.^[7]

In 1987, film producer-director-archivist Arnold Leibovit, a friend of George Pal, collected several Puppetoons and released them theatrically and to video as The Puppetoon Movie reintroducing them to contemporary audiences. A feature-length documentary on the life and films of George Pal followed, The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal. In 2020 and 2023, The Puppetoon Movie Volume 2 and The Puppetoon Movie Volume 3 was released on Blu-ray and DVD, featuring 17 shorts and over 30 shorts on the latter not included on The Puppetoon Movie original film release. The Puppetoon Movie Volume 3 is a Rondo Award Winner for Best Blu-ray Collection of 2024.^[8][9]

The Academy Film Archive preserved several of the Puppetoons in 2009, including Jasper and the Beanstalk, John Henry and the Inky Poo, and Rhythm In the Ranks.^[10]

• Sinbad
• Three Little Princes^[14][15][16]
• Gulliver's Travels
• Casey Jones
• Davy Crockett
• Johnny Appleseed

• The Puppetoon Movie

• Cripps, Thomas (1993), Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-536034-9
• Cohen, Karl F. (2004), "Racism and Resistance: Stereotypes in Animation", Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America, McFarland & Company, ISBN 978-0786420322