Credits

A Robert Lawrence Production
Direction and Animation: Grantray-Lawrence Animation Inc.
Story: Bill Bernal and Gene Deitch
Design: Cliff Roberts
Music: Irwin Bazelon
Voices: Allen Swift and Nell O’Day

Film Notes

Diversification of investments, dividends and market risks hardly sounds like material for a seven-minute animated short, but The Hope That Jack Built uses this dry subject matter as the basis for an entertaining, beautifully designed cartoon. The film, commissioned by the National Association of Investment Companies, is one of the most obscure mid-century industrial cartoons and has rarely been seen in the past fifty years. These types of animated shorts, which were prevalent during the 1950s, were targeted squarely adult audiences and typically shown in workplaces and civic meetings as well as in movie theaters.

The Hope That Jack Built was a unique cross-country collaboration between New York City-based Robert Lawrence Productions and its West Coast commercial arm, Grantray-Lawrence Animation. The film was conceived in New York by Gene Deitch and Bill Bernal, and animated in Los Angeles by Grantray-Lawrence Animation. In both style and form, it is unmistakably modeled after the Oscar-nominated UPA short Fudget’s Budget (1954), directed by Bobe Cannon. From the simplified Cannon-esque character designs to very specific Fudget’s Budget touches, like graph paper being used in the backgrounds, abstracted triangular arms on the characters, and figures who dissolve into a straight line when facing front, the film is clearly modelled after UPA’s earlier finance-oriented cartoon.

There is much to enjoy in this strikingly modern short. The minimalist character designs and colorful production design are terrific examples of the work of designer Cliff Roberts, and the film has a challenging modern music score by Irwin Bazelon. The male voices in the cartoon are all provided by Allen Swift, a staple of East Coast cartoon voice acting who famously provided all the voices in Ernest Pintoff’s short Flebus (1957) and in numerous Rankin/Bass productions. —Amid Amidi

About the Directors: Grantray-Lawrence Animation Inc.

Grantray-Lawrence Animation, the studio that receives credit for the direction and animation of this film, was started by former MGM and Disney animators Grant Simmons and Ray Patterson in the mid-1950s. Their partner, Robert Lawrence, was a well known New York live-action commercial producer who not only operated his own animation studio, Robert Lawrence Animation, but also partnered with other artists to create studios like Grantray-Lawrence and Pintoff-Lawrence (in partnership with Ernie Pintoff).

In a 1999 Animation Blast interview, Ray Patterson described the early years of Grantray-Lawrence:

The original Grantray studio was in an old, green two-story house on La Brea Ave., just above Sunset Blvd. It was quite a nice setup. For a while there we were by ourselves, but as we got more work, we took on more people. My brother, Don, worked for us, and also MGM people like Eddie Barge, Irv Spence, Gene Hazelton, Walt Clinton and Jim Escalante. When they closed MGM [the studio shut down their entire cartoon studio in 1957], these guys needed work, and we happeend to be able to get enough to keep some of them busy. It was just a fun time. Inbetween commercial jobs, we’d sit and play poker, until we got our next job and then back to work we’d go.