I earlier posted a clip from UPA’s Gay Purree. That exact seen that I posted gets a mention in this Time article.
Well, It Isn’t a Dog
Friday, Dec. 21, 1962Gay Purree, an 86-minute UPAnimated cattoon, is all about Mademoiselle Mewsette, a pretty little kitty who has never seen the city. In her catnaps she dreams of the Felines Bergère, the Place Catalle and the Mewlin Rouge, so one day she departs for Purree in pussuit of happiness. Her boy friend, a hair-trigger mouser called Jaune Tom, hurries off to Paris as soon as he gets the bad mews, but he arrives too late to avert catastrophe: Mewsette has al ready fallen in with Meowrice Percy Beaucoup, a sinister allée cat who has designs on her chatsteté. As for Jaune Tom, what happens to him in the big city shouldn’t happen to a dog, but in the end the hero hangs a mouse on the villain, and everything comes up catnip.
UPA’s art work often suggests stale Disney sprinkled with Kitty Litter, but at one point the picture wittily displays Mewsette as she might have been painted by Monet, Van Gogh, Seurat et al. Judy Garland, as the voice of Mewsette, yowls enchantingly. And even those who think that the plot is a very old sardine may admit that it is often amewsing, in a clever script by Dorothy and Chuck Jones, to read between the felines.
This article shows that by 1962 the critic’s love affair with UPA was over. I know a lot of people who today dislike UPA do so because the critics of the time loved everything that they did, even the rubbish. In 1953 they were considered as artistes while by 1962 they were just stale imitators of Disney.
