VOTE! "Hell-Bent for Election" (1944) (Patreon)

Being that it’s Election Day, it seemed appropriate to post this important political cartoon from Industrial Film, which later evolved into United Productions of America (UPA).

Hell-Bent for Election was intended for use in the 1944 presidential campaign against Franklin Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey. The United Auto Workers (UAW) approached John Hubley to make an animated cartoon from a script written by Robert Lees. John Hubley and Bill Hurtz drew the storyboards, with help from Phil Eastman. Hubley suggested Chuck Jones direct the film; Hurtz insisted on Shamus Culhanee to direct, but Jones received the directorial job instead. The assignment went to Industrial Film, run by Stephen Bosustow, Zack Schwartz and Dave Hilberman, each heavily involved with the 1941 Disney strike.

The studio had never made an animated film, only a slide film and a few safety posters—the film had to be completed within 90 days. Hell-Bent was in a constant schedule, day and night, with animators from full-time jobs arriving after-hours to work on the film. Storyboards were finalized and shot on film by February 1944 and work finished on the film by the end of June/early July.

I originally planned to make a partial animator breakdown post, using documentation via historian Adam Abraham (author of When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA). The papers have handwritten notations that mention animators assigned to different scenes, but it does not entirely reflect the finished film. In discussing the notion of an animator breakdown, or even a partial analysis based on the documentation, it just does not seem possible.

However, I sent the documentation to animator Mike Kazaleh, an avid devotee of UPA and its personnel, and he offered these notes on the film.

Most of the scenes are very short, and the animation is pretty perfunctory. There are limited bits of actual character animation, and those scenes seem to be dominated by [Bobe] Cannon, [Phil] Monroe, and [Ken] Harris. [Ben] Washam did a few scenes, too. This leaves a large chunk of the cartoon that could have been animated by anybody. Train cycles, wheels rolling, a character moving from layout pose A to B...not enough there to for any style to slip through. (The perfunctory nature of much of the animation isn't necessarily a bad thing in terms of filmmaking, but it does tend to reduce the animator's role to that of an engineer.)

Briefly, there are a lot of wide/medium shots of the worker guy and/or Sam that were animated by Monroe. Cannon did most of the key dialogue scenes with them. Harris did some of the close-ups of the bad guy, particularly his rants. Washam animated a few scenes of the bad guy, like the one of him setting up the room in the shack, and later, the scenes of him desperately blowing smoke. So it would seem that Jones wanted the Warner guys the handle most of the character scenes.

I will add that the backgrounds during the musical pitch that show the hands holding pamphlets ("No pushin', no shovin' ") were painted by Paul Julian.

Hope you all enjoy the film, and most important of all: VOTE!