‘Drawings’ Series to End With UPA Cartoons : Animation: The studio that created ‘Mr. Magoo’ and ‘Gerald McBoing Boing’ had a short but influential reign.

“Enchanted Drawings,” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s retrospective of short cartoons, closes out this weekend--and perhaps it’s fitting that Friday is devoted to UPA Studios. UPA--short for United Productions of America--was, in its day, the most critically lauded, celebrated and influential of all cartoon shops.

UPA had a brief ascendancy. Started in the mid-’40s, its great years were in the early ‘50s, and by the early ‘60s it was gone. Columbia Pictures garnered 12 nominations and three Oscars with UPA’s cartoons, but that doesn’t convey the studio’s actual impact. UPA’s most talented directors, John Hubley, Robert (Bobe) Cannon, Ted Parmelee, were young firebrands who really did want to change the world--and did.

UPA cartoons became famous for their overt stylization: the flatly drawn characters, extremely minimal backgrounds and witty economy. They used jazz and modernistic scores by David Raksin and others. Their stories were more sophisticated, written by Dr. Seuss, adapted from Edgar Allen Poe and James Thurber. They relied on human characters rather than funny animals. Even the most popular UPA star--the half-blind and irascible old curmudgeon, Mr. Magoo--is recognizably drawn from life.

Most important, they changed the way cartoons were perceived. UPA’s animators were partially formed by the progressive politics of the era; their work reflected it. Among the first UPA efforts was a campaign cartoon for F.D.R.’s fourth term, financed by the UAW. Another early film, “The Brotherhood of Man” (on Friday’s program), was a cartoon sermon against racial prejudice.

It was Mr. Magoo, created in 1949 for Hubley’s “Ragtime Bear,” that gave UPA its first big hit. But it was a little boy who couldn’t speak normally who put them on the map. In 1951, Cannon directed, from a rhymed story by the ineffable Dr. Seuss, the now-legendary “Gerald McBoing Boing” to an avalanche of praise that had greeted few short cartoons before or since. Like most of Seuss’ work, it’s a parable that works through wild fantasy and humorous exaggeration. It’s about a child who, instead of speech, can make only noises, honks and squeaks. Rejected by his parents, doctors, teachers and playmates, he finds his niche, and world fame, as a sound-effects supplier for radio. Seuss’ message is obvious: Don’t reject people because they’re different.

But the UPA visualization seemed revolutionary. In the heyday of abstract art and new graphics, UPA’s boldly artificial style looked strikingly modern. Later UPA cartoons would duplicate Thurber’s drawings, Ludwig Bemelmans’ illustrations (for “Madeleine”) and the surreal paintings of Dali, De Chirico and illustrator George Salter (for “The Tell-Tale Heart”).

Meanwhile, it was Magoo who was carrying the studio, winning most of the audiences and, ironically, two of the Oscars. By the end of UPA’s existence, it was reduced to grinding out Magoos on an assembly-line basis for TV. But he got his special tilt early on when, in “Ragtime Bear,” Hubley encouraged voice actor Jim Backus to ad-lib on microphone, prompting Backus, in the words of a witness, to “go crazy,” spontaneously generating all the mutters, cackles and cantankerous outbursts that gave him his color. The two Magoos on Friday’s program are from his tantrum-throwing heyday: In “Ragtime Bear” he mistakes a banjo-obsessed bear for his fur-coated nephew and, in 1951’s “Grizzly Golfer,” he has another bestial encounter. “Christopher Crumpet” is another Cannon-directed fable about an obnoxious little boy who keeps turning himself into a chicken. The 1952 “Rooty Toot Toot,” with its syncopated re-creation of “Frankie and Johnny,” demonstrates Hubley’s lifelong love of jazz. And Parmelee’s “Tell-Tale Heart” shows UPA at its most artistically adventurous. James Mason reads the break-down soliloquy of Poe’s murderous madman, while the screen is filled with the surreal vistas of a tortured lunatic: half-completed houses, staircases twisting up into midair and the visual reverberations of the victim’s madly beating heart.

All these films are as fresh as they were in their time. So are the others on the program, including the animated excerpts from the 1952 film “The Fourposter,” which directly inspired the formation of the renowned Zagreb cartoon studio.

In a way, UPA was a product of the false optimism of the immediate postwar era--and also a victim of its worst excesses. The movie-industry blacklist cost them Phil Eastman and Hubley. Within four years, most of the old guard was gone, and when the original founder, Steve Bosustow, sold the studio, he was the only survivor of its great early years.

Today, no one argues that UPA stood head and shoulders above all its cartoon competitors. Its best efforts have improved with age: still idealistic and sophisticated, simple and audacious. They’ve become period pieces but, in a funny way, that increases their charm. We watch them now full of nostalgia for the revolution. They make a fitting last hurrah for “Enchanted Drawings.” At 1 and 8 p.m. Information: (213) 857-6010.