Stars & B'ars

The art of animation has fallen on evil days. Once upon a time Walt Disney had a duck that laid a golden egg, but for many years now it has cost more to draw a paper performer than it does to hire a live one. In order to balance their books, most modern animators compromise their methods. They simplify figures, eliminate movements, primarize colors, standardize settings. Even so, they occasionally do exciting work. Of two feature-length cartoons in current release, one is about as good as such things get. The other, unhappily, looks like a TV reject.

Hey There, It's Yogi Bear is even cuter, kiddies, than the title attempts to suggest. The principal character, whose name and nature are distinctly insulting to the present manager of the New York Yankees, is a chubby and badly drawn bruin who looked reasonably ursine on TV but on the giant screen resembles an enormous and rather soggy cinnamon cookie. He lives in Jellystone National Park but talks like a bear from the Bronx Zoo. "Duh," he announces, "I'm smahtuh dan de avidge bayuh." To prove it he assembles a battalion of "trained picnic ants" and sends them to steal chocolate cakes from tourists. Then he runs off to rescue a nifty little beige bear named Cindy from the clutches of the Chizzling Brothers, who--oh, heck, who cares? Certainly not the people (Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera) who are unscrupulously luring the public into this bear trap.

Of Stars and Men, however, was made by a man who cares very much about what he has to say and how he means to say it. John Hubley learned his trade in Disney's shop, later developed a moneymaking style of his own (Gerald McBoing Boing, Mr. Magoo). But at 50 he aspires to be a serious graphic artist, a Matisse of animation.

Hubley's hubris is evident both in the theme ("To find man's place in the universe") and in the treatment of his latest film. Adapted from a fairly erudite essay published in 1958 by Astronomer Harlow Shapley, Of Stars and Men is constructed like a philosophical treatise. In a prologue, Hubley celebrates man's capacity to know--and to know that he knows. In five principal chapters (Space, Time, Matter, Energy, Life), he expounds the physical universe as man has come to know it. And in an epilogue, he imagines where man stands in the novum organum: a puzzled inflection of star stuff, a mote of mind that glitters for a moment on the grand galactic stream.

At times, Hubley handsomely transforms these ideas into images. His colors are pale and wash across the screen like slow surf in the moonlight; yet here and there in the watery depths, a point of richer color burns for an instant like a brilliant fish. Early in the film he engineers a spectacular ballet of electrons; later he pictures a cluster of great galaxies that lie asleep in space like a nest of glimmering, immeasurable crabs.

Nevertheless, a lot of things go wrong in Hubley's universe. Too often his art smells of the airbrush. Too often his narration reads like a high school science lecture. All the same it is well to remember that, for the present, the alternative to Hubley's unperfected universe is the witless world of Yogi Bear.

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