[4] Hubley was born in Marinette, Wisconsin, in 1914 and developed an interest in art from a young age, as both his mother and maternal grandfather were professional painters.

In 1952, Hubley was forced to leave UPA after refusing to denounce communism, leading to his eventual investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Hubley collaborated with jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, and Quincy Jones and often used unscripted, improvised dialogue in his films, creating an entirely new way of expressing emotion and feeling through the medium of animation.

[9] The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences claim the Hubleys' films "bucked the establishment and defined an era of independent animation production".

[20][21][22][23] While a student, Hubley would partake in a wide array of extracurricular activities, including the debate,[24] drama,[25] a capella,[26] basketball,[27] Hi-Y (a male-only group associated with the YMCA),[28] and mathematics clubs.

On February 25, 1939, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited the studio with a copy of The Tale of the Czar Durandai (1934), a Russian animated film directed by Ivan Ivanov-Vano.

Hubley, who had grown increasingly more interested in the works of modern artists like Paul Klee, pushed his films to have flat, abstract visuals.

The film won UPA their first Academy Award for Best Short Subject Cartoon, which "stung" and "really shocked" Hubley, claimed layout artist Bill Hurtz.

[1]: 131  He found work illustrating album covers for Westminster and Clef Records for artists such as Al Hibbler,[52] Aaron Copland,[53] Slim Gaillard,[54] and Chico O'Farrill.

[62] Shore had difficulty interesting studios with the project due to the musical's strong racial themes, but eventually secured funding and a distribution deal with the Distributors Corporation of America (DCA).

By the end of 1954, all of the dialogue and music had been recorded for the film and Hubley had assembled a large team of past collaborators, such as Littlejohn, Babbitt, and Les Goldman.

Soon thereafter, DCA president Fred J. Schwartz received a call from IATSE representative Roy Brewer, who ousted Hubley for his refusal to cooperate with the HUAC.

The film, an experimental montage of paintings by Gregorio Prestopino[73] with a score by Carter,[74] further explored the Hubleys' desires to push animation towards modern art.

[68][63]: 10 Hubley wanted to make a film about Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and was inspired after reading Harlow Shapley's Of Stars and Men (1959) in 1959.

[85] Carter would collaborate with the Hubleys again on Urbanissimo (1966), a film humorously examining the impact of urban sprawl on the environment made for Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec.

John and Faith won their third Academy Award for the short,[87][88][89] and the film is today considered to be an early prototypical example of a music video.

Their next film, Windy Day (1967) featured an improvised conversation between their daughters Georgia and Emily "explor[ing] the child's projection of fantasy to enact romance, marriage, and growing up".

By the beginning of the 1970s, John and Faith understood they needed to take on more commercial work in order to fund their shorts, and began contributing animated segments for New York-based children's variety programs such as The Electric Company and Sesame Street.

[107] His most notable contributions would be on The Electric Company, where Hubley directed "The Adventures of Letterman" segments from 1972 to 1977[108] featuring Joan Rivers, Gene Wilder, and Zero Mostel.

[125] Hubley picked many unknown actors with few or no prior credits for the film, including Lawrence Pressman, his then-girlfriend Lanna Saunders, and Yale student Meryl Streep in her first acting role.

[132] In 1976, Doonesbury was one of the most popular newspaper comics in America, having won a Pulitzer Prize the year prior[133] and frequently making headlines for being dropped by papers across the country over Trudeau's decision to tackle topical and controversial real-world events.

[56] Many of Hubleys kids went on to pursue their own artistic careers,[147] with Raymond becoming a film editor,[148] Emily becoming an animator,[149] and Georgia founding the band Yo La Tengo with her husband Ira Kaplan.

Hubley was greatly influenced by Ivan Ivanov-Vano's The Tale of Czar Durandai (1934),[33] which used limited animation and flat compositions to create an incredibly stylized world.

Punchy De Leon opens with a panning shot of a highly-stylized graphic background that uses skewed perspective, large blocks of color, and exaggerated shape language.

As the supervising director of Gerald McBoing-Boing, Hubley oversaw the film's unique visuals provided by designer Bill Hurtz[162] and colorists Herb Klynn and Jules Engel.

For his independent directorial debut, The Adventures of *, Hubley drew heavily from the visual style of artists like Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.

Hubley sometimes opted to use underlighting[166] - wherein the drawing or cel is lit from below rather than above - to make the films more distinct, and often used multiple exposure for more complex elements, like the river in Tender Game[56] or the abstract color section in Everybody Rides the Carousel.

The Hat, The Hole, Eggs, Voyage to the Next, and Urbanissimo tackle industrialization, war, overpopulation, and the environment, all subjects the Hubleys were highly concerned with.

[94] A Doonesbury Special was completed by his wife and Garry Trudeau, earning John Hubley a posthumous Academy Award nomination and Palme d'Or win.

[178] Artwork from Moonbird, Windy Day, Cockaboody, and several other of the Hubleys' films are on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.