Beginning with industrial and World War II training films, UPA eventually produced theatrical shorts for Columbia Pictures such as the Mr. Magoo series.
UPA also produced two animated features, 1001 Arabian Nights and Gay Purr-ee,[1] and distributed Japanese films from Toho Studios in the 1970s and 1980s.
Chuck Jones' 1942 cartoon The Dover Boys had demonstrated that animation could freely experiment with character design, depth, and perspective to create a stylized artistic vision appropriate to the subject matter.
Hubley, Bobe Cannon, and others at UPA, sought to produce animated films with sufficient freedom to express design ideas considered radical by other established studios.
No formal charges were filed against anyone at UPA in the beginnings of McCarthyism, but the government contracts were lost as Washington severed its ties with Hollywood.
Columbia had historically been an also-ran in the field of animated shorts, and it was not satisfied with the output of its Screen Gems cartoon studio.
The UPA animators applied their stylistic concepts and storytelling to Columbia's characters The Fox and the Crow with the shorts Robin Hoodlum (1948) and The Magic Fluke (1949), both directed by Hubley.
With a unique, sparse drawing style that contrasted greatly with other cartoons of the day, not to mention the novelty of a human character in a field crowded with talking cats, mice, and rabbits, the Mr. Magoo series won accolades for UPA.
In December 1950, UPA announced plans for a feature-length film based on the work of cartoonist and humorist James Thurber.
Supervised by Bobe Cannon, this production offered an array of styles and brought then-new talent to the studio, such as Ernest Pintoff, Fred Crippen, Jimmy Murakami, Richard Williams, George Dunning, Mel Leven, Aurelius Battaglia, and John Whitney, among others.
[7][8] UPA produced only two full-length feature films in their tenure: a 1959 feature starring Mr. Magoo entitled 1001 Arabian Nights, directed by ex-Disney animator Jack Kinney; and Gay Purr-ee in 1962, written by Chuck Jones and his wife Dorothy and directed by a friend of Jones, Abe Levitow.
The studio's TV cartoon library was licensed by Classic Media in New York, and then in 2007 merged into Entertainment Rights in London.
In 1970, Saperstein led UPA into a contract with Toho Co., Ltd. of Japan to distribute its "giant monster" (see kaiju and tokusatsu) movies in America.
UPA's contract with Toho also resulted in Saperstein producing Woody Allen's first feature film, What's Up, Tiger Lily?.
On January 1, 2000, UPA shuttered its operations, with the assets sold by the Saperstein family, which would later result in the founding of Classic Media by May 2000.
UPA Pictures' legacy in the history of animation has largely been overshadowed by the commercial success and availability of the cartoon libraries of Warner Bros., MGM and Disney.