Credits

Director: John Hubley
Writers: John Hubley and Phil Eastman
Assistant director: Bill Hurtz
Animation: Willis Pyle, Bill Hurtz, Joyce Weir
Backgrounds: Paul Julian

Film Notes

Sixty years after it was made, Flat Hatting still holds its ground as a remarkable example of animation’s power to simultaneously educate and entertain audiences. The training film, commissioned by the U.S. Navy, was produced with a tiny crew on a miniscule budget and compressed production schedule, but thanks to its director John Hubley, the film is a creative masterpiece, filled with amazing drawings worthy of gallery exhibition, confident cinematic storytelling and beautiful graphic treatment throughout.

In 1945 the U.S. Navy commissioned United Productions of America (then still called United Film Productions) to produce sixteen animated shorts about flight safety. The films had such dire titles as Bailing Out, Collisions With The Earth, Join-Up Collisions, Landing Accidents and Marginal Weather Accidents. The most well received and famous of the “Flight Safety” films was Flat Hatting, which warns pilots of the consequences of ‘flat-hatting,’ which is when pilots would purposely fly their planes low to grandstand or harass civilians on the ground. The term was reportedly coined after an incident in which the wheel of a low-flying plane struck somebody on the head and crushed a hat the person was wearing.

Flat Hatting, along with The Brotherhood of Man, was one of the earliest films that garnered UPA attention for its modern approach to animated filmmaking. The film is based on a 1944 U.S. Navy training booklet Flat-Hatting Sense which features drawings by illustrator Robert Osborn. While Hubley admired Osborn’s work, the film bears little relation to Osborn’s visual style, save for a little kid who appears at the end of Hubley’s film, which was adapted from the Osborn drawing on the cover.

The booklet, which approaches the subject in a relatively dry manner, attempts to scare pilots by illustrating the life-threatening dangers of flying low. Hubley’s film, co-written with Phil Eastman, takes a different approach by establishing a visual hook that equates flat-hatting with childishness and immaturity. While the 22-page book offers a lot more information, Hubley’s short is more entertaining and as such, likely would have made a stronger impact on its intended audience.

Director John Hubley conceived the film as “an animated lithograph,” according to the film’s assistant director Bill Hurtz. The film features richly designed black-&-white backgrounds, an illustrative drawing style, and clever bits of stylized animation. There is a highly evolved use of the ‘carry-over’ dissolve in which multiple scenes are linked together by a constantly metamorphosizing animation element—a plane transforms into an axe, then a book, a mouse, and so on. Through dynamic cutting and camera moves, the film also achieves a dramatic use of space as the pilot flies up the California coast and through San Francisco. —Amid Amidi

About the Director: John Hubley

John Hubley (1914-1977) was a seminal figure in the transformation of animation from “humanized pigs and bunnies” into an art form that was capable of expressing sophisticated ideas in a contemporary graphic language. His career is notable in that it was in many ways a self-contained microcosm of animation’s Modern design movement: he was instrumental in the graphic breakaway from Disney beginning in the late-1930s, took part in some of the earliest design experiments in the early and mid-1940s, was the creative head of UPA (United Productions of America) during its peak period in the early-1950s, and produced graphically trailblazing independent shorts at his own studio Storyboard in the late-1950s, which in turn ushered in the flourishing foreign animation design scene of the 1960s.

Hubley was hired at Disney in 1936 as an assistant background painter on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Rising quickly through the ranks, he was promoted to art director (the studio’s term for “layout artist”) on Disney’s next feature Pinocchio (1940). He continued in this role on Fantasia (1940) where he contributed to the beginning of the “Rites of Spring” section, Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942). He left Disney during the infamous employees’ strike of 1941, anxious to break away from the studio’s creative shackles. He ended up at Columbia’s Screen Gems and in 1942, he enlisted in the Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit (FMPU), which was dedicated to producing training and technical films for the war effort. While still serving in uniform, Hubley (along with Bill Hurtz) storyboarded Hell-Bent for Election (1944), the first major animated film produced by UPA. Hubley left the service in November 1945, at which time he joined UPA full time as a director-designer-writer. In 1946, following the departure of two of the studio’s founders—Zach Schwartz and David Hilberman—he was promoted to studio vice president.

Following his departure from UPA in 1952, he started Storyboard Productions, and in the mid-1950s began collaborating with his wife, Faith Elliott, on independent animated shorts. By the time of his death in 1977, the shorts that he had produced with Faith had been nominated for seven Oscars, winning three times (Moonbird, The Hole and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature). Other classic shorts that he directed include The Adventures of *, Tender Game, The Hat, Windy Day and Cockaboody.