At some point in 2018, I stumbled upon a short animated film from the 1950s based on Edgar Allen Poe’s THE TELL-TALE HEART, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The short was created by a studio I’d heard of but knew very little about, and it set me on a path to consume as much as I could of the now-defunct United Productions of America. The more of their films that I watched and the more of their story that I delved into, the more I knew I needed to talk about their wonderful work on my channel. Originally, this was intended to just be one single fifteen-minute video but I quickly found that UPA’s story was too large and their films too important to try and cover in just one go, so I wound up settling on doing a trilogy of videos that would cover the humble beginnings, the rise and fall, and the incredible modern art of one of the USA’s greatest animation studios.

The first episode in this series, The World of UPA, received a Vimeo Staff Pick and was included on Sight & Sound’s Best Video Essays of 2019 list.