Tea Pot Town

TEA POT TOWN is a five-minute cartoon directed by Ted Eshbaugh and released through Bray Studios. It was a promotional film for tea sales, falling into that huge class of "industrial films" that was a surer and more profitable source of revenue for animation studios than the higher-prestige theatrical release. With theatrical release, you made your cartoon, and it was a constant balancing act between spending money on, frame for frame, the most expensive branch of film-making, and the minor revenue of the "selected short subjects" category.

With industrial films, however, you have one customer, frequently one who wishes his product to appear in the best light and willing to spend money to do so. When that happened, you could something as lovely as this movie,

It's a silly story about how the tea pots go out and help people against the blue-cloaked mean people -- Blue Meanies, get it? In many ways it will remind the viewer of the previous year's THE SUNSHINE MAKERS, which Eshbaugh had co-directed for Borden's Milk (but why mess with a winning formula?). The color palette, however, is much richer, and the artistic choices are less derivative of other sources.

Although Eshbaugh would remain largely a director of cartoons for industrial films, coming up with an ad hoc studio needed one, and a lot of his cartoons unavailable or even unknown, he clearly had an artistic vision within the "candy box" style of animation of early Technicolor cartooning that is lovely and idiosyncratic. I hope that more of his work will turn up.