Finding reliable information about Paul Julian has proven, from beginning to end, to be difficult. Digging up images of his work was one hurdle: I looked through the credits of over 350 Looney Tunes cartoons (many of which did not list background artists), trawled innumerable art auctioning sites, scanned the index pages of any book which had anything to do with cartoon history, and searched through a whole host of abandoned passion-project WordPress blogs documenting animation art and production. Eventually, I found enough visual evidence of Julian’s work that I felt like I had a good grip on his artistic sensibilities. What also became clear through this process, however, was that finding reliable information, about not only his creative life but also about his life as a person, was much more difficult.
In a 1986 group interview with Michael Barrier at Julian’s home in Van Nuys, L.A., the portion of the recording in which Julian talks about his own family history and early life is not included in the eventual transcript, as the other two interviewees were yet to arrive. I emailed Barrier (who is now over 80 years old) regarding this portion of the interview, and further enquired after potentially accessing the interviews which both he and his collaborator Milton Grey undertook during their thirty-year research project for the book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age. Potentially the most comprehensive account of the studio era, it features almost entirely first-hand testimony from those who worked in the industry. As of yet I have received no reply from Barrier. I also emailed the staff of the Animation Art Conservation Research Library, based in Los Angeles. In a reply from Dawn Vallance, business manager at the library, it was suggested that I get in contact with the University of Southern California, “where a nice portion of the Looney Tunes Background art is located.” “Like with us,” she continued, “I doubt that the background art there is delineated as being by any particular artist. That might take deeper exploration.” I did contact the USC libraries, and my enquiry was forwarded on to their Cinema Library, wherein I received a reply from the curator of the Warner Brothers archives, Bree Russell. “Unfortunately,” Russel wrote, “I could not find anything relating to Paul Julian and there are not materials specifically relating to the background art itself.” She enquired after the time period during which Julian was working at Warner Brothers, and after I replied with the relevant dates and some additional information, I unfortunately did not hear anything back.
Photographic evidence of Julian’s existence is rare, and finding a new picture of him feels something like finding a photograph of a person thought to have died before the invention of the camera. This one appeared in the final days of research:
(Left to right) Paul Julian, Herb Klynn, Ade Woolery and Rudy Larriva help clean up after a boiler explosion at the UPA studio.
Julian’s compositional separation from the other three men makes it feel as though he’s been placed by hand inside the image, or constituted out of thin air. The illusion could potentially hold, if only his figure didn’t cast a shadow in the dirt.
Dad reads to us, stories about giants. He says,
“For they live in a swingeing wine-press, fifty steps up to it.
You must know there are some of all sorts,
little, great, private, middle-sized,
and so forth.
You go through a large peristyle,
alias a long entry set about with pillars,
in which you see, in a kind of landscape,
the ruins of almost the whole world,
besides so many great robbers’ gibbets,
so many gallows and racks,
that ‘tis enough to fright you out of your seven senses.”
Mom laughs. “Paul! Don’t scare them too much.” *
* In a 2009 telephone interview with Adam Abraham for his book When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA, Paul Julian’s daughter Alison “said of her father, “He was creepy.” She recalled that he was prone to “clanging” – that is, rhyming words without logic […] Julian “could recite the most obscure poetry for hours,” Alison recalled. When he read bedtime stories to his daughters, Julian chose selections from Gargantua and Pantagruel”, a pentalogy of collected stories by 16th Century French author François Rabelais about the adventures of the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel.