Directed by Lee Mishkin in 1974, The Butterfly Ball is a Halas & Batchelor film based on the 1973 picture book by Alan Aldridge and William Plomer; Harold Whitaker and future Willo the Wisp creator Nick Spargo also worked on the film. It was picked as the best short of 1974 by the British Federation of Film Societies.
Pretty good screengrabs here, probably came from some DVD I haven't seen before.
ReplyDeleteI first saw "Butterfly Ball" back when it was something that showed up during a program here in the US called "Pinwheel" on the fledgling cable network Nickelodeon. The same program also played a few other Halas & Batchelor productions I never knew came from them until many years later like "The Owl & The Pussycat" and "Hamilton the Musical Elephant".
Someone mentioned Lee Mishkin in a Facebook post, and I remembered him from doing this animation too. Checking out IMDB, his work was mostly in the states doing stuff for UPA and Hanna-Barbera. I guess for a while in the mid 70's he was working in England on a couple projects like animating an episode of Roobarb I see. His last credit goes to animating timing two episodes of The Simpsons during the show's second season (1990-91). Not a great end to his career, but quite an interesting one in the ream of TV animation.
From what I understand, this short was part of a proposed animated feature film that never came to fruition. A concert film was otherwise produced which incorporated the film in with it's "Love Is All" sequence.