The Kiss of the Vampire: Hammer's cartoon bats

Here's a little something for Halloween...

Last month I posted about Hammer's best-known usage of stop motion. What is less well known is that the studio also dallied with drawn animation... albeit very, very briefly.

The climax of Hammer's 1963 film The Kiss of the Vampire sees a flock of bats attacking a castle. Although most of the sequences uses model bats, the very first shot was achieved with animation. The background is related in Wayne Kinsey's book Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years:

Of course, the most memorable sequence in the film is the climax, when Professor Zimmer conjures up the horde of bats to attack Ravna's minions. This task befell Les Bowie and his team of special effects wizards. The scene opens with an animated swarm of bats descending on the castle. Among initial ideas to capture this scene was to film burning paper as its black wisps spiralled up into the air. In the end they settled for cartoon animation. Ian Scoones remembers, "The job was farmed out to a guy called Pearce. Alan Tavner, who ran an optical company in Slough, suggested it to Les."

Danger Mouse and the nostalgia wave

The BBC website recently had an article about Danger Mouse, focusing on the level of popularity which it reached during its heyday; it was posted to tie in with a radio programme entitled Crikey DM! David Jason's Tribute to Cosgrove Hall.

Meanwhile, a revival of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's The Clangers has been announced; it will be written by Postgate's son Daniel and will premiere in 2015. It will be stop motion, like the original, but another stop motion series - The Wombles - is set to be revived in CGI the same year.

The Clangers, The Wombles and Danger Mouse belong to a cluster of animated series, reaching from the late sixties to the early eighties, which seem to be targets of regular waves of nostalgia. I remember a similar boom in the early 2000s, with clip shows such as 100 Greatest Kids' TV Shows on television and Bagpusses on car dashboards. Now, another wave appears to be hitting our shores - and these children's series have shown themselves to be cemented in the popular consciousness.

Ray Harryhausen in the UK: The Valley of Gwangi

Harryhausen's last film of the sixties: the 1969 film The Valley of Gwangi. Another dinosaur film, the creatures on show are a tiny dawn horse, a pteranodon, a ornithomimus, a triceratops-like dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus Gwangi and - somewhat unexpectedly - an elephant.