The life and films of Joe Noble

Title card to Loonie Lids (1933), featuring a caricature of Joe Noble.

Charles "Joe" Noble's name will turn up in just about any history of early British animation, but few such accounts will go into much detail about his work. He made some noteworthy accomplishments: he directed what appears to have been Britain's first sound cartoon, and introduced several early series characters (including Sammy and Sausage, two of the country's more successful animated heroes from the period). But despite this not a great deal has been written about him.

My three main sources on his life and work are Denis Gifford's filmography, which gives details on a number of his key films but overlooks a large portion of his other material; the British Pathé website, which provides a large amount of his shorts for viewing and purchase (where possible, I've linked to the relevant pages here); and an obituary written by Ken Clark in 1984.

According to Clark's account, Noble was born in 1894 and, inspired by Dudley Buxton, decided to take up animation. In 1922, after making something apparently called Out of the Ink-Pot, he worked on Thomas Webster's short Tishy (which I wrote about here) and in 1926 collaborated with Webster and Dick Friel on three short films starring a racehorse named Alfred and his trainer named Steve. The same year he created an animated version of Dismal Desmond, a dalmatian character apparently originally designed as a toy by Richard Ellott; there would appear to have been a series of Desmond shorts, although I have not been able to find out exactly how many films the character starred in.

Whatrotolis (1929)

In 1928 Noble began directing a series of cartoons starring a boy named Sammy and his dog, Sausage. They appeared in a total of seventeen films: Putting the Wind up Winnie, Television, The Pipe of Peace, The Shadows, Inside Information, Fowl Play, Crossing the Line, The Good Old Days, Onion is Strength!, The Lie Do Cup, A Big Draw, A Bite for the Biteless and Shooting Stars in 1928; Fire!, No Parking Here and Whatrotolis in 1929; and finally Call Me Speedy in 1930.

'Orace the 'Armonous 'Ound

December 1928 saw the premier of Noble's short 'Orace the 'Armonious 'Ound in "The Jazz Slinger", the first British cartoon with synchronised sound; the following year he made a sequel, The Second Adventure of 'Orace the 'Armonious 'Ound.

I have not seen either 'Orace film, and the only trace of them I have yet to come across is the above image from Denis Gifford's book The Great Cartoon Stars: A Who's Who! As can be seen, 'Orace was basically Sausage under a different name.

Mr. York and customer

In 1929 Noble directed Meet Mr. York! A "Speaking" Likeness, reportedly the first animated advert with synchronised sound, which is available online at the Yorkshire Film Archive. The film is interesting as a museum piece: although better-known cartoons from the early sound period emphasised music, Mr. York contains no score at all and is instead largely dialogue-driven; in this way it prefigures much television animation. The lipsync is executed using rather basic cutout animation, similar to Captain Pugwash.

The short is also rooted in the idea of animation as a novelty; like some of Winsor McCay's work from the previous decade it contains lengthy live action sequences in which the animator draws the character before bringing him to life. A stop-motion sequence in which a bar of chocolate reassembles itself rounds the film off.

At some point Noble also made Illusions, an odd film combining cartoon humour, documentary and fashion advice; the pleasingly weird The Froth Blower's Nightmare; and Little Bruin the Talking Teddie, apparently another attempt at creating a series star.

Title card for Little Bruin.

Noble's post-twenties work includes Do You Know? (1931), a how-to-draw short featuring stop motion and drawn animation; Hats Through the Ages (1931), a mockumentary cartoon; Supposing - ! (1932), consisting largely of still drawings and text; Wed-Time Stories (1932), starring the "Microbephone" character from Illusions; Beauty - A Skin Deep Commodity (1932), a documentary on differing standards of beauty featuring a largely irrelevant skit with Wally the Wily Welsh Rabbit; Loonie Lids (1933), a satirical look at clothing; Facetious Fashions (1933), another film on much the same subject; On the Farm (1933), a collaboration with Sid Griffiths, Brian White and H.M. Bateman; and Run Adolf Run (1940), an anti-Nazi film.

Run Adolf Run (1940)

A few live action documentaries feature cartoon sequences by Noble, including How we Fly (1931); Sparks (1931); Water Ways (1931); the almost identically-titled Waterways! (1936), about canals; Just Bumps! (1936), about phrenology; The Root of All Evil (1936), about money; Here Comes the Bride(1936), about weddings around the world; Here's Luck (1937); Hats (1943), about weird and wonderful headgear; Balloons (1943); How she Looks (1943); Odd Laws (1944); Roads (1944) and Cliches (1944), which contains a sequence combining live action and animation.

He also made diagrammatic animation for educational films such as this untitled short about legs (1932); Your Hand (1932); The Eye (1932); That "Bodyline" Argument (1934);
The Romance of the Motorcar (1935); The House We Live In (1936); Windows of the Mind (1936); The Talking Link (1936); World Money (1936); Mars (1939); Our Navy at Exercises(1939); Sun (1940); Mines (1940); Knots (1940); Translating Tessie (1940); Radiolocation (1941); Bubbles (1941); Cockney Slang (1943); Waves (1943); Waists (1943); Motoring of Future (1943); Nose (1943); Rhythm (1943); Elements (1943), in which he also starred as Sherlock Holmes; Bridges (1944); Polarised Light (1944); Through a Telescope (1944); Jet Propulsion (1944) and The Plough (year unknown) and provided still diagrams for Superstitions (1943).

The Pathé website uncertainly connects Noble's name to Curves and Lines (1930), a very of-its-time film in which a series of still drawings educate us on "womanly loveliness"; The Light of Night (1937); Eve in the Swim (5/5 1932); a Gabriel Dee interview (1933); Gambling with the Gulf Stream (1936); The World We Live On! (1937); Water, Water, Everywhere (1938); That There Ear (1938); an untitled film from the thirties about the Great Wall of China; Wait a Second (1940); Little Gel (1941); Cigarettes (1941); Armour (1941); Shape of Things to Come (1942); Energy (1942); Negatives (1943); Riddles (1943) and Eve Buys a Camera from Soho Ltd (year unknown). He may also have been involved with Circles (1940), which briefly shows a film reel with his name on it.

Noble also appeared as an actor in Fire! (1931); Madame You Will Walk (1942); Signatures (1943); and possibly also Light (1941), in which he may or may not have played a pithecanthropus; an untitled film of uncertain vintage in which he may have smoked a pipe underwater; Doodling (1942) and Collections (1942).

This is an impressively-sized filmography, but from watching the films it becomes apparent that Noble never really evolved since his days animating Sausage and Mr. York in the late twenties. Something like Run Adolf Run may have looked reasonable alongside Felix the Cat, but in 1940 - the year of Friz Freleng's You Ought to be in Pictures and Hanna & Barbera's Puss Gets the Boot, to say nothing of Fantasia and Pinocchio - it must have seemed rather old-fashioned.

Small wonder that Noble's output seems to have tailed off in the late forties; I know of only four more projects that he worked on.

In 1948 he provided animation for an educational short called This Film is Dangerous (see the BFI archive for more information) while in 1950 came the feature film Mr H.C. Andersen, a biopic of the fairy tale author. This was mostly live action but had a few animated sequences provided by Noble. A Film Report reviewer was not impressed by these, complaining that "Instead of telling the story straight, many lengthy and irrelevant cartoon sequences are introduced. They contain a few amusing moments but on the whole are very crude." In 1955 he contributed special effects to something called Cross-roads; again, all I know about this is from the BFI database.

According to Ken Clark's obituary, Noble's last film was called Trachoma, made in 1970 for the Overseas Film and Television Centre. Named after an eye infection, this was presumably another diagrammatic educational film.

"A plan to honour Joe at the 1979 Cambridge Animation Festival was abandoned only when it was discovered that he was living alone in London, partially-sighted due to glaucoma, and confined to a wheelchair in a very poor state of health", wrote Ken Clark. "It was feared the travelling and the effort and excitement of a public appearance would prove too much." Joe Noble, whose career in animation spanned some fifty years, passed away in 1984.

Following up on Gifford: the 1940s

The fifth in a series of posts using Denis Gifford's book British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography to provide a decade-by-decade analysis of British animation's history.
Disclaimer: Although wide-ranging Gifford's book is not perfect. He missed out several films and sometimes provided incorrect dates or crew information. I have done my best to correct any errors which I have found myself repeating in these posts.

Run Adolf Run can be watched online here.

The first film of the decade to be listed by Gifford is Joe Noble's Run Adolf Run. This sets the tone of the war years, when the animation industry focused largely on propaganda, albeit not always related to the war effort. The same year saw the release of Len Lye's Musical Poster No. 1, an abstract film which warned its audience that "the enemy is listening to you"; Adolf's Busy Day, from new director Lance White; and Kitten on the Quay, a film made for the Ministry of Food by another new name, Robert St. John Cooper. There were, however, also entertainment films in the form of Paul Kimberly's six-part Follow Me Sing-Song Series and some advertising films, Anson Dyer's I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles (promoting Rinso) and John Halas and Joy Batchelor's Train Trouble (promoting Kellogg's Cornflakes).

Lance White portrays the Fuhrer as a short-tempered incompetent in his slapstick Adolf's Busy Day.

Gifford lists only three films for 1941, all of them directed by Halas and Batchelor: a political satire titled The Pocket Cartoon, an adaptation of The Brave Tin Soldier, and a Lux Soapflakes advert named Carnival in the Clothes Cupboard. The final film was produced by William Larkins, another person who would shortly become a key figure in British animation.


The heroes of Halas & Batchelor's Dustbin Parade are tossed out onto the street, where a fence railing encourages them to enlist in the Army and be converted into clothing and weaponry.

It should be noted that the years given by Gifford for Halas and Batchelor's films do not match up with the years provided on the Halas & Batchelor Collection's website. For one thing, the official site says that The Brave Tin Soldier was in fact released the previous decade, in 1938. But whatever the exact release dates, the pair became prolific at this time: promoting Lux Soapflakes again in The Fable of the Fabrics (both sources agree that this was in 1942); encouraging people on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to grow their own vegetables with Filling the Gap; detailing the importance of household waste for the war effort in Dustbin Parade; advising on the use of compost in Compost Heaps; giving advice on dealing with frost in gardens in Early Digging; encouraging viewers to save electricity in Cold Comfort; showing how old rags can be converted into nurses' uniforms in Cinderagella; or, From Rags to Stitches; teaching how to make do and mend in Mrs. Sew and Sew; advising audiences to post early for Christmas in Christmas Wishes; and making instructional films for the War Office, Tommy's Double Trouble and Six Little Jungle Boys, on the dangers of foot rot, venereal diseases and other such ailments in the Far East.

Anti-Japanese propaganda collides with sexual health advice in Six Little Jungle Boys (viewable here)

Other propaganda films directed by the two during the war include Digging for Victory and Blitz on Bugs, made for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries; Model Sorter, for the Ministry of Supply; and I Stopped, I Looked, for the Ministry of War Transport. They also directed another Rinso advert, The Big Top, in 1945.

Cold Comfort, viewable here, features anthropomorphic objects doing their bit to save resources.

And these are just the stand-alone shorts. In 1943 Halas & Batchelor made a four-part series starring an Arab boy named Abu; these films were made for distribution in the Middle East, and saw their hero fighting off the Axis forces (portrayed by a Hitler-snake and Mussolini-frog) with the aid of a friendly British tank.

Abu and his friends drive the Axis from the Middle East.

But arguably the studio's greatest achievement was in 1945, when it completed Britain's first full-length animated feature. However, the 70-minute Handling Ships was an instructional film made for the Admiralty and was not made available for the general public.

War in the Wardrobe portrays moths as wicked witches. Watch the film online here.

Meanwhile, Halas and Batchelor's sometime producer William Larkins began animating films himself. He directed Diphtheria No. 3 and Diphtheria No. 4 in 1943, which contained animated diagrams (the first and second in the series, however, had no animation); and in 1945 he made Summer Travelling for the Ministry of War Transport; War in the Wardrobe (which advised viewers on how to deal with moths) for the Board of Trade; and the bizarre-sounding The Meco-Noose Power Loader for the Ministry of Fuel and Power.

Leather Must Last, which can be watched here, takes the story of the old lady who lived in a shoe as its inspration.

Halas & Batchelor's Mrs. Sew and Sew and Larkins' The War in the Wardrobe were the second and third parts in the Make Do and Mend series; the first, Leather Must Last, was made by a company called Films of GB. Gifford does not identify a director.

Nazi moth larvae in The Clothes Moth. Watch the film here.

A director named Henry Elwis arrived on the scene in this decade with his own studio, Elwis Films. His 1944 film The Clothes Moth, AKA The Behemoth, is similar to Larkins' later War in the Wardrobe only with moths compared to Nazis rather than witches. Other films of his are It Makes You Think (on the dangers of carelessly-dropped cigarettes), A Ticket's Dream (on recycling for the war effort), Bristles and Brushes (showing old brushes being treated at the Brush Hospital), Bones Bones Bones (encouraging the donation of bones to the war effort), More Hanky Panky (for the Ministry of Health), Tombstone Canyon (Ministry of War Transport) and Writing's Worth While (for the War Office).

Bones Bones Bones, which can be seen here, features anthropomorphic bones teaming up to be converted into fertiliser and glue for armaments.

Other filmmakers creating propaganda animation during the war include Roger MacDougall and Alexander Mackendrick, who gave us Save Your Bacon (in which a farmer asks for kitchen waste to give to his pigs) in 1942 and cast Lewis Carroll's Walrus and Carpenter as scrap-salvaging heroes in 1943's Contraries, and L. Bradshaw, who directed Little Annie's Rag Book, in which puppets collect old rags. Meanwhile, Peter Strausfeld directed Peak Load for the Ministry of Fuel and Power, Salvage Saves Shipping and Skeleton in the Cupboard for the Ministry of Supply, and Tim Marches Back for the Post Office.

In Skeleton in the Cupboard (available for viewing here) ghostly George grows tired of haunting and has himself converted into a piece of artillery, after which he personally chases Hitler back to Berlin.

Carl Giles, who came to animation in the thirties, directed a few films in 1944. The Grenade features a Nazi eagle being defeated by the titular explosive; One Pair of Nostrils uses military imagery to tell its audience that coughs and sneezes spread diseases; and A Cautionary Tale involves a factory worker cutting his finger.

One Pair of Nostrils, directed by the legendary Carl Giles, can be viewed here.

Anson Dyer released a couple more films during these years: something from 1943 titled Behind the Clock, and a 1945 children's cartoon named Robbie Finds a Gun; and there are some more anonymous films listed by Gifford - 1943's Bob in the Pound, and 1944's Spending Money (AKA Save & Lend for Victory - Fifteen Bob).

Spending Money, AKA Save and Lend for Victory - Fifteen Bob; watch the film online here.

And finally, there is the 1943 film Calling Mr. Smith, funded by the Polish Film Institute and made by exiled Poles Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. Combining live action with still drawings and kaleidoscopic camera effects, the film is a documentary exposing Nazi atrocities.

A heavily experimental approach to propaganda in Calling Mr. Smith.

And so we come to the postwar years. Halas & Batchelor continued to make educational and propaganda films, including Old Wives' Tales, A Modern Guide to Health, This is the Air Force, The Keys of Heaven, Road Safety (possibly the film I posted about here), Fly About the House, R.A.F. - First Line of Defence, A Well Kept Machine, A Little Forethought, A Better Spirit, Start with What Is Under Your Nose and a trilogy of sorts consisting of Britain Must Export, Export or Die and Export! Export! Export! The studio also made advertising films, promoting Kellogg's Corn Flakes (Radio Ructions), Rinso (Good King Wenceslas), Oxo Cubes (Oxo Parade), Brooke Bond Tea (Dolly Put the Kettle On) and Bovril (What's Cooking?).

Charley and his wife in Halas & Batchelor's Your Very Good Health.

Arguably Halas & Batchelor's most notable achievements from across these four years are Water for Firefighting, a second feature-length instructional film; the Charley series, another venture into character-based propaganda; and The Magic Canvas, an experimental film.

The Magic Canvas. See this post for more stills.

The Larkins Studio also carried on making propaganda and educational films: Pacific Thrust, The Big Four or What to Eat, Join the Army, The King's Men, Roof Control, The Cyclist, T for Teacher and Men of Merit. The studio's output from this time also includes shorts based on traditional songs, The Lincolnshire Poacher and Widdicombe Fair, made for overseas release; and a single advertising film, Just Janie, promoting Halex Toothbrushes.

Larkins' Men of Merit. See this post for more.

A new major studio sprung up alongside Halas & Batchelor and Larkins: G-B Animation, fronted by former Disney animator David Hand. The studio started small, directing advertising films such as Sparky Goes Shopping, Smokey Goes Clean, Puddle Trouble and two Rowntree's Cocoa commercials starring a black boy named Coco (as an aside Publicity Films also made a Rowntree's Cocoa advert starring a black kid, Honeybunch and the Giraffe, at around this time). In 1948, as well as providing animated sequences for Derek Mayne's documentary Atomic Physics, the studio started three series of entertainment films: Musical Paintbox and Animaland, both of which lasted into the fifties; and the three-part Old English Cartunes Series. The studio went on to make the advertising films A Clean Sweep and Snowy Cleans Up.

Sketches of Scotland, one of David Hand's Musical Paintbox cartoons. See this post for more.

Another American who entered the British animation industry in this period was George Moreno Junior, a Fleischer animator who produced the Bubble and Squeek series at British Animated Productions. This series starred a taxi driver and his anthropomorphic cab and was directed by Harold Mack; it lasted for four shorts. The studio also put out Loch Ness Legend, a 1948 film starring a character named the Colonel. From what I can gather this character also appeared alongside Bubble and Squeek in The Old Manor House.

Stars of British Animated Productions: Bubble, Squeek and the Colonel.

Meanwhile, Anson Dyer made the standalone 1947 children's cartoon Who Robbed the Robins?; advertised Bush Radio with Bee Wise, E.T. Green Ltd. with Farmyard Rising and Cherry Blossom Boot Polish with Cherry the Boots; directed what Gifford claims to be the first ever cartoon serial, the three-part Squirrel War; created the character Soupy, who promoted Symington's Soups in four films; and became the subject of a second documentary, Eric Owen's Cartoonland (AKA Make Believe). Other directors from the war years who were still active at this point are Henry Elwis, who made Brickmakers for the Ministry of Labour and Watch the Fuel Watcher for the Ministry of Fuel and Power; and Lance White, who delivered a paean to the Royal Mail in The Mail Goes Through.

In the previous decade George Pal directed a number of Anglo-Dutch advertising films. After the war, some of Pal's animators came to England to make similar adverts for Signal Films: Doolittle Makes Good and Top o' the Morning (advertising Horlicks); Mousewife's Choice (Persil); and A Change for the Better (the Cooperative Wholesale Society).

Old King Coal, a propaganda film by German animator Julius Pinschewer. More stills here.

A studio named Basic provided animated sequences for the How What and Why Series, which dealt with such subjects as what elephants can do with their trunks; the same outfit also made Long Long Ago and its follow-up And Now Today for the British Gas Council. Dudley Ashton of the Blackheath Film Unit directed Trouble in Toytown for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, in which a live action boy sees his toys become involved in a stop-motion traffic accident; while Frances Rodker and A.J. Shaw animated How an Aeroplane Flies for the Shell Film Unit. Meanwhile, distinguished German animator Julius Pinschewer animated Old King Coal for the National Coal Board.

And finally, there's the six-part Let's Sing Together series. The first short, The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies-O, was made by Diagram Films (the director is not named by Gifford) while the second, One More River, was animated by Mina Woolfe and Reg Jeffreys for Science Films. After that the series began to act as a kind of who's who of the period's animation talent: Anson Dyer directed Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron; Halas & Batchelor handled Heave Away My Johnny and David Hand made Bound for the Rio Grande. The final film in the series, Oh No John, is again uncredited by Gifford.

During the forties the industry moved away from advertising - its bread and butter in the thirties - and towards government propaganda, an area which remained in demand after the war. The experimental animation that reached a new height in the previous decade seems to have largely died out, but in its place came a wave of mainstream animation of great technical proficiency, including a return to entertainment series courtesy of G-B Animation.

In the next post in this series I will be covering the fifties, the decade in which Halas & Batchelor continued their work in feature films, Lotte Reiniger made her return, and experimental animation found a new benefactor in the BFI.

Other posts in this series:

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9

Following up on Gifford: the 1920s

The third in a series of posts using Denis Gifford's book British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography to provide a decade-by-decade analysis of British animation's history.

Disclaimer: Although wide-ranging Gifford's book is not perfect. He missed out several films and sometimes provided incorrect dates or crew information. I have done my best to correct any errors which I have found myself repeating in these posts.


Felix the Cat, arguably the first great animation star, hit cinema screens in 1919. In the last post in this series I talked about how British animators had been comic up with character-based series of their own around this time, featuring such now-forgotten characters as Slim and Pim. Interest in series characters would rise in the twenties, with UK cartoonists - some of them active in the previous decade, including Anson Dyer, George E. Studdy and Tom Webster - attempting with varying degrees of success to create the British answer to Felix.

Anson Dyer's Othello. See Screenonline for more.

1920 saw more Shakespeare spoofs from Anson Dyer at Hepworth Picture Plays with Othello and The Taming of the Shrew (Gifford notes that details on the latter film are scarce beyond its announcement, and it is possible that it was never completed) along with two new series by Dudley Buxton at Kine Komedy Kartoons, Bucky's Burlesques and Memoirs of Miffy, which lasted two films each. The year also gave us a new director, J.L. Anderson, who directed The Daring Deeds of Duckless Darebanks (spoofing Hollywood swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks) and The Smoke from Gran-Pa's Pipe (about a grandfather reminiscing about fishing, boxing and visiting the circus as a child). "The American animator J.L. Anderson was brought over to England to introduce the American technique of cel animation to British cartoon makers", says Gifford.

Part of a Pip, Squeak and Wilfred strip.

Much of the decade was spent attempting to get series off the ground. In terms of quantity the most successful pre-1925 series was The Wonderful Adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfred; directed by Lancelot Speed for Astra Films and based on the Daily Mirror comic strip by A.B. Payne and B.J. Lamb, the series started in 1921 and lasted for twenty-six films. Other series from this period are Tom Titt's obscure Crock and Dizzy series, which spanned twelve films and was made for B & J Productions; the three Bobby the Scout films by Anson Dyer, still working at Hepworth; two Kiddiegraph films, adapting Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs and again made by Dyer; Gaumont's The Noah Family (Gifford does not name a director) based on J. F. Horrabin's Daily News cartoons and apparently lasting for two films; the Adlets Advertising Budget series, which contained several animated shorts; and the seven Pongo the Pup films made by Dudley Buxton for Pathé in 1924. Gifford also lists three stand-alone films directed by Tom Webster, a cartoonist known for his caricatures of sporting personalities: Tishy (1922, see my post on the film for more), Jimmy Wilde and Inman in Billiards (both 1923).

One of George E. Studdy's illustrations of Bonzo.

The book lists one last film made in the first half of the decade - 1924's Bonzo. Directed by William Ward for New Era in collaboration with George E. Studdy, the film brought to the screen Studdy's puppy character from The Sketch. Gifford quotes a Kinematograph Weekly review:

A cartoon subject which will rival Felix the Cat and provide excellent items for all programmes. Bonzo is by no means a slavish copy of his predecessors. He is, in fact, a very doggy dog, whom it is a delight to watch. The producer, W.A. Ward, has collaborated admirably with the artist, and we look forward to seeing more of their work. The first example is most amusing and shows Bonzo's acrobatic efforts to capture some sausages out of his reach on a shelf, incidentally allowing for a scrap with a kitten. The conception is extremely simple, but also it is typically doggy, and there is no need for explanations to point the working of a dog's mind.

Bonzo would, like Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, star in twenty-six shorts; most of these were released in 1925. After so many false starts that year saw the beginning of a veritable torrent of animated series, giving us not only a glut of Bonzos but also the first nine films in Sid Griffiths' Jerry the Troublesome Tyke series, also starring a puppy, and the minor three-film The Bedtime Stories of Archie the Ant series by stop-motion animator Frank Percy Smith.

In 1926 Tom Webster, Dick Friel and Joe Noble collaborated on three Alfred and Steve films, starring a racehorse and his trainer (this should not be confused with a later series about a horse named Steve, which was adapted from the comic strip Come on, Steve!); Joe Noble also worked as a solo animator on the Dismal Desmond series, starring a doleful dalmatian (the first short premiered on November 18; I don't have dates for the others, if any more were made); Norman Cobb directed twelve films for Ideal Films' Sing Song Series, which were a bouncing-ball singalong affair featuring such popular numbers as Stop Your Ticklin' Jock and Burlington Bertie; Brian White directed two similar films for Pathé, There's a Long Long Trail a-Winding and Land of Hope and Glory (which portrays "typical British scenes of a patriotic and artistic kind", according to Kinematograph Weekly); the mononymous Hiscocks directed two The Language of Cricket films; and Sid Griffiths gave us another hefty shipment of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke cartoons. Also released in 1926 were two adverts for Colman's Mustard: The Happy Iron and Stopping the Rot.

Things wound down somewhat after that. The final six Jerry films came out in 1927, the same year which saw the release of eight sing-along cartoons by Luscombe British (songs covered include Am I Wasting My Time on You and The Frothblowers' Anthem). The most noteworthy effort of the year was Anson Dyer's The Story of the Flag, which was very nearly Britain's first full-length animated feature - instead, however, it found itself released as a six-part series.

Gifford quotes the Bioscope review:

Opening with much information of the antiquarian order, light is thrown on the remarkable alterations which have taken place in the Royal Standard of England, largely owing to dynastic changes, notably in the accession of James I, William III and George I.

Summaries of the first three shorts are also provided, courtesy of February 1935 Monthly Film Bulletin, 1935 being when the film was reissued for educational purposes. Part one "[i]ncludes a note on Oliver Cromwell's introduction of the Irish Harp, and a useful observation on degrading the flag"; part two "[a]dds some pictures of the Kew flagstaff and the Douglas firs in British Columbia"; and part three "[i]llustrates the Fleur-de-Lys quarters introduced by Edward I and traces their gradual elimination."

Sammy and Sausage send up Fritz Lang in Whatrotolis, viewable online here.

In the last two years of the decade Joe Noble directed sixteen shorts about a boy-and-his-dog duo named Sammy and Sausage and two starring 'Orace the 'Armonious 'Ound. The first of these, 'Orace the 'Armonious 'Ound in "The Jazz Stringer", was Britain's first animated film to boast synchronised sound. A few animated commercials were also made: Mr. ... Goes Motoring, a Shell ad animated by David Barker and designed by H.M. Bateman; The Boy who Wanted to Make Pictures, a Kodak commercial also from Barker and Bateman; and Meet Mr. York - A Speaking Likeness, an advert for Rowntree's Chocolate directed by Joe Noble. 1929 also saw the release of an information film on hygiene titled Ten Little Dirty Boys.

'Orace the 'Armonous 'Ound, the Mickey Mouse of Britain. Well, sort of.

The British animation industry blossomed during the twenties, but it's hard to shake the feeling that something had been lost. Was the experimental nature of the earlier animated films being lost in this hunt for popular series characters? This 1926 Gaumont advertisement for the animated debut of Dismal Desmond shows just how commercialised things had become:

Dismal Desmond the Doleful Dalmatian is the most popular mascot figure since Felix. His lugubrious countenance is seen in every toy shop and has been extensively advertised in the press. As a cartoon character he will create another furore that means a lot of money at the paybox. Dismal Desmond, a picture of pathos and profit.

"Animation should be art. That is how I conceived it" remarked Winsor McCay, the brilliant American animator who departed from the medium in this decade. "But as I see what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad Luck!"

Still from Tusalava.

But the very last film listed in Gifford's chapter for 1929 points in a different direction. Titled Tusalava, this abstract piece was the work of New Zealand-born animator Len Lye, who described it as "representing a self-shape annihilating an antagonistic element." Screenonline has a page on the short:

Tusalava bears similarities to several abstract films made in the 1920s by figures such as Oskar Fischinger and Hans Richter. One main difference, though, is that Lye (who was born in New Zealand) was very much influenced by Australian Aboriginal art. This influence means that Tusalava alludes to more organic shapes than Fischinger's and Richter's films, which featured more angular, geometric forms. The shapes in Tusalava jitter and wriggle as though alive, which led one critic to read into the film a narrative concerning primitive life forms.

In the next post in this series I will be looking at how commercial animation existed alongside a rise in more experimental work in the thirties.

Other posts in this series:

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9