Four years of blogging

I have a few dim memories of my own fourth birthday (I definitely recall drinking limeade out of a Yogi Bear mug, for one thing) and now it is my blog that has reached that ripe old age. Was it really back in 2009 that I started running it...?

Once again, I've decided to mark the day by taking a look at my stats. For the last couple of years, the top search term was "Cosgrove Hall"; that has now slid down to third place, with "Animaland David Hand" and "Jet Force Gemini" dislodging it from the top spot. Fourth place, funnily enough, is "Xenu".

The top pages are Denis Gifford on the seventies, British gaming heroes 1993-7, life and death of Cosgrove-Hall, Animaland: The Lion, Denis Gifford on the forties, part of my Animation Nation transcript, Denis Gifford on the eighties, British anime, my interview with William Mather and All Overboard.

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."

Gromit Unleashed

Nick Park inspects Julie Vernon's mosaic Gromit.

For a few years now, Wild in Art has been holding charity events in which plain white sculptures of animals are decorated by various artists and spread across a city. The events include elephants in Norwich, penguins in Liverpool, toads in Hull, sheep in Skipton... and now, with the collaboration of Aardman, Gromits in Bristol.

Gromit Unleashed started on the first of July and will run until the eighth of September. During that time, eighty sculptures of Gromit - all made using the same base, but each with an overall paint-job given by an individual artist or art team - will be spread across Aardman's home city of Bristol, with proceeds going to the local children's hospital.

Comedian Harry Hill was one of the celebrity artists involved, contributing a bald Gromit.

A range of celebrities got in on the act, with the likes of Jools Holland, Joanna Lumley and Harry Hill providing their own takes on Gromit.

Pixar's contribution to the trail.

Other than the involvement of Aardman, there are several connections to animation and cartoons. Pixar contributed a Buzz Lightyear Gromit; Richard Williams painted a rainbow Gromit; the crew behind The Beano plastered their Gromit with a comic collage; Raymond Briggs combined Gromit with his immortal Snowman; Where's Wally? creator Martin Handford placed Gromit into those iconic red and white stripes; Gruffalo illustrator Axel Scheffler came up with the Grommalo; Simon Tofield, creator of Simon's Cat, doodled his feline star over Gromit; Quentin Blake brought his distinctive style to his sculpture; political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe coated Gromit with one of his trademark ink splashes; and graffiti artist Tom Deams and Zayn Malik of boy band One Direction provided unofficial takes on two DC Comics superheroes, turning their Gromits into Superman and the Green Lantern respectively.

Simon Tofield's Gromit

Finally, there were a few designs coming from within Aardman itself. amongst the Gromits was a traditional, unadorned version of the character credited simply to the Aardman studio. Richard Starzak, aka Richard Goleszowski, aka Golly, collaborated with artist Jane Kite to create a Trojan Gromit operated by Shaun the Sheep. Nick Park, meanwhile, came up with a design which incorporated both of his characters...

British Animation goes to Troperville

I've been tinkering with TV Tropes lately. After familiarising myself with the site, I thought I'd write down a few of my thoughts.

For those unfamiliar with it, TV Tropes works like Wikipedia in that any of its readers can edit it. Unlike Wikipedia, it expressly rejects any concept of "notability" when it comes to the material it covers. Almost any work of fiction is considered fair game for a page on TV Tropes: it just needs somebody willing to start one.

TV Tropes has good coverage of mainstream American animation (with a particular fondness for superhero cartoons, it seems) and anime, but has many blind spots when it comes to the wider world of animation - to use its own terminology, it suffers from something of a Small Reference Pool.

Hedgehog in the Fog: A Norstein animation. Not to be confused with Digimon.

There are some bright spots, to be fair: TV Tropes has a burgeoning section on Eastern European animation, including pages covering individual directors such as Jan Svankmajer, and there is also a short page on the National Film Board of Canada which briefly celebrates the NFB's contributions to animation. When I searched the site for pages mentioning Yuri Norstein, however, all I found were articles discussing Thomas Norstein (a character from the anime series Digimon) and a single forum post dismissing Tale of Tales and Hedgehog in the Fog as "pretentious shit". Alas, this would seem to be the dominant milieu in Troperville.

TV Tropes is, of course, a site compiled by and for the geek demographic, which has its ups and downs. One thing I appreciate about geekdom is the total lack of any conventional snobbery: on a site like TV Tropes, animation and comics will be covered alongside live action and prose fiction, with no assumption that they are in any way less deserving of discussion.

Kihachiro Kawamoto: a Japanese animator beloved by animation enthusiasts - except for fans of Japanese animation.

The downside is that geek culture is rife with a sort of inverted snobbery. A vast quantity of work is dismissed as "pretentious" or "artsy" without a second thought merely for not fitting into the dominant comfort zone, often simply because it has not been quite so heavily commercialised as, say, Hollywood films or Marvel comics. Perhaps the best evidence of this on TV Tropes is the fact that, while the site has reams of pages covering various anime - including anime which have never officially been translated into English, and even large amounts of pornographic anime until this started to get the site in trouble - there does not appear to be a single page mentioning Kihachiro Kawamoto. Kawamoto's stop-motion films have been admired by the Western animation community for decades, but are apparently not "geek" enough for TV Tropes.

At first, the site's skewed emphasis might seem justifiable. The whole point of TV Tropes is documenting the building blocks of popular fiction, from The Scrappy (an annoying sidekick) to the Heel Face Turn (when a bad guy becomes a good guy). Idiosyncratic animators such as Svankmajer, Norman McLaren and the Brothers Quay are less reliant on conventional narrative, and so less reliant on these building blocks. Attempts to describe their work in TV Tropes terms tend to fall back on vague labels such as Deranged Animation (basically, animation which looks odd), Nightmare Fuel (things which are mildly creepy) and What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs? (self explanatory).

However, while these animators may not be using existing building blocks, they are certainly creating building blocks of their own. As I mentioned in another post a while ago, the creators of The Mighty Boosh have described their series as "Svankmajer-esque", and a search on Google turns up over one thousand examples of this phrase being used to describe everything from Being John Malkovitch to the films of Tim Burton. The influence of Norstein, Svankmajer and other key animators looms large, and no discussion of recurring motifs in animation would be complete without at least namechecking them.

Absent-Minded Professor/Beleaguered Assistant.

So, with that commentary out of the way, how does British animation fare on TV Tropes?

Well, the internationally recognised animations are there. Aardman and Cosgrove-Hall have their own pages, as do most of their key works (including each individual Wallace and Gromit film); there are also pages on Yellow Submarine and Watership Down (covering the novel as well as its animated adaptations). I also notice a few works which are probably little-known outside Britain, such as The Wombles, The Clangers and a very thorough page on The Dreamstone. Some examples of British web animation - Weebl and Bob, Salad Fingers, Cyriak - are also covered. There were a few entries which pleasantly surprised me with their presence, including Richard Williams' The Little Island.

Hare-Raising Hare.

On to the big gaps. TV Tropes currently has almost no coverage of Halas & Batchelor: judging by a quick search, the only significant mention of the studio is on the page for Orwell's Animal Farm, which has a paragraph briefly discussing the animated feature. The Brothers Quay have been mentioned a few times on the site, but neither they nor any of their films have pages yet.

Creepy Doll.

Granted, the films of the Quays are fine examples of the kind of which is awkward to cover on TV Tropes due to their non-narrative content. Most of Halas & Batchelor's better-known works, meanwhile, are perfectly accessible and could easily be covered by TV Tropes pages; the issue in this case is more of a generation gap. Most of the site's contributors are children of the eighties, nineties and early 2000s, and series such as DoDo, The Kid From Outer Space will have been before their time.

Innocent Alien.

But anyway, as I said before, any of TV Tropes' readers can add a new page to the site. With that in mind, I went and started a short page about Channel 4 animation. How will this bastion of more experimental animation fare in the geek-centric world of TV Tropes? Time will tell...

The early nineties: promoting British animation abroad

Most of my readers will know that there was a boom in independent British animated shorts in the late eighties and early nineties, largely thanks to Channel 4. In this post I'll take a quick look at a couple of attempts to promote this body of work in the US as something resembling a single coherent movement.

First off, here we have the poster for Expanded Entertainment's "British Animation Invasion" show which toured North America in 1991. It showed a range of shorts, some of which are well remembered today (such as the works of Nick Park, Peter Lord, Candy Guard, Joanna Quinn, Barry Purves and David Anderson) and some which later fell from view (Richard Ollive's Night Visitors, Ian Andrew's Dolphins). A VHS tape of the show's selection was released in 1993, using the poster image as a cover.

The show featured a good range of films taking a number of different approaches, and representing them in a single image would be a tricky prospect. The poster ended up taking a rather generic tack by depicting an audience member doing a Tex Avery take, an idea which could have just as easily have been used for about any other animation festival. While contemporary British animation was deemed worthy of a dedicated screening, then, there seems to have been a problem in finding a suitable image for the movement.

Also released by Expanded Entertainment in 1993 was a laserdisc focusing solely on Channel 4's shorts and bearing the title "New British Animation". Its cover takes a very different approach: instead of a specially made image, it shows a still of two background characters from Derek Hayes and Phil Austin's The Victor.

It is perhaps odd that the cover is dedicated to characters who appear only briefly in a single short, but the image works. The characters are in some ways very traditional - cel animation with hard black outlines - but in other ways strikingly new and, above all, cool.

These releases date from around the same time that Japanese animation was being branded as "anime" in the English-speaking world, and tied to a specific visual style and range of subjects. One wonders if Expanded Entertainment was trying to produce a similar image for British animation.

Three years of blogging

I considered scouring through my animation collection looking for a still of a cake with three candles, but ended up going for the quick alternative instead...

Phew - there have been times when I've worried I'll run out of things to post about, but here I am at the third anniversary of this blog's beginning.

I took another look at the blog's statistics out of curiosity again; the most viewed posts to date are Gifford's '70s, the closure of Cosgrove Hall, video games '93-'97, Gifford's '40s, Animation Nation part one, British anime, the William Mather interview, All Overboard, Save UK Animation and Gifford's '80s.

The single top search term, meanwhile, is "Cosgrove Hall".

Year four starts now, let's see if I can keep up my five-posts-a-month quota...

Two years of blogging

Today is this blog's second birthday - fancy that, and it only seems like yesterday I started it. As with last year, I decided to take a look though my stats to see what my readers have been looking at...

The most-viewed pages on this blog are Gifford's '70s, Gifford's '40s, Save UK Animation, Richard Taylor's Swimsong, Richard Williams ads for Levi's, Jōvan and Limara, British anime, the closure of Cosgrove Hall, Joe & Petunia, Gifford's '80s and obscure adult comedy series.

The search terms that brought the most people to my blog are "Cosgrove Hall", "Daddy's Little Bit of Dresden China", "Soloflex", the blog's URL, "Halas and Batchelor", "Owl and the Pussycat 2011" (I'm not sure what these people were searching for, but I'm afraid the only version of The Owl and the Pussy-cat I've covered so far was from 1952), "BBC2 ident", "BIC Perfume" and "history of British animation".

Thanks go out to my top referrers: Cartoon Brew, Peter Gray's Cartoons and Comics and Asterisk Animation.

The picture at the top of my post, incidentally, is from John J. Miller's Act V, and is the picture most clicked by people who find my blog via Google images.

Now, on with year three...

One year of blogging

I've tried keeping blogs before, but most never got beyond the stage of text document drafts on my hard drive. So looking at it I'm actually a bit surprised that I've managed to keep this one going for a whole year...

Today I'll take a break from research and instead look at the blog's stats from the last year. What subjects have my readers been interested in?

Turns out that my most-viewed pages are seventies/eighties Richard Williams Studio adverts, Save UK Animation, British anime, Joe and Petunia, Following up on Gifford: the 1940s, Following up on Gifford: the 1920s, Larkins' Without Fear and a Barclays Bank ad, Halas & Batchelor's Snip and Snap, Bevanfield's Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and Following up on Gifford: the 1930s. Interesting mix.

By some distance, my top referrer (aside from Google) is Cartoon Brew. Thanks, you two!

The top search terms are "Daddy's Little Bit of Dresden China", "seventies advertising", "BBC2 ident", "Eric Goldberg animator", "Snip and Snap cartoon", "Petra Freeman", "A Busy Day Ub Iwerks", "animators before 1910" and "Butterfly Ball film". It's good to see continued interest in work from a range of periods.

Hopefully all of my visitors have enjoyed reading my blog. I've definitely enjoyed myself putting it together.

British animation circa 1957: family businesses and craftsmen's guilds

A year ago Michael Sporn reproduced a 1957 article from the British Film Academy's journal on the state of animation in the UK; it's definitely worth a read if you haven't seen it already.

The article captures the flavour of the period: emphasis is placed on Halas & Batchelor, with Larkins, Nicholas and Mary Spargo and Joan and Peter Foldes also covered. But for me the most interestng aspect is the author's comparison between British and American production methods:
IN America, most animation work is linked with the major studios. Tom and Jerry come from the M.G.M. studios, Popeye from Paramount, Tweety Pie from Warners; even the U.P.A. unit works under the general umbrella of Columbia, whilst Disney’s is almost a separate major studio in itself.

In Britain, animation is a family business, operating in the style of the medieval craftsmen’s guilds. The Units tend to stay together in small communities, usually in converted houses or tiny offices.

The post also contains a few stills from little-known films.

Culture wars: American animation on British television

Children's Television in Britain: History, Discourse and Policy is a 1999 BFI book by David Buckingham, Hannah Davies, Ken Jones and Peter Kelley. Opening with a Guardian article covering a report by the Broadcasting Standards Commission arguing that children's television is being dumbed down, much of the book is spent examining such claims in detail. In doing so, it highlights the place of animation in discourse on children's television.

[T]he concerns about the 'barrage' of 'cheap American cartoons' voiced in these reports, and in the broader debate about children's television, involve some quite dubious assumptions about cultural value and cultural identity. Animation in particular is typically regarded homogeneous and uniformly 'bad' for children; its very presence is taken as symptomatic of 'dumbing down' and an 'erosion of standards'.

The book also explores the history of such attitudes, as when it describes the views of the BBC's Children's Department at the time Andy Pandy creator Freda Lingstrom took over in 1951:

Popular culture, particularly in its American forms, was to be opposed: in the BBC, and more generally in elite English culture, American influence was thought to be undermining national traditions and hierarchies. In 1951 Norman Collins, Head of Television Services, warned children's producers against letting 'Children's Hour become simply another vehicle for introducing American dance tunes to English children'. Americanisation was also something that Freda Lingstrom feared. 'Abhorring any hint of commercialism,' she would screen Westerns only 'over her dead body', and despised American animation.

In 1956 the Children's Department was taken over by Owen Reed. Reed expressed similar opinions:

He had a distaste for the most successful choices of ITV's programme buyers, especially in the area of animation. 'I would not touch Popeye', he told his colleagues, if it was offered to me on a plate for the same reason I would not touch Huckleberry Hound, because it is noisy. It harps on the type of violence which, in the aggregate, is far worse than all the duels [in adventure films].' It was 'agony' to watch this sort of thing, he said.

The book later quotes more recent arguments of the same stripe. One unnamed BBC executive interviewed for the book stated that "if you've ever sat in a room watching young boys watch the Cartoon Network it is one of the most frightening experiences I've ever seen"; a 1997 interview with Jocelyn Hay, founder of Voice of the Listener and Viewer, is also excerpted from:

[I]t's that kind of high-quality programming that's made with a public service remit that puts the needs of British children above all else; it's just not imported American animation or cartoons with voices and different values and everything else... if [parents] want [children] to sit down and watch nothing but American cartoons, OK. But it's not going to do the child much good... we all need a mixture. And variety and diversity - and that's the strength of British television. You've got it now. But once it's gone - it's not going to come back, and that's going to have an impact on our language, on our cultural values...

BBC 2 has been carrying some bible tales in animation, which is quite a different thing. I mean, and they've done some Shakespearean animation, so it's not necessarily bad. But it's just re-peddling things which have got very often purely commercial values that are made primarily to sell related merchandise, not even that the programme story is the driving force behind it...

The book is broadly sympathetic with Hay's views, but objects to a number of the assumptions being made. There is a suggestion that such concerns are rooted in a class-based ideology: "Hood disliked the cultural attitudes embedded in the children's service", says the book of Stuart Hood, appointed Controller of Television by the BBC in 1961; "the view was often attributed to him that it was 'too bloody middle class'". At points the book expressed similar views itself:

As in television in general, the most easily exportable material is that which comes closest to the British national stereotype: literary adaptations about middle-class white children having exciting adventures, preferably in rural and historic settings (for example, The Phoenix and the Carpet and the Chronicles of Narnia), all do extremely well in overseas markets. And of course, these children's versions of Merchant-Ivory reflect a certain construction of 'British' national identity which may well be quite close to the hearts of those who see children's television as under threat from the encroachment of 'American trash'.

It also notes that, with all the criticism of American imports, imports from other countries have been treated with less suspicion:

The BBC Children's Department was initially resistant to US imports, and looked to European productions; but by the late 1950 it was increasingly using US programmes to compete with ITV. As this suggests, there is often an implicit distinction here between 'good' imports - Czechoslovakian folktales, perhaps - and 'bad' imports - principally in the form of US cartoons.

And, further, that not all animation is treated equally:

The categories [Jay Bumler's initial BSC study] uses are occasionally quite problematic. Some of the distinctions between programmes implicitly rely on judgments about cultural value. For example, some illustrated narrative programmes are categorised as 'animation', while others are regarded as 'storytelling'. It would appear that British animation programmes aimed at the under-fives - such as Postman Pat - fall into the latter category, while 'animation' is implicitly confined to imported programmes aimed at older children. However unintentionally, this runs the risk of downgrading animation as something synonymous with cheap US imports.

And so, the book mounts a spirited defense of American animation:

Such arguments are also often based on an extraordinary degree of ignorance about the material itself. For example, the fear of 'wall-to-wall American cartoons' is one which belies their diversity... Arguably, the most innovative and creatively imaginative children's programmes of the last ten years have been animated; and many of these have been produced by commercial channels, most notably Nickelodeon. Series like Ren and Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life have effectively redefined the possibilities of cel animation, and attracted a considerable 'cult' audience among young adults in the process. The Simpsons and Daria have demonstrated that cartoons can be a vehicle for social commentary; while Rugrats, Doug and Hey Arnold! have shown that is possible for them to tackle children's real-life concerns in entertaining and incisive ways.

There are also few graphs which I feel are worth posting as the provide statistical data on animation's place on British TV over the years.




Incidentally, in case anyone is baffled by the amount of "social drama" animation in the last table, the book defines the term extremely broadly, covering series such as Hey Arnold!, Doug and Rugrats. Even with this in mind, though, the preponderance of the genre in 1956 is surprising.

Lyrical versifiers and witless extravagance: British critics on American animation from the thirties to the sixties

If you want to look at the history of the animation scene in the UK, then it's useful to take a step away from British animation and look at how foreign animation has been received in the country. With this post I'll be examining coverage of American animation in The Times from 1934 to 1961.

Positive evaluation of Disney's cartoons can be seen in a column titled "Disney Films: Six New Cartoons" printed in the 8 November 1938 issue of The Times:

The six short pieces privately shown at the Cambridge Theatre yesterday afternoon give collectively a useful indication of Mr. Walt Disney's range... In Donald's Lucky Day, the hero, as a messenger-boy carrying a parcel that contains a bomb, is not in his best form, in spite of a brilliant dancing interlude with a black cat on a pavement, and one might be disposed to wonder whether this particular vein was not becoming exhausted if Donald's Golf Game, with clubs that turn into a net to catch the ball or into a parachute to swirl the player into the air, were not there to bring Donald into his own again. But Mr. Disney is always least successful where his humour is plain slapstick, and increasingly good as he moves nearer and nearer to pure fantasy.

Clearly, the critic took Disney shorts very seriously, treating them as films worthy of in-depth discussion. Less positive, but no less analytical, was the Times review of Song of the South (12 December 1946) that criticised the characterisation: "Brer Rabbit... has that stridency and violence which now seem an integral part of Mr. Disney's fancy. Brer Fox is in the same coarsening tradition."

Times reviews of Walt Disney's cartoons were often written from the same stance as this - praising its artistry, showing disdain for its "stridency and violence". The paper's glowing review of Snow White (14 January 1938) takes pains to explain that the story has not been overly modernised ("The Brothers Grimm, who must often deplore the treatment their fairy tales receive in pantomime, would have had their word of praise... The Grimm tradition has been followed faithfully, with no concessions to modernity"); similarly, the review of One Hundred and One Dalmatians (23 March 1961) praises the fact that "those streaks of vulgarity and cruelty which so often marred [the Disney approach] are here, to all intents and purposes, non-existent". Walt Disney's obituary (16 December 1966), meanwhile, acknowledges objections to the addition of an "all-talking, all-American Gopher" to his Winnie the Pooh adaptations.

Both sides of the coin can also be seen in the paper's coverage of the Silly Symphony short Who Killed Cock Robin? In August 24 1934 a report read "A DISNEY MELODRAMA: The next Silly Symphony to be made by Mr. Walt Disney will be entitled Who Killed Cock Robin? This will be the first melodrama to be made by Mr. Disney." The September 17 1935 issue, meanwhile, grumbles in an editorial on children's entertainment that Disney "has lately turned his attention to satirizing American murder trials, a subject which, though the victim's name be Cock Robin, is not of topical or imaginative interest in British nurseries". The paper first treats the short as a melodrama, as opposed to frivolous comedy (clearly the result of crossed wires, as the cartoon was very much a frivolous comedy) and then objects to its American setting.

A 30 June 1936 editorial titled "Mice and Men: Mr. Disney's Films" sticks out by defending Disney's lowbrow taste. The author states that that

His fairies are the creatures of the kitchen calender... His jokes are the jokes of Broadway: the under-clothes, the mother-in-law and the banana-skin. The comic strip seems always the sheet-anchor of his policy. This jolly vulgarizing of the animal kingdom, cheerfully endued with a sense of humour which it does not possess, is of course satisfying up to a point.

But goes on to conclude that

The aesthete must relinquish his ideals when he visits the pantomime; the philosopher would be wrong to seek wisdom in the Punch and Judy show, and to tax Mickey with failing to cultivate his imagination perhaps recalls too much the pedagogue.

Most interesting of all, however, is a column in the 8 April 1953 issue, titled "Film Cartoons: Recovery After Decline" and attributed to "our film critic". It's a lot harsher, seeing Donald Duck as nothing more than the fall of the medium. Walt Disney, argues the author, was at one point split between two camps:

There were once two Disneys, the humorist who amused himself with Mickey and, incidentally, made a most brilliant use of the new invention of sound, and the lyrical versifier - poet is putting it too high - who created the entirely successful Flowers and Trees.

The column goes on to criticise the "lunatic distortions" and "exaggerated raucousness" of Donald Duck ("as far removed from the adventures of Mickey as the dubious prettiness of Fantasia was from the flowing, graceful lines of the Silly Symphonies"). But its strongest objections are reserved not for Disney's output, but for that of Warner Brothers:

It is possible to see Donald Duck as a heroic rebel, a last-ditch individualist, or to argue that he represented the frustrated fury felt by the common man as the thirties drew to their catastrophic close, but, whatever the motive for his peculiar behaviour, it had a disastrous effect on the cartoon. From the pleasant exaggerations of an inventive humour, the cartoon descended to the depths inhabited by such creatures as "Bugs" Bunny and "Tweetie-Pie", where all is a chaos of insensate physical disaster, and the point and essence of fantasy are lost in wild and witless extravagance.

The author goes on to point to the French film Joy de Vivre and the cartoons of UPA as a light at the end of the tunnel. (We are also told that "a form of three-dimensional cartoons is promised").

With the Looney Tunes shorts regarded by many in the animation community as the crown jewels of the medium, it's an eye-opener to find a contemporary critic treating them as animation's nadir. How widespread was this opinion? Were American critics making the same arguments?

Skwigly: The Big Animation Magazine

A few years ago there was an animation site called Skwigly that published what I believe to be the UK's second ever animation magazine (the first being Animator, which ran from 1982 to 1995).* Unfortunately, the magazine - which was only sold online - never reached its second issue, but deserves a bit of recognition.

The one and only issue, dated April 2005, has a feature on Valiant (remember that?) as its centrepiece; news on the likes of Gordon the Garden Gnome, New Captain Scarlet, Bromwell High and Loonatics Unleashed; interviews with Pixar's Travis Hathaway and Ghost in the Shell 2 producer Mitsuhia Ishikawa; features on Studio AKA's Philip Hunt, BB3B and the video game Stranger's Wrath; a curiously erotic guide to storyboarding; sketches by storyboard artist and character designer Jez Hall; an opinion piece on the artistic merit of CGI; a section on the animation students at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication and their views on their course; a hefty preview of Sean and Barrie Robinson's Andersonesque puppet series Project Cobra (which doesn't seem to have materialised; the creators have since moved on to Agent Crush) and finally reviews of various books, DVDs, animation programs and websites.

Since then two more British animation magazines have emerged - Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Imagine - but Skwigly had its own identity, being far less academic than the Interdisciplinary Journal and somewhat less industry-focused than Imagine. If anything it was a UK-centric equivalent of the American Animation Magazine, catering to animators and animation viewers alike.

Skwigly had an afterlife of sorts, with the site that spawned it being reconfigured as an online magazine (essentially, a pay-per-view website) called The Big Animation Magazine. The site has since gone the way of the mag, although a Facebook page for its forum members remains active.

UPDATE: The Skwigly website returned in early 2011, complete with its own forum.

A few scans from the magazine:








* By which I mean a magazine covering animation in general. Skwigly was predated by several British magazines that focused solely on Japanese animation and comics, amongst them Anime UK (later renamed Anime FX); the mostly comics-centered Manga Mania; the still-active Neo Magazine; and numerous fanzines such as Animura, Animenia and Futuranime.

Cartoons as cultural icons

Hedges, queuing, bowler hats, marmite, miniskirts, Doctor Who, Monty Python, brass bands and Damien Hirst's shark - all of these are national icons, according to Icons: A Portrait of England. I was a bit disappointed that no animated icons made the cut, although the section on Monty Python discusses Terry Gilliam's contributions, while several other icons - such as Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland - have been adapted into cartoons.

The icons are nominated and then voted for by the site's readers before appearing the front-page list, and the nominees
that have yet to get voted in (old ladies with tartan shopping trolleys and the misused possessive apostrophe are two of my favourites) include a few cartoon-related picks. The only bona fide pieces of animation are Wallace and Gromit, Danger Mouse and Oliver Postgate's children's programmes, but also worth mentioning are the nominations for The Wombles, the Noddy books, Dennis the Menace (surely a bit of a rogue entry, being Scottish and all, but there we go), Sooty, Rupert Bear, Fred Basset, Viz, Paddington Bear, Mr. Bean, the Tufty Club and Eeyore, all of which were animated at one point or another.

Comics are also represented, with Dan Dare, The Eagle, Andy Capp and Roy of the Rovers all present and correct, while puppets turn up quite a bit too: Thunderbirds, Thomas the Tank Engine, Spitting Image, Basil Brush and Zippy from Rainbow have all been nominated and Punch and Judy have been voted into the list of icons. There's also a nomination for the Yellow Submarine but, somewhat oddly, it's the sculpture at the John Lennon Airport rather than either the film or the song.

So take a look through the website, vote for your personal choices, and savour the political ravings of disgruntled people. "You have to be joking", reads a comment posted on the page for kebab vans. "What a travesty of an icon! What a parcel of trendy-leftist pap!" Er, yes, thank you, J. Oswin.