Cartoonland, and Anson Dyer's animators in the late forties

Peter Hale has forwarded me this extract from Cartoonland, a 1949 documentary about Anson Dyer and his studio, asking for help in identifying the artists shown in the film. The man in the first of the photos below is Harold Whitaker; if anyone recognises the rest, let me know.

Len Kirley, Laurie Price, John Garling, Tony Guy, Sid Griffiths, Bob Privett, Vic Bevis, Betty Smith and Mollie Zambra are all candidates.

 

Another curiosity regarding the documentary is its focus on a cartoon entitled Ronnie Rabbit. Peter tells me that an earlier part of the documentary, not included in the extract, shows Dyer reading a book of the same title to his niece before deciding to adapt it into a cartoon.

Ronnie Rabbit by T. Payten Gunton and Frank Rogers, published in 1949 - possibly the inspiration for the animated character.

However, there does not appear to be any kind of record of a cartoon called Ronnie Rabbit ever being released. It may be that the footage was commissioned specifically for the documentary and the entire scenario staged, but this itself raises questions - for one, the clip of animation is not shown in its final state, only as a pencil test followed by individual cels.

Sid Griffiths and Jerry the Troublesome Tyke

According to the BFI database, Sidney G. Griffiths lived from 1899 to 1967. IMDB credits him as an actor in the 1903 short A Desperate Poaching Affray, but this obviously contradicts the BFI's chronology; the actor is probably a different Sid Griffiths.

Griffiths' first film, then, appears to have been 1925's Jerry the Troublesome Tyke, which he wrote, directed and animated. Jerry went on to star in 41 subsequent films as part of the Pathé Pictorial magazine, the last of them appearing in 1927. This was one of the longest British animated series in the era of theatrical animated shorts, and the first animated series to be made in Wales.

Jerry is a sort of hybrid of Felix the Cat and G.E. Studdy's Bonzo, but lacking either the iconically stripped-down design of Felix or the delicate rendering of Bonzo. He's actually a little disconcerting: from the neck down he looks like a swollen, naked human.

The Jerry cartoons, although reasonably good for their era, haven't aged as well as some of their contemporaries. What saves them is their general sense of playfulness: the first carton introduces us to Jerry's parents, an anthropomorphic pen and inkpot, while Griffiths is always on the lookout for new locales for his character to visit, often placing Jerry in front of like action backgrounds (In and Out of Wembley is a particularly good example of this). Even the shorts which are generally unremarkable tend to have a good sequence or two, such as the train ride in Honesty is the Best Policy.

My personal favourite is Ten Little Jerry Boys, which doesn't bother trying to tell a story and instead strings together a set of gag sequences. This seems to have been Griffiths' strong point.

After the Jerry cartoons, Griffiths appears to have worked on only a handful of films. In 1930 he, Brian White and A. Goodman co-directed Tropical Breezes, a short cartoon about two castaways. In 1933 he worked on two shorts written by the popular cartoonist H.M. Bateman: Colonel Capers (directed by Adrian Klein, animated by Griffiths and White) and On the Farm (Directed by Griffiths, White and Joe Noble).

In 1935 Griffiths began working as a supervisor at Anson Dyer's studio Anglia Films, beginning with Sam and his Musket and staying in this role until Gunner Sam in 1937. Griffiths does not appear to have worked with Dyer during the latter's stint at Publicity Films, but the two worked together again when Griffiths provided animation for You're Telling Me, A.G. Jackson's documentary about Dyer's studio

This would seem to have been Griffiths' last piece of animation. I can find only three more credits for him, all as a camera operator at Halas & Batchelor: Animal Farm (1954), The Candlemaker (1957) and Man in Silence (1964).

Following up on Gifford: the 1930s

The fourth 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.
 

Horace Shepherd's Bingo character.

The first few years of the decade were something of a dry period. In 1930 Joe Noble's final Sammy and Sausage cartoon, Call Me Speedy, was released; the same year saw the arrival of new director Horace Shepherd's four-part series starring Bingo (yet another dog character), John Maxwell's debut The Elstree 'Erbs and another short from Sid Griffiths, Tropical Breezes.

John the Bull, the frankly bizarre tale of a prize bull who heroically sacrifices himself for his country's beef industry.

Advertising and propaganda films are represented by two 1931 cartoons endorsing the Conservative Party, titled The Right Spirit and Red Tape Farm; and John the Bull, a 1930 short promoting the National Marked Beef Campaign showing a degree of Disney influence. Meanwhile, Anson Dyer completed another animated documentary in 1932: The Story of the Port of London.

Conservative propaganda film The Right Spirit.

1933 saw Adrian Klein make his directorial debut in Colonel Capers while Joe Noble, Sid Griffiths and a third director active in the previous decade, Brian White, teamed up with cartoonist H.M. Bateman to create On the Farm. The following year White directed Treasure Island - billed as the first part of the aborted Barnacle Bill Series - while two films about anthropomorphic billiard and golf balls, The Lost Ball and The Eternal Triangle, were released and have been uncertainly attributed by Gifford to director Dennis Connolly.

George Pal's The Sleeping Beauty, covered in detail at AWN's George Pal Site.

1934 also gave us a film by a better-known director: Hungarian-born puppet animator George Pal, at the time working in Holland and later to move to America. His film The Sleeping Beauty was an Anglo-Dutch co-production advertising Philips Radio, and tweaked the fairy tale by having the prince wake the sleeping princess using a radio.

Len Lye's Kaleidoscope.

An upsurge of animated adverts and propaganda seems to have occurred in 1935. Laurie Price and Christopher Millet animated commercials for Morris Motors (Morris May Day), Worthington beer (The Midshipman and, with Ian Matherson, The Gay Cavalier), OK Sauce (The Baronial Beanfeast) and a fourth client not identified by Gifford (Carnival Capers). See How They Won, an advert for Boots, was scripted and designed in Britain but animated in America; none other than Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Iwerks served as director. Abstract animator Len Lye directed Kaleidoscope, a film advertising Churchman's Cigarettes.

Dirty Bertie was a propaganda film made for the Central Council for Health Education and told the story of Dirty Bertie receiving a lesson from Clean Eugene; Giro and his Enemies, meanwhile, was made for the Health and Cleanliness Council and showed Giro the Germ launching an attack on Healthiville. Gifford does not list directors for either film.

A few entertainment films were also released this year. Anson Dyer directed a short under the banner of the newly-formed Anglia Films, titled Sam and His Musket; this was based on a character created by radio entertainer Stanley Holloway and was the first in a series. Dennis Connoly directed a Robin Hood film of which little is known, while Cyril Jenkins and Margaret Hoyland made a puppet film using paper dolls, The Little Paper People; Kinematograph Weekly credits the film with "having an appeal for the better class as well as the popular patron." Woofy, released by Zenifilms, was not so well received by this publication: "A feeble cartoon, the drawings are unoriginal and the sound effects are poor. Crude drawings of a dog who rescues his sweetheart from a burning house. Poor drawings, animation and sound effects make it a doubtful attraction for minor halls."

Anson Dyer's interpretation of Stanley Holloway's Sam Small character.

This more or less sets the stage for the rest of the thirties. The redoubtable Anson Dyer continued to make films throughout the decade, completing seven more Sam Small films and another collaboration with Stan Holloway, The Lion and Albert, between 1936 and '37. He went on to make a string of adverts at Publicity Films promoting Bush Radio (All the Fun of the 'Air, The King with the Terrible Temper, The King with the Terrible Hiccups and This Button Business), the Samuel Hanson company (Red, White and Blue) and Rinso (The Queen Was in the Parlour) and even becoming the subject of a documentary, You're Telling Me, in 1939.

Character-based series, once so popular, seem to have fallen out of favour in the thirties. Bingo and Sam Small were joined in 1936 by the third and final proper series star of the decade, Steve the cart-horse, who originated in the comic strip Come On, Steve! and was brought to the screen by his creator Roland Davies with the aid of legendary cartoonist Carl Giles. Steve appeared in six shorts; the contemporary reviews quoted by Gifford are generally positive, although Giannalberto Bendazzi has described the cartoons as "a failure in every respect... the inventions and plots were linked to an old-fashioned concept of animated film."

Cyril Jenkins and Margaret Hoyland, who made The Little Paper People back in 1935, created a sequel in 1939 titled Paper People Land. Dennis Connoly's National News was intended to kick off a series that, apparently, never surfaced; a reviewer writing for the Daily Film Renter dismissed the pilot as "Quite the worst cartoon I've seen to date, a cartoon that might have found favour 15 years ago."

Of the one-off shorts produced around this time, one of the more notable specimens is 1936's The Fox Hunt. Directed by Anthony Gross, Hector Hoppin and Laszlo Meitner, the film was produced by none other than Alexander Korda after he had seen and been impressed by Gross and Hoppin's Joie de Vivre, which they made in France; Kinematograph Weekly questioned The Fox Hunt's mass appeal but praised its artistic merity. Korda, Gross, Hoppin and Meitner were also connected with what was to have been Britain's first animated feature film, Around the World in Eighty Days; World War II halted production and the completed footage was eventually released in 1955 as a short film.

John Halas' Music Man.

Also of note is the 1938 film Music Man, which is historically significant as the first project that John Halas and Joy Batchelor worked on together. The company behind the film, British Animated Films, produced the documentary short How a Motor Works the same year; this was an early work by Kathleen "Spud" Houston, then Kathleen Murphy. The following year Len Lye directed another abstract film, Swinging the Lamberth Walk.

Britain picked up another foreign talent in Lotte Reiniger, who is best remembered today for directing the pioneering animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed in her native Germany. Her first film made in the UK was The King's Breakfast, made in collaboration with Martin Battersby and based on the work of A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepherd.

That leaves us with a number of advertising, propaganda and educational films. You could be forgiven for assuming that these would show a lower degree of creativity than the entertainment cartoons; this is far from the truth, as the decade's most highly-regarded examples of British animation come from this field. Some, inevitably, are not well remembered today (you'd be hard-pressed to find much information on the Gibbs toothpaste ad The Magic Seaplane, or Brian Salt's British Social Hygiene Council film The Road of Health) but others are genuine classics made by people now regarded as masters of the art.

George Pal's South Sea Sweethearts. Read more at AWN's George Pal Site.

George Pal continued to direct Anglo-Dutch adverts, promoting Horlicks (On Parade, Sky Pirates, Love on the Range, What Ho! She Bumps and South Sea Sweethearts) and Philips Radio (Philips Broadcast of 1938 and Cavalcade of Music).

Len Lye's The Birth of the Robot.

Len Lye directed an Imperial Airways advert titled Colour Flight in his characteristic abstract style and also ventured into stop motion with his Shell commercial The Birth of the Robot. Educational films, meanwhile, benefited from the talents of Norman McLaren, a new animator who provided diagrams for the British Commercial Gas Association's film The Obedient Flame.

Len Lye's Colour Flight.

And finally, we come to the biggest benefactor of British animation in the thirties: the General Post Office. The GPO Film Unit fostered individuality and experimentation amongst its directors, which included Lye, Reiniger and McLaren.

Len Lye's Rainbow Dance.

Len Lye's animated films for the GPO were A Colour Box, an abstract piece with a few frames about parcel post tagged on to the end; Rainbow Dance, a more representational film that mixes live action dance footage into the animation, and ends with a bit of narration about the post office savings bank; and Trade Tattoo, an unusual combination of abstract animation and live action documentary stressing the important role played by the Post Office in British industry. A contemporary review of Rainbow Dance praises the film but criticises the advert at the end as "a bad anti-climax", underlining just how much these are art films rather than mere adverts.

Len Lye's Trade Tattoo.

Lotte Reiniger provided The Tocher, one of her many silhouette-animated fairy tales, in which the day is saved by a post office savings bank book; and The H.P.O., which uses silhouettes and line drawings to tell the story of a postal service run by cherubim. Meanwhile, Brian Pickersgill made a GPO film entitled Oh Whiskers! - unusually, this said nothing about postal services, but instead taught children about healthy living.

Lotte Reiniger's The H.P.O.

And finally there is Norman McLaren's Love on the Wing, in which an ever-changing line drawing conveys the tale of a love triangle between a hero, heroine and villain - all the while promoting airmail.

Love on the Wing by Norman McLaren.

The thirties were a strange decade for British animation. While the American industry was creating Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Goofy, the UK had almost abandoned the concept of series characters despite the various attempts to create the next Felix in the previous decade. Propaganda and adverts grew noticeably in proportion to entertainment films, and yet in a seeming paradox this led to a flourishing of experimental work from some of animation's most remarkable auteurs.

Propaganda would, of course, rise to new heights in the following decade. In the next post in this series I will look at how British animation was used in the wartime and post-war years.

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

Following up on Gifford: the 1910s

The second 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.

By the end of the last decade there were three directors working in British animation: stop-motion animator Arthur Melbourne Cooper, trickfilm director Walter R. Booth and silhouette animation pioneer Charles Armstrong. The 1910 films listed by Gifford are Armstrong's The Clown and his Donkey, Booth's The Toymaker's Dream, and a film from a newcomer - Cecil M. Hepworth's Embroidery Extraordinary, a trickfilm featuring an animated needle and cotton.

More new directors began cropping up in 1911. Stuart Kinder made A Merry Christmas to All Our Friends ("Animated letters from the title phrase as a greeting from the cinema manager to his patrons"), while J.H. Martin directed a complex-sounding film entitled The Little Artists. Gifford quotes a contemporary synopsis from Bioscope:

Two children are shown, one holding a teddy bear, while the other girl sketches on a blackboard, and then the latter is replaced by a frame of canvas to which a thread is attached, which by its own volition forms a star, and in closer view is then seen to take various other shapes - a child's photograph, a lighthouse, Humpty Dumpty before his fall, the Man in the Moon, a picture of a rabbit, and portraits of King George V and his consort, the thread finally tracing the legend 'Au Revoir' with which the film concludes.

The year also saw the release of Booth's Animated Putty, Cooper's Road Hogs in Toyland, and three films by Armstrong (the cinema message Ta-Ta! Come Again, the political satire Mr. Asquith and the Clown, and an advert entitled The Best Cigarette is a Jones).

British animation steadily increased in production early in this decade: Gifford lists three films for 1910, seven for 1911, and thirteen for 1912. In 1912 Booth and Cooper were still active, and there was a new director in F. Martin Thornton. He directed two films that year, In Gollywog Land and Santa Claus (the latter co-directed by R.H. Callum); Gifford identifies In Golliwog Land as the first animated film in colour. The synopses are intriguing:

The gollywog manages to dodge the apples but when the sough covers the basin, six little wogs break through. Then the gollywog gives a conjuring act with flowers, and later goes for a ride in his auto-boot, runs into a rival motorist, and has to amputate his leg. First aid with a vengeance! (taken from Bioscope)

live action/animated toy sequences. Elsie goes to sleep on Christmas Eve and dreams that Father Christmas arrives down the chimney and transforms her into a Tingaling, a fairy. They travel by reindeer sledge to his home at the North Pole where busy little gnomes are making toys for the children, and Santa enlists the aid of Father Neptune to help a sea captain return to his family. (Gifford's own synopsis)

Both films contain animation by Walter R. Booth and Edgar Rogers. 1912 also saw the release of Sports in Moggyland, a stop-motion film whose director is not known. "[I]t is quite impossible after seeing them to believe that these puppets are not endowed with an intelligence which enables them to fully appreciate and enjoy the antics they engage in," reads the Bioscope review. 1913 saw Thornton's assistant Edgar Rogers direct a film himself (The Nightmare of the Gladeye Twins; like Santa Claus it takes place in the dreams of a girl named Elsie, and may be a sequel to that film) but is chiefly notable for the first six films in Max J. Martin's Pathé Cartoons series. This is the first British animated series - unless, of course, you want to make a case for the Elsie films constituting a series...

Harry Furniss in 1912.

And so we come to 1914. Gifford, in the introduction to his book, says that British animation had a boost during World War I thanks to a demand for propaganda cartoons. The first such film listed in the book is Peace and War Pencillings by Harry Furniss, a throwback to the days of filmed lightning cartoonists; the film portrays cartoonist Furniss drawing a peaceful London scene which is disrupted when the dome of the National Gallery turns into the face of Kaiser Wilhelm.

Still from Lancelot Speed's Bully Boy No. 1, which combines live-action lightning cartooning with animation.

After this came War Cartoons by Dudley Tempest; something called Cine War Cartoons No. 1, of which little is known beyond the fact that it was released by R. Prieur; a second Furniss offering, titled simply War Cartoons; War Cartoons by Sidney Aldridge; The Voice of the Empire ("The longest cartoon to date, a full 1,000 foot reel running some 15 minutes" says Gifford; no director is credited); F. Baragwanath's The Kaiser's Nightmare; the first four entries in Lancelot Speed's Bully Boy series (Bully Boy No. 1, French's Contemptible Little Army, Sleepless and Sea Dreams); the five-part Wireless from the War Series, whose director is not named; Charles Urban's The Kineto War Map Series, which would last for 15 films, ending in 1916; Dudley Tempest's British War Sketches, Christmas War Sketches and Merry War Jottings; War Skits by Sidney Aldridge; Dudley Buxton's Proverbs and War Topics (AKA War Cartoons Series 1), War Cartoon Series 2 and War Cartoons Series 3; and finally Studdy's War Studies No. 1, from future Bonzo creator George E. Studdy. It is not entirely clear from the book's synopses how many of these contain true animation and how many are, like the earliest films listed in the book, simply live action films of cartoonists drawing still images.

Not all of the 1914 films were propaganda. Amongst the other offerings of the year were Isn't it Wonderful? (Charles Armstrong's return to animation after an apparent two-year break); films by new directors F. Gandolphi and Louis Nikola; more work from Stuart Kinder and Cecil M. Hepworth; more films from R. Prieur that lack directorial credits; Transformation, which Gifford uncertainly attributes to F. Percy Smith; and the remaining thirty-one films in the Pathé Cartoons series.

The remaining years of the war would see the continuation of Studdy's War Studies and Lancelot Speed's Bully Boy series, which were joined by other topical series: Anson Dyer and Dudley Buxton's John Bull's Animated Sketchbook; Topical Sketch, from the pseudonymous "Say"; Dicky Dee's Cartoons, by Anson Dyer again; Alick Ritchie's Frightful Sketches; Britainnia's Budget, brought to us by Ernest H. Mills of Kine Komedy Kartoons; Raemakers' Cartoons, Jack Dodsworth's films based on Louis Raemakers' illustrations; and Leslie Holland's John Bull Cartoons.

Other films from this period include non-series work from Speed, Buxton, Mills and others; Bruce Bairnsfather's autobiographical Bairnsfather Cartoons; Leonard Summers' Humours of... series (Humours of a Library, Humours of Football and Humours of Advertising); several propaganda films by E.P. Kinsella and Horace Morgan; The Golfing Cat and The Hunter and the Dog, two films by George Pearson made in collaboration with cat-loving illustrator Louis Wain; and some early work by Sidney Aldridge and Victor Hicks.

Slim and Pim.

By this time the American industry had began to create animated series with recurring stars, such as Colonel Heeza Liar and Mutt & Jeff. Towards the end of the war the UK had joined in with a similarly character-based series: Leslie Dawson's Adventures of Slim and Pim, starring two heroes whom Gifford describes as "England's somewhat feeble answer to Mutt and Jeff". In addition, newspaper cartoonist Tom Webster (who had made his animation debut with 1917's The History of a German Recruit) directed two 1918 cartoons starring an animated Charlie Chaplin.

Spick and Span with their creator Victor Hicks

Series films of one variety or another were the order of the day in the final year of the decade: 1919 gave us Dudley Buxton's three-part Cheerio Chums series (about the exploits of ex-servicemen finding work after the war); three Uncle Remus cartoons, directed by Anson Dyer; three Zig-Zags at the Zoo shorts, directed by Ernest H. Mills and based on J.A. Shepherd's illustrations; the three-part Poy Cartoon series, based on the work of caricaturist Percy "Poy" Fearon; and A Geni and a Genius by Victor Hicks, a two-part adventure starring Charlie Chaplin. All of these came from the prolific Kine Komedy Kartoons.

Hicks also made a short called Spick and Span, with two characters who apparently never appeared in any later shorts (Gifford confuses this with A Geni and a Genius in his book) and something called Twice Nightly, which I'm afraid I know nothing about.

The heroes of the Cheerio Chums series.

Two other companies released animated films that year. Lancelot Speed's Speed Cartoons returned to propaganda, apparently for the last time, with Britain's Honour. Bioscope describes the film:

In addition to the heroes who have fought, worked and died in the cause of humanity, we are shown the victims of child labour, bad housing, disease, and other evils, the dragon that preys on humanity and that can only be vanquished by justice, truth, and right, aided by science rightly applied.

Oh'Phelia.

The third company is Hepworth Picture Plays, which released four Shakespeare parodies by Anson Dyer: The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, 'Amlet and Oh'Phelia. Dyer is the only animator who began work in this decade to have a biography on Screenonline (his Oh'Phelia is covered as well, as is his 1920 film Othello) and will, it seems, be remembered as the key figure of this decade.

A caricature of Anson Dyer, probably a self-portrait. The characters in the top right are, I'm assuming, from his Uncle Remus series.

The 1910s saw animation across the world rise in status from a novel offshoot of filmmaking to an industry. Looking at British output we can see a leap from the three films of 1910 to the multiple animated series being distributed in 1919.

In 1919 the American industry created Felix the Cat, almost certainly the earliest cartoon star to still be a part of popular culture; the next decade saw the debut of Mickey Mouse. How did British animators react to the changes around them? That will be the subject of the next post in this series.

Other posts in this series:

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