Horror in British animation

David Pirie's book A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972 was published in 1973. This seminal work provided an in-depth analysis of the Gothic horror films made by studios such as Hammer and Amicus, generally overlooked at the time by the critical establishment. Pirie compared the British horror film to the American western, a genre that was receiving far more academic attention, and reached a bold conclusion:

It certainly seems to be arguable on commercial, historical and artistic grounds that the horror genre, as it has been developed by Hammer and its rivals, remains the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own.

Much of Pirie's argument is now outdated. The original edition of his book - he revised it heavily in 2008 - was clearly written with the assumption that Hammer and Hammer-like horror was there to stay; in Pirie's own words, horror was "the most popular and frequently attempted cinematic form in England". Shortly after A Heritage of Horror was published The Exorcist hit the cinema screens; like Night of the Living Dead from a few years beforehand it carried a sense of nihilism and contemporary grit, and dealt Hammer's stately Gothic stories - or fairy tales, as Pirie astutely noted - a blow from which they never truly recovered.

Be that as it may, Pirie touched upon a concept which has intrigued later film scholars. Even if the horror cycle of Hammer, Amicus, Tigon and the rest did not last, it left its mark and has been looked back upon by subsequent generations as a respectable slice of the country's film history.

Inspired by Pirie's writing on Gothic horror in the live action films of the United Kingdom, I began to wonder if British animation has any kind of comparable horror tradition. After thinking about it I noticed three distinct threads of horror animation...



The Cult of the Quays

Street of Crocodiles, by the Brothers Quay.

If a book on horror films covers animation at all, a
select group of names are likely to be brought up. There is a good chance that Jan Svankmajer will be discussed, for one; perhaps Satoshi Kon and other anime directors will also be mentioned in more recent volumes. Next to them will almost certainly be two of the most revered animators in the United Kingdom: the Brothers Quay.

I doubt very much that the Quays would describe themselves as horror filmmakers. I remember reading an interview with them in which they expressed bewilderment at seeing how many goths were in the audience to one of their screenings, commenting that they do not see their work as particularly ghoulish. But as with any other genre the boundaries of horror are vague, leaving many grey areas. Indeed, the very idea of "horror" as a genre is surprisingly recent: the term was adopted as a generic classification in the early thirties to describe the cycle of films initiated by Universal with its adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein, films that emerged from a melting pot of nineteenth-century Gothic novels, German expressionist cinema, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and any number of other precedents.

With the disorienting nature of their fantasy worlds and their haunting images of battered dolls coming to life like ghosts of a long forgotten childhood, it is not hard to see how the films of the Brothers Quay are relevant to horror cinema.

The Comb, another Quay film.

Of course, the Quays came from America, and many of their main influences are eastern European; it would therefore be misleading to say that they inherited any kind of British tradition. Even so, they may well have started one. I have seen films by numerous animation students around the country that show clear Quay influence; similar echoes can be found in the films of Robert Morgan, the Bolexbrothers' Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, and even in the live action comedy series The Mighty Boosh.

Robert Morgan's Bobby Yeah: dolls and body parts meld together in an unhinged fantasy world.

But is this cult of the Quays - and of Svankmajer, as the influences of the two can be hard to disentangle - really any stronger in Britain than in the rest of the world? I do not know for sure, although obviously both the twins and the alchemist of Prague have many admirers and imitators around the globe: the Japanese animator Naoyuki Tsuji, for example, has cited the Quays as an influence. But I cannot help but wonder if the Quays' animation gave rise to a national institution of sorts.

Brian Pickersgill's Oh Whiskers!

One final note before I leave this subject. A recurring image in the films of the Quays is that of the animated doll. Dead of Night, a pioneering British horror film from 1945, has a central motif of a murderous ventriloquist's dummy; in 1946 the Kentish ghost story writer Algernon Blackwood published The Doll; and in 1939 Brian Pickersgill directed Oh Whiskers!, a harmless educational film which featured an unintentionally disturbing doll character amongst its otherwise cuddly toybox cast. Perhaps the Quays did tap into a local horror motif after all.



Dark fairy tales

One of Arthur Rackham's typically weird illustrations to Grimm's fairy tales.

There is a popular idea that the classic fairy tales such as Snow White and Cinderella, before Walt Disney got his hands on them, were all dark, disturbing stories full of twisted and nightmarish imagery.

This is very much an oversimplification. For one, the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and others come in all shapes and sizes: some could be included in the category of horror stories, but many more are harmless fare that are perfectly suitable as bedtime stories for children. For another, Disney films are hardly devoid of ghoulish imagery: there are scenes in Snow White, such as the witch's transformation, that compare well with the live action horror films of the period.

To me, if Disney has negatively impacted the world's folktales, it is not in sanitising them but in branding them. Most of the fairy tale films in the Disney canon have become established in the public imagination as the definitive versions, and any later tellings will be in their shadow. Even if the storytellers avoid Disney influence this will involve self-consciously creating something non-Disney.
In Hollywood, animated fairy tales made by other studios have generally taken two approaches: they either imitate the Disney approach slavishly, as with Richard Rich's The Swan Princess or Don Bluth's Thumbelina, or they make films which parody fairy tales in general and Disney fairy tales in particular. The latter approach has a strong pedigree - Tex Avery made repeated use of it - but came into its own with the Shrek series and its imitators, at which point it effectively replaced the traditional Disney model.

But while Hollywood has been burlesquing the fairy tale, animators in Britain went down another path by turning to fairy tales for inspiration when telling horror stories.

Run Wrake's film Rabbit weaves a morbid modern fairy tale out of innocuous mid-century children's illustrations.

I certainly do not mean to imply that the genre of the dark fairy tale is the sole domain of the United Kingdom. This country is unusual, however, in that the creepier approach to animated folktale adaptations may well have become dominant. The British animation canon contains relatively few fairy tales told using either the Disney or the Shrek approach, but many which contain overt elements of horror.

Lotte Reiniger's Thumbelina.

We can find many examples of films throughout history that, one way or another, point in this general direction. The fairy tale animations of Lotte Reiniger, while not horrific, are more genuinely otherworldly than those of Disney. Later animators began using the structures and iconography of the fairy tale for more subversive ends, such as Vera Neubauer's 1981 feminist short The Decision; this achieves haunting results by using stream-of-consciousness imagery to deconstruct the idealised romance of fairy tales. There is also an overlap between the field of the dark fairy tale and the work of the Brothers Quay, both building upon the imagery of childhood imagination.

David Anderson's Deadsy.

The cycle of British fairy tale animation that truly embraced the dark, the gloomy and the macabre flourished in the nineties. David Anderson collaborated with American writer Russell Hoban to produce the two Deadtime Stories for Big Folk films, Deadsy and Door, in 1990; presenting the kinds of folktales that may be told in a post-apocalyptic society these stand as two of the most inventive and considered treatments of the subject.

The Sandman by Paul Berry.

Paul Berry's The Sandman, from 1992, uses more conventional imagery but stands as a similarly complex and thoughtful piece, if in a very different way. Derived from part of the story of the same name by E.T.A. Hoffman, the film draws on the traditional image of the bogeyman who punishes misbehaving children. The short's genius is in how it steadily builds its tension to unexpected heights: what begins as a cartoon-grotesque runaround with an over-the-top pantomime villain (similar to Ken Lidster's Balloon, made shortly beforehand) eventually reaches an unforgettably gruesome climax.

Ruth Lingford's Death and the Mother.

Deadtime Stories wove original fairy tales out of modern anxieties, while The Sandman drew on a genre intended solely to scare children. Other pieces of animation, meanwhile, work by drawing out the darker and more nightmarish elements of the classic stories. The Bolexbrothers' Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb is a prime example, taking a story known by many from the cheerful George Pal film and injecting it with weird and unsettling imagery. Ruth Lingford's 1997 film Death and the Mother is another, but is unusual in that the darker emphasis came about due to an organic evolution of sorts. It is a largely faithful adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Story of a Mother, which deals with a woman accepting the death of her child; but while the original tale works on the assumption that the dead child will go to heaven, Lingford's telling removes any hint of an afterlife and so takes on a very different meaning.

Tim Burton and Mike Johnson's Corpse Bride.

Perhaps the biggest name in the genre of the dark fairy tale film is Tim Burton. A resident of California, Burton is something of a transatlantic figure when it comes to animation as his last two stop-motion features, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie, were both animated by Three Mills Studios in London.

The films of Tim Burton draw on two main sources for inspiration. One is the field of children's stories and fairy tales: as well as making live action adaptations of Lewis Carrol and Roald Dahl, Burton based Corpse Bride on a Russian folktale. His other love is the canon of classic (and not so classic) horror films, as can be seen in the loving monster movie parody Frankenweenie. But crucially, Burton's films have a playful undercurrent to them; like a child dressing up for Halloween, Burton embraces all manner of macabre and twisted images and tropes but both he and his audience know full well that, at the end of the day, it's all just a bit of fun. This is what separates Burton's often charming works of dark fantasy from films such as the stylistically similar The Sandman, which are willing to take their viewers to some genuinely horrific places.



The Nuclear Threat

A Short Vision.

Joan and Peter Foldes' 1956 film A Short Vision has something of the fairy tale about it: its visual style suggests folk art, its usage of animal figures recalls Aesop, and its narrative follows the "rule of three" in its portrayal of a mountain, a forest and a city and their differing inhabitants. Its climactic depiction of faces melting into skulls, meanwhile, echoes the imagery of fantasy horror. But yet the scenario it presents is anything but fantasy. It is a film about a nuclear attack.

It may seem misleading to include A Short Vision in a discussion of horror films, but this depends on how one approaches the subject. The sheer breadth of what can be termed horror media is perhaps best demonstrated by David J. Skal's book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, which covers not only the obvious examples such as Universal films and Stephen King novels but also many satellites, ranging from the photography of Diane Arbus to the media circus surrounding the Kennedy assassination. The third major strand of horror in British animation is part of a similarly broad spectrum.

The final decade of the Cold War saw a spate of key films on the topic of nuclear cataclysm. In 1983 an American TV film about the aftermath of an atomic conflict, The Day After, was shown in Britain and greeted with controversy, with philosopher Roger Scruton lumping it in with so-called "video nasties" - the unrated VHS horror films that were the subject of a hot debate at the time. Threads, a 1984 drama on the same matter, was generally applauded by viewers but received a few complaints as well; moralist campaigner Mary Whitehouse was amongst those condemning the film. In 1985 The War Game, Peter Watkins' docu-drama on atomic warfare and its effects, was shown on television for the first time - despite having been completed in 1965. Clearly, somebody somewhere was touchy about the subject.

Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows.

The burgeoning field of the graphic novel also tackled the issue. In Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons depicted the childhood fantasy figure of the costumed superhero as powerless in the face of nuclear annihilation, while Raymond Briggs - famed for innocent tales such as The Snowman and Father Christmas - created the harrowing When the Wind Blows. A feature-length animated adaptation of this book was made by TVC in 1986.

The film was directed by Jimmy T. Murakami, an American of Japanese descent who had lost a relative in the bombing of Nagasaki. When the Wind Blows tells the story of an retired couple who faithfully follow government advice in the face of a nuclear attack, advice which ultimately does them no good: the film ends with them dying of radiation sickness. Forgoing A Short Vision's graphic portrayal of a nuclear blast, the film instead relies on anticipation of the final, dreaded moment.

The Protect and Survive opening sequence.

In 1975, between A Short Vision and When the Wind Blows, another animated work depicting nuclear attack was made. But whereas A Short Vision set out to shock and When the Wind Blows conducted itself with quiet, mounting outrage, Protect and Survive took a third approach: it tried to comfort its audience. Crucially, it failed.

The twenty-part series was made by Richard Taylor, a master of the instructional film, at the behest of the Central Office of Information. Taylor did a good job: the diagrammatic animation is simple and clear, while the use of abstract shapes to represent different sounds - such as the all-clear signal and the warning siren - is a good touch. But as Taylor himself knew at the time, the films were fatally unconvincing. "If there is no solid cover, lie flat in a ditch or a hole," said one film, "and cover your head, face and your hands as fast as you can with some of your clothes." Another short explained what to do if a family member died in your fallout shelter, making the slogan "Protect and Survive" ring rather hollow.

Protect and Survive demonstrates one method of surviving a nuclear explosion.

The Protect and Survive films were intended only to be broadcast in case of an imminent nuclear attack. However, footage was leaked out and ended up shown to millions of viewers in a 1980 edition of Panorama entitled If the Bomb Drops, and the series duly became the butt of outraged jokes. Frankie Goes to Hollywood used samples from the films for their song Two Tribes and even hired narrator Patrick Allen to deliver the announcement "mine is the last voice you will ever hear; do not be alarmed", giving rise to an urban legend that this parodic line was used in the actual films. The Leeds Animation Workshop, meanwhile, lampooned the title of the campaign with their film Pretend You'll Survive.

Surprisingly enough it could be argued that the Protect and Survive series, intended to be the least alarming of these three works, is the one which stepped the furthest into the mainstream horror canon. In 2003 Channel 4 ran a jokey two-part Halloween special counting down the one hundred scariest moments in film and television. There, sandwiched between Dracula and The Day of the Triffids, was Protect and Survive.

Animation Nation: Visions of Childhood part 2

Here's the final part of my transcript of the 2005 documentary series Animation Nation. This part covers the second half of episode three, which discusses children's animation from the eighties onwards, along with adult animation that plays on the themes of children's stories.

---

Narrator: For many, British TV animation had finally come of age. A more self-assured generation of animators now reached further for their cultural references. Danger Mouse and his hamster sidekick Penfold were a knowing concoction of classic spy heroes for a more sophisticated audience.

 Footage from Danger Mouse.

Brian Sibley: The thing about Danger Mouse was that it took the kind of concepts we were used to seeing in American animation and it overlayed it with a very, very particular British - and British of that particular time - sensibility. It's a sensibility which owes something to 007 and Danger Man, of course, these were the kind of thriller/detective/spy series that we were seeing on television that were very much of their period.

Brian Cosgrove: You've got Penfold, who was an out-and-out coward and doesn't mind anyone knowing it, you've got Danger Mouse who purports to be a hero, but if he gets in a dark spot he'll run. So there's a weakness there, even if he puts up a face of brick.

Brian Sibley: This was an animated series that had wit, intelligence, it was anarchic, it had a cutting edge to it that was zany, but was also very, very English in the voices of David Jason and Terry Scott.

Narrator: Danger Mouse broke away from the storyteller tradition that had long held sway in children's animation. The single engaging male voice was replaced by character actors.

Brian Cosgrove: David Jason loves animation, and when you give him a character, he actually lives it. He really sort of became Danger Mouse.

Narrator: Danger Mouse was the first British animated series to be syndicated in America. Like the spy films it parodied its quintessential Britishness appealed to audiences of many different nationalities and ages.

Brian Sibley: It wasn't just the youngsters who loved Danger Mouse, it began to be their older brothers and sisters, and indeed their parents, so this was an animated series that really extended the range of the potential audience for animation.

Footage from The Snowman.

Narrator: The international success of series like Danger Mouse prompted other British broadcasters to follow suit. In 1982 Channel 4 invested £100,000 to realise Raymond Briggs' The Snowman as a centrepiece of its first Christmas schedule. The Snowman has become a TV classic, drawing a huge audience to its idealised word of childhood memory. At its centre is animation's earliest storytelling device: a child who creates his own magical playmate.

Paul Wells: And The Snowman of course is profoundly lyrical in its output, the whole 'walking in the air'-type idea is very interesting because it chimes immediately with animation, that's entirely it, the magic of walking in the air can, as it were, be achieved through animation, and I think that's very powerful as its engine, we love the magic of the child at the heart of the story kind of having this perhaps imaginary playmate in his embrace of the snowman. It doesn't really matter if it's imaginary or whether it's real: animation makes it real.

Narrator: In keeping with the illustrations of the original book, John Coates developed a complex animated style known as rendering to translate this fairytale word to television.

John Coates: And I met a lot of resistance. Everybody said 'oh, you can't animate that kind of thing, it'll all go like that' [waves hand] and not being an artist myself I was able to say 'oh, for heaven's sake, I'm sure there's a way of making it work', and we ended up with this animation that was really rather good.

Brian Sibley: It had the feeling literally of a drawing that was coming alive before your eyes; it had, because of that, great beauty. It had moments of sheer wonderment. By today's standards the flight with the snowman across the world is not as amazing as stuff we now see on film. At the time, I can tell you, it was astonishing!

John Coates: The idea of the flying sequence is in the book, but he just flew to Brighton Pier in one beautiful centrespread picture, there and back, and we invented the whole idea of there being such a thing as a snowman ball, flying with the snowman up to the North Pole and we introduce Father Christmas.

Narrator: The Snowman's idyllic evocation of childhood was an immediate critical and popular success, an its been shown almost every Christmas since.

Paul Wells: And obviously that lyrical, romantic, magical storytelling scenario that The Snowman embraced matched with the Christmas scheduling, and ultimately, I think, became a landmark in animation accordingly.

Narrator: The Snowman broke the constraints of British TV animation without resorting to comedy or dialogue. It gave British broadcasters the confidence to consider other, more experimental animation, and provided a new generation of animators with the impetus to realise their own childhood fantasies.

Footage from Ken Lidster's Balloon. More stills here.

Ruth Lingford: I think during the eighties and nineties animation, to a large extent, broke out of its shackles of having to be for children, having to be funny, and it started to discover all the things it could do, to express nightmare as well as dream, to express madness, to express anything at the darkest corners of the human imagination.

Footage from Mark Baker's The Village.

Narrator: Amongst these animators were emigre identical twins the Brothers Quay.

Footage from Street of Crocodiles.

The Quays: I think in terms of British animation we're slightly just on the edge. We don't intentionally go out to isolate ourselves from the mainstream. We tend to go for objects, for instance like this puppet, we thought that its sort of face had that dazed fragile beauty about it, that potentially he could almost within his gaze represent a fairytale princeling figure.

The Quays showcase one of their puppets.

The Quays: I mean, some of the puppets you find are just eyeless, or maybe they're made of wood, but somehow, put these glass eyes in them and there's a secondary life inside them.

Narrator: Though the style of the Quays' animation was uncompromisingly adult, its essence remained the childlike desire to bring the world of fantasy to life.

Marina Warner: People now, particularly visual artists, in different media are deeply interested - not just in retrieving the child in themselves, that is returning to the person that they might have been - but actually using that state to apprehend the world again. It has become the way of thinking about being a human being, thinking through the child.

Dave McKean: I saw a film by the Brothers Quay called Street of Crocodiles one Christmas. It was like a trace memory, it felt like Id been told who my parents really are or where I was actually born. I rally felt like I knew that place, and it felt really close to me, and everything about it, the sound of it, the colours in it, the dust in it, the textures, everything about it.

Narrator: The Quays' imaginary world was much darker and more surreal than the gentle nostalgia of The Snowman. In stories composed more like music or dance, natural and everyday objects were brought to life to take on other meanings.

The Quays: What we hope to transmit in some of these films is a different form of narrative. After all, even when people go to ballet, they don't ask the dancers to talk - you're forced to interpret gestures, movement, rhythm, and music, in very much the same way as coud apply to our films.

The Quays: I think it's sad that people can't make that connection between ballet, where there is no dialogue, and it's only music, and they go to an animation film and suddenly they think this is something altogether different, they don't see that as parallel.

Narrator: The intense symbolism of the Quays was further developed by young British animators like Paul Berry. Berry's film The Sandman is a throwback to the sinister world of traditional fairytale and hardly safe family viewing.

Paul Berry's The Sandman.

Paul Wells: The puppets... and the Sandman is very persuasive, and has darting eyes, and is angular, and is kind of very threatening and moves through the shadows step by step and clicks his fingers and he's an enormously threatening force, and that's the thing that we're engaged with, you know, the life if the shadows almost, the life of the... kind of the force of the threat, and of course, one of the big preoccupations of both children's and adults, the fear for children.

Marina Warner: And that film is absolutely uncompromisingly against children, I mean, it would be very, very hard to show it to a child, I think, because the Sandman when he appears actually does scoop out the eyes of the little boy, and with his long nails, and feeds them to his horrible children in his nest. So it's very, very dark and sinister and thrilling, with a kind of, you know, shiver you can enjoy as an adult.

Dave McKean: Even when you're going into dark waters, even if you're going into nightmares, a lot of those nightmares, a lot of those feelings of anxiety are born in childhood, I think they come out of our feelings that we had as a child, a lot of the dreams that we have as adults sort of reflect back to anxieties from childhood. I think that's why animation works so well for telling those kinds of stories because you really can get underneath, you really can get deep into the mind, the imagination, get back to those sort of primal fears.

Narrator: In the 1990s many British animators drew inspiration from the power of fairy tale to realise these primal fears. Ruth Lingford used Hans Andersen's fable The Story of a Mother to challenge our ideas about death and childhood.

Footage from Ruth Lingford's Death and the Mother.

Ruth Lingford: I went to my daughter's bookshelf and got out a book of Hans Andersen's collected stories, opened it ant random an read this story which I found so powerful and more challenging that anything else I'd ever done. And it seemed to me that this story was almost like a virus, once I had this story in my head I really had the urge to tell other people the story. An d people didn't always like it, it's kind of a difficult, hard story.

Narrator: Lingford's film ends with the mother willingly surrendering her daughter to death. Though inspired by fairytale, it's a conclusion far beyond the emotional reach of any child.

Ruth Lingford: In a way the story of Death and the Mother felt strangely taboo and when I took it on I felt suddenly prone to a sort of magical thinking that isn't usually the way I work, and I was convinced that if I dare to tell this story then my children would die, you know, I felt that I was really tempting fate, it seemed like something you absolutely shouldn't deal with or look at was the death of a child.

Footage from The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb.

Narrator: With The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb fairytale returned to the mainstream as part of the 1993 Christmas schedule. Though it was commissioned as a fairytale its producers, the Bolex Brothers, created a very different vision of childhood.

Paul Wells: And there might have been the sense that it was going to be another Snowman, that it was going to be a Christmas special that everyone would embrace and engage with as a piece of animation. It could not be further from the truth.

Narrator: What the Christmas audience got was a disturbing and macabre tale in which Tom begins life as a very modern social misfit.

Dave Borthwick: I thought, okay, I'll make Tom, if he's going to be that high, he's got to be a foetus, so in this story he's going to be either the result of a miscarriage or an abortion, you know, really play it quite heavy to start with. And you get this little thing that comes out, but it survives - what do you do? And to me that was really striking home much more at this misfit sort of element that Tom Thumb is - you know, he's a little thing in this big world. And to me, emotionally, that had everything that I really wanted to try and go for.

Ruth Lingford: You can smell that film, really, it's incredibly visceral, it's very, very uncomfortable to watch, but also very seductive, it's a magic world that they create.

Narrator: This classic tale had a contemporary twist, with the the Bolex Bothers using a technique called pixilation, involving animating real actors.

Dave Borthwick: You're working with a human character, and what you have to do basically is treat that character a though he is a model that you're putting into a position, I mean, if you've got the basic principle of animation under your belt, which is the classic move a bit, take a frame, move a bit, take a frame, you know, and that pixilator has to do that in his performance.

Narrator: Actors had to hold their positions sometimes for hours while scenes were animated around them.

Dave Borthwick: I'm asking everything of these performers to do just the physical movements and the expressions, which in themselves are excruciating to perform over a long period of time, just to smile, you know, especially if you're like Tom's dad where you have to look like this [he grins] after two, three hours you know where every muscle in your face is, so the degree of concentration required was, you know, immense. And as it turned out the only people that we could find were colleagues of hours, people who understood the principle of animation, I think we were just lucky at the time because we did have a lot of weird looking friends working in the industry.

Footage from Postman Pat and Bob the Builder.

Narrator: By the 1990s, animated British film like Tom Thumb had become increasingly innovative in style, but also, for many, increasingly uncomfortable to watch. Whilst these modern versions of classic fairytales impressed and disturbed their mainly adult audience, animation produced for children's television seemed to have become almost entirely merchandise driven. 1990s series like Ivor Wood's Trumpton-style creation Postman Pat generated millions from spin-off toys and video sales, and the latest great animation success story, Bob the Builder, was designed specifically to target a preschool audience. From its merchandising sales alone, it's now a multi-million pound brand. It seemed that animation would never again be able to appeal equally to adults and children, but help was at hand.

Footage from A Grand Day Out.

Narrator: When Bristol animator Nick Park first created Wallace and Gromit, he was self-consciously harking back to a long tradition of British children's animation

Paul Wells: I think Nick Park's particularly clever in the way that he draws upon a tradition of children's animation in what he does with Wallace and Gromit. He combines, I think, that small little England world of Gordon Murray's Trumpton or Chigley and he slings outward to things like Postman Pat and the kind of stories that follow in that ilk, but he also links into the Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin magic of something like Bagpuss. The small kind of eccentric world, and this magical nature matched with a kind of English parochialism and English realism, characterised Wallace and Gromit.

Brian Sibley: Many of the things in the world of Wallace and Gromit are thing that are familiar to us in animated television since it began. But why he brings into the world is all the elements from all these other things: he brings in the kind of anarchy of Danger Mouse, he brings in the kind of wild inventions that we saw in The Clangers.

Nick Park: I mean, in a way that's why I like films, series like The Clangers and all these different Oliver Posrtgate, Peter Firmin stuff: it's 'cause they have a kind of slightly quirky element to them as well, and that's the sort of thing I always wanted to make myself, it inspired me to always be looking for a slightly odd angle and a sightly quirky angle.

Narrator: The first time Wallace and Gromit hit the small screen was in 1990's A Grand Day Out.

Nick Park: Whenever I find that it's kind of getting a bit normal or a bit predictable, I have to, like, think there must be another way, there must be another way to get from this point to that point without being kind of linear. And it's nice in A Grand Day Out to have a story that kind of organically develops: they have to get to the moon to get cheese, so they have to build a rocket, and Wallace is so stupid he builds it in his basement. And that's one example - there has to be an underlying absurdity to everything about Wallace and Gromit.

Brian Sibley: So you've got this technological idea of people  travelling to space with this totally fantastical, fairytale concept that the moon is actually made of cheese, because the world of Wallace and Gromit at that point is as bizarre as the world of The Clangers, because the moon is no more made of cheese than the Clangers' planet is filled with soup.

Narrator: Wallace and Gromit's world may have been whimsical but it had more in common with the adult comedy of Tom Thumb than The Clangers.

Dave Borthwick: Nick's stuff is obviously much more geared for family consumption, really. But that difference I think really is pretty superficial, I mean, we were both creating an equal, kind of, how do you say, escapist world, if you like, you know, a fantasy world, and it's down to the individual appetite really whether you want that to be dark or cosy.

Footage from The Wrong Trousers.

Narrator: And as with Eric Thompson before him, Park's comedy has its roots in a more adult worldview.

Nick Park: For me, I think we've got this whole kind of bedrock of Ealing, you know, and Ealing comedies and Norman Wisdom films. I mean, I just love the Ealing comedies, and you know, if anything I try to reflect the most, even dimly, is those, really.

Narrator: Like many previous British animators, Park found the inspiration for his world of eccentricity in the paraphernalia of childhood.

Nick Park: You know, my main source is childhood, really. I just remember the toaster we had as a kid, or the iron, you know, or the... even the little things - there's a little radio in the rocket, and that's the one I had, I got it for my seventh birthday; I made it out of a matchbox. And then I was inspired to use plasticine. You're directly linked with the character, you're sculpting and you're feeling your way through it, and I think that allowed me... the technique of Plasticine allows you to be a bit more eccentric and a bit more slapstick.

Narrator: And like Park's heroes, Wallace and Gromit quickly became a modern British institution, finding their natural home at the heart of the Christmas TV schedule.


Brian Sibley: I find it extraordinary when you think of all the programming that is put out over the Christmas season that Wallace and Gromit ended up having the cover of the Radio Times. They became the focal point of Christmas each year, and even after there weren't any new films, or even between the films, the other films were being shown, and it was still an event. We wanted to see Wallace and Gromit's latest adventure or their last adventure and we wanted to see it again and again in the same way - in the same way! - that we wanted to see The Snowman year after year after year. It just became instantly and undyingly part of British culture.

Narrator: Now Nick Park and British TV animation stand on a threshold: the world of Wallace and Gromit is about to go global in a multi-million dollar feature financed by the Hollywood studio DreamWorks. But the timescales of a Hollywood production present their own problems.

Behind-the-scenes footage from Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Nick Park: I'm just always completely astounded at what a different kettle of fish it is to make a feature film than a thirty minute film. It's far more than two and a half times - probably more than a hundred times more, easily, easily. The biggest problem I find is that jokes you thought of four years ago are starting to get old on you, so you're starting to rewrite everything, and think everything's rubbish! The danger is you can... you lose that kind of initial inspiration and freshness.

Narrator: Park and his Aardman colleagues may now work to Hollywood budgets for a global audience, but their cultural touchstones remain closer to Postgate and Firmin than Disney.

Nick Park: The best way to describe it would probably be - it's a vegetarian horror movie. There are many more characters in this one, but the most important thing in the whole film is the relationship between Wallace and Gromit, and this film pushed that relationship to the extreme. You know, they have a problem that is bigger than anything they've ever had before.

Footage from the Curse of the Were-Rabbit trailer.

Narrator: In the century since Arthur Melbourne-Cooper first realised his Dreams of Toyland, British animation has used childhood inspirations successfully to appeal to an ever-growing audience. But it remains to be seen if the parochialism and whimsy that once characterised this television world can ever really win over a global cinema audience.

Brian Sibley: Wallace and Gromit are the crown jewels of British animation, they really are. and you know, for Nick, they are more than that, they're family, they're friends, you know. Not to make it whimsical, but that's what they are, they're people he knows. And therefore, to let them go out into the big bad word of feature-length movies is a risk, it's a risk. I'm sure they're up to it, and I'm sure they're going to have some pretty... you know, some good inventions up their sleeves to pull it through, and I hope they do. I wish it well, I just... I fear for them, in that mad world.

1-2-3-4-5-6