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.

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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.

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Animation Nation: Something to Say part 2

Continuing my transcript of the 2005 documentary series Animation Nation. Here's the second half of episode two (go here for the first half) which focuses on the Channel 4 era of independent animation and on adult animated sitcoms of the early 2000s.

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Narrator: Until the early eighties, the commissioning and funding of challenging animation like The Wall had been sporadic and haphazard. Then, in 1981, a new patron appeared, with a logo that was an animated classic in itself.

Footage of Channel 4's original logo.

Narrator: Channel 4 quickly showed its intent when it commissioned the company behind Yellow Submarine to adapt a controversial book by cartoonist Raymond Briggs, about nuclear war: When the Wind Blows.

Footage from When the Wind Blows.

Narrator: When the Wind Blows became something of a personal crusade for director Jimmy Murakami.

Jimmy Murakami: It was such an emotional, moving thing, a lot to do with my background of being a Japanese and all, and the atomic bomb and the whole memory of the A-bomb and about the people killed. And the way it was written, and the way it was depicted was the right way to do it. I mean, the subject matter was difficult, and I knew I could do something with it so I thought this was the film I was waiting for, to do.

Narrator: The film tells the story of a retired couple's attempts to follow official government advice on how to prepare for a nuclear strike.

Robert Hewison: The couple in the film are deeply conventional ordinary people, and they're very obedient people. They are the sort of obedient people who went into the shelters in 1940, who accepted all the restrictions and rationing of wartime. And the voice of authority in the film is simply the voice of this pamphlet, Protect and Survive, which is an absolutely real pamphlet which told you how to survive a nuclear attack. And all they do - it's a brilliant piece of subversion - is solemnly read out and do the thing that this pamphlet tells you to do. And of course, what happens to this lovely, warm, loving couple? They die!

Narrator: When the Wind Blows was made during years of tension and paranoia as the cold war went into one last spasm of confrontation. In this atmosphere, even animators could be the enemy within.

John Coates: I'm quite sure that my home telephone was bugged at that time. So There was one day I came into the studio and somebody said "do you know your room has been broken into?" I said "Oh, for heaven's sake", and then when I went and looked at my desk I could see everything was there, but it wasn't where I'd left it.

Narrator: The masterstroke of the film was the casting of the actors Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills to provide the voices of the couple.

John Coates: We were in the recording studio and we were down to the last take, and I remember John Mills saying to Peggy what we said, do a read through, and he said to Peggy "we could just do a real run and see what happens", and that's the one that's on the film.

Jimmy Murakami: Raymond was there, John, myself and then Jim, we were in tears. It as just so moving - I mean, when you get it all at once coming at you, never heard it before, and only ever reading the lines, you know, and I just walked in to the studio and Peggy was in tears, and she said "please, Jimmy, don't ask me to do it again", I said "you don't have to. I mean, that's it."

Narrator: Channel 4's patronage not only established animators to create challenging work, but also encourage new voices previously underrepresented in the mainstream. These filmmakers brought fresh energy and invention with highly personal short works of animation.

Paul Wells: This was an incredible leap forward for British animation. I think it chimed in too with the idea that, of course, Channel 4's remit was to bring on board the margins, to look for areas of British culture that had not been covered and represented before in terms of British television and British broadcasting.

Footage from Murders Most Foul. More on it and the other Blind Justice shorts here.

Gillian Lacey: I had the idea of doing four different films with women animators who felt similarly. So we all took a different aspect of women and the law. And so I chose to do this one about murder, because I just felt so outraged at some of the judgments that I'd come across, and that way in which the women were seen as to blame, and men were often given quite light sentences. I used the style of melodrama because there is a sense of theatre in court procedures for me. There's a kind of absurdity about it.

Narrator: The first wave of female animators in the eighties was openly polemical, bringing a feminist agenda to their filmmaking. Candy Guard represented a second wave, less obviously political in their aims , where humour was the weapon of choice.

Footage from Candy Guard's Alternative Fringe.

Candy Guard: I naturally had a female main character and then I did cartoons about, jokes about women's toilets, and, you know, hairdressing and that kind of thing. I just want to make people laugh - but not by being silly, but by being truthful. Then I say, 'okay, this has happened to me', and if people laugh I think 'okay, it's probably happened to you as well then", and it makes me feel better.

Gillian Lacey: I think Candy's work from the beginning was really funny. It was like she was a female Bob Godfrey. It was building on what the generation before, my generation, had had to fight for. And in a sense we fought for a space, and Candy's generation walked into that space.

Narrator: Based the experience of working on her early films, Candy Guard went on to develop the character of Dolly Pond.

Candy Guard draws Dolly Pond.

Candy Guard: Small bosoms, three fingers - no real reason for that, except that it's very hard to do four fingers with a big fat felt pen. Spotty callots, circa 1988, for riding bike, and going for interviews, and going to the park. Sparrow legs, don't know where I got those from but they're good for doing fast walking, which she does a lot of. I wanted to do a sort of multifaceted character who as eternally dissatisfied, always trying very very hard to get certain things, and somehow failing, and going back to square one.

Footage from Pond Life.

Narrator: Dolly became the star of Pond Life, a series directed by a woman, dictated by a woman's view of the world. It was commissioned by Clare Kitson at Channel 4.

Clare Kitson: She just sees right through human nature and you know tells it like it is. I mean, there are some very, very funny scenes that are almost shocking because they're so, so real, you know, and you've been there, you've done that.

Footage from a film which I have not identified.

Narrator: Channel 4 also helped provide a showcase for those emerging from art schools, keen to experiment with both the form and the content of animation. Filmmakers like Jonathan Hodgson wanted animation to reflect the life they saw around them

Jonathan Hodgson: We tended to go out into the environment and observe things, and I made a couple of films at Liverpool. One was about dogs, and people and people with their dogs, the other film was kind of more personal to me, it was about nightclubs and the sort of scene in Liverpool at the time.

Footage from Jonathan Hodgson's Night Club. More stills here.

Narrator: This art school generation were children of the counterculture, taught by children of the sixties to value not only observation but the visual possibilities of animation.

Susan Young: I learnt that animation was more or less an extension of drawing, painting, sculpture, extended into time and space with sound with narrative, with possibly political content, and I thought, well, it's almost the ultimate art form. And that's really what got me hooked on animation.

Narrator: Working in a tradition which valued experimentation, Sue Young created animation which played with line and colour for its impact. Her 1985 film Carnival captured both revelry and tension on the streets of Notting Hill, London.

Footage from Susan Young's Carnival.

Susan Young: It's almost as if you can bring a line to life you can bring a brushstroke to life, you can give it its own personality, its own energy, and I think only with animation can you do that. I didn't really draw anything in advance, because I thought if I drew images in advance I'd start to be focused more on a specific narrative, and I wanted to allow myself some spontaneity. And I think if you're trying to express emotion in animation as well, it feels more relevant to do it in a non narrative kind of way, as a series... it's almost like an observational documentary, but with the animator's own emotions expressed throughout the piece of work.

Paul Wells: Film and television documentary, of course, has always been characterised by that observational style, trying to actually embrace the social world, and here this new generation of animators are taking that on board, and they're working in an observational style too. They're trying to draw from real life experience, trying to deal with the social issues and social concerns of the period. What they're bringing to that party though, obviously, is the language of animation itself, and in many senses able to make those observational documentaries distinctive by virtue of the use of that language, by as it were being able to depict interior states, by being able to show us emotional ideas.

Footage from Jonathan Hodgson's Camouflage.

Narrator: Camouflage by Jonathan Hodgson built on the memory of his mother's schizophrenia.

Jonathan Hodgson: I didn't want to just use my own point of view for this film, because partly, you know, I wanted to open it out and not just talk about me and my mum. So I interviewed quite a few people who'd had a similar experience to me. It would've been pointless in a way to have got an actor to re-read that stuff, because it's real emotion, you know, it's things being said for the first time, and incredibly honest, brave statements.

Narrator: Channel 4 not only invested in animation that observed life using documentary devices, it also commissioned animators like David Anderson to create imagined worlds where the mood was dark and surreal. Deadsy was ambitious, both in its technique and in the complexity of the message.

Footage from David Anderson's Deadsy.

David Anderson: It reflected that concern of nuclear threat that was lurking in in the background, but I think it was also part of the desire to rip open the sort of underbelly of society, that there was a certain amount of thing not being what they seemed, I think, at that point. It was looking at male sexuality and those issues. It was another slant on the business of warmongering. And it was really to stimulate people and get them thinking from another perspective about those things.

Paul Wells: The central figure is half man, half woman, changes gender halfway through perhaps. There's a strong sense in which that figure is also part of some sort of apocalyptic world that's in utter flux and not quite comprehensible. And animation of course had got the language to apprehend all of that.

Narrator: The defining element of Deadsy was a language for his world, invented and narrated by writer Russell Hoban.

Footage of Russell Hoban typing Deadsy's script.

Paul Wells: He used a very corrupted language, a corrupted language that we half understand, half engage with, but also half can't quite comprehend. And this is really the spirit of nightmare, this is Deadtime Stories for Big Folk.

Narrator: Into the nineties, animation for 'big folk' became ever more provocative in the universe created by Phil Mulloy. To give his animation directness Mulloy went back to basics.

Phil Mulloy draws one of his cowboy characters.

Phil Mulloy: I made a decision, okay, I'm just going to use a brush with ink, and I'm going to use it on A4 paper, and the reason is so that all the materials I'm using are dirt cheap. I dodn't want it to be about "look how good my animation is".

Footage from Phil Mulloy's Cowboys.

Narrator: In his series of shorts Mulloy deliberately played around with the iconography of classic cowboy films like High Noon to fuel his satire.

Phil Mulloy: You're accessing this kind of language, all these films that people already have in their heads, which they're running when they watch any other film, which they're comparing it with. The other aspect is I wanted to do with it... a kind of maleness, which cowboy films are associated with. And I suppose that I wanted to in some way poke fun at that.

Clare Kitson: What i think is marvelous about all of Phil's work is that it's terribly moral. I mean, Cowboys could've been done in the manner of Aesop's Fables, you know, and nobody would have watched them, but they're all fantastically moral about - you mustn't be greedy, you mustn't, you know, do all these awful things. And of course in certain respects they're rude, they're direct, you know, you can't miss the point of Phil's films because he sort of hits you over the head with it.

Narrator: Cowboys took adult animation to a whole new place in its treatment of the tricky world of male sexuality.

Phil Mulloy: For me, it's not about the degradation of the female, primarily. It's about males using their sexuality to gain status and power over other males and in the process degrading women. You know, who's the alpha male, who's got the biggest prick in the room. It's, I mean essentially it's men boasting in a pub, you know. They're boasting about how they have sex, you know, and this is what they do. And in the end they run off and fuck horses.

Narrator: When Cowboys was transmitted it was late-night viewing on Channel 4. By the end of the nineties animation of this kind could only be found in the margins of the schedule. Funding continued, but the channel's dedicated animation unit was closed.

Clare Kitson: Perhaps what we were doing was a little bit kind of artificial anyway. You know ,the fact that it resulted from the remit and from just a freak of fate that there was a lot of money coming in from the advertising. Maybe, you know, there isn't really too much of a future in the short films; I mean, I think the future is in series.

Narrator: By now, the success of American series like The Simpsons had shown TV executives how animation could be subversive, and popular, and get ratings and critical acclaim in am ore competitive multi-channel environment. One by one the channels began to invest in home-grown animated series. In 2001 ITV commissioned 2DTV to put satire back into its schedule.

Giles Pilbrow: one of the great things when we started was that there were some great international characters - Bush, obviously, he's easy to be funny about, he's a walking joke himself, you don't need to put much of a spin on him, he's a cartoon character before we even begin.

Footage from 2DTV.

Narrator: 2DTV was deliberately pitched at a mainstream audience.

Giles Pilbrow: We're a very accessible show and we want to have all the characters that everyone sees every day and people love having a pop at celebrities. There's this, you know, obsessive celebrity culture nowadays - Heat magazine, Zoo, Nuts, all these magazines that just totally live around celebrity. And so, yeah, I think a big percentage of the show does cover that. But there are some... there's a nice crossover with celebrity and politics nowadays.

Narrator: On BBC 2 the success of new wave comedy like The Office, League of Gentlemen and Alan Partridge encouraged the idea that animation could also be used to break new ground.

Paul Wells: These kind of satiric works kind of link across again to the possibilities for animation, and of course this has prompted, you know, sort of Monkey Dust, and I Am Not an Animal, for example, and these are kind of animated versions, really, of that kind of social caricature that's being carried out in British comedy.

Footage from I Am Not an Animal.

Narrator: In I Am Not an Animal, comedy star Steve Coogan featured in the wild story of animals on the run from their science lab hell. Then, a new digital channel emerged, with an ambition to commission animation. In 2002, Monkey Dust first appeared on BBC Three.

Footage from Monkey Dust.

Harry Thomson: It was saying that, you know, maybe it'd be fun to actually attack the construct of groovy Britain, of Cool Britannia, the whole idea that everything's perfect and amazing and everyone's having a great time under New Labour and nothing's wrong, and there's no misery and there's no poverty and there's no... you know, we aren't going off and invading other countries. So it was just to do the underneath of that shin world that we keep getting fed. I wanted it to be sombre, and I wanted it to be slightly morose, but at the same time I wanted it to be really beautiful. i didn't want it to be just... I didn't want it to be ugly at all. So although a lot of the things that happen might be a little bit ugly or might be a little bit shocking, I wanted it to look really, really nice. And that was the brief, always go to the animators, is "can you make it look great?" you know, "really want it to look lovely."

Narrator: Monkey Dust is now on its fourth series. Its young animators keep the questioning, subversive spirit of British animation alive. They engage with and observe the world like the art school generation of the eighties, and their work links today with the questioning animation which began to emerge so colourfully four decades ago with Yellow Submarine.

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Animation Nation: Something to Say part 1

Here's the third part of my transcript of the 2005 BBC4 series Animation Nation. The series' second episode discusses the more experimental side of British animation; the first half, covered in this transcript, focuses mainly on works from the sixties and seventies.

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Footage from the premiere of Yellow Submarine, followed by footage from the film itself.

Narrator: London, July 1968, and the premiere of the latest film from the most famous band in the world. But adoring fans, expecting another madcap adventure with the fab four, were in for a surprise. Yellow Submarine didn't feature real life Beatles but cartoon versions of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Nothing quite like this had been seen before in a British animation film. Yellow Submarine was colourful, bursting with energy and invention: it signalled a new way forward for British animation. After Yellow Submarine came a time when animators could free their minds, take risks.

Gerald Scarfe: I satirised everything I could, and I had Mickey Mouse on drugs, oh horror of horrors! I mean, that was something you just didn't do.

Footage from Candy Guard's series Pond Life.

Narrator: Animators could turn to comedy to ask questions of the world.

Candy Guard: I just want to make people laugh. But not by being silly, but by being truthful.

Narrator: Animators could turn your world upside down.

Terry Gilliam: Whatever we were doing was trying to shock people into waking up and looking at the world in a different way. I mean, if it's subversive, it's subversive in trying to change people's perspective of what the world is.

Narrator: This is the story of how British animation got bite, when British animators began to make films with vision, and films with something to say.

Behind-the-scenes images from the making of Yellow Submarine.

Narrator: Yellow Submarine was based on twelve songs the Beatles had been recording during the explosion of psychedelia in 1967. The film took eleven months of frantic activity, a team of nearly 200 animators working night and day in the Soho studios of company TV Cartoons. The overall director of Yellow Submarine was Canadian George Dunning, who impressed on those joining the project what was expected of them to capture the spirit of the film.

Bob Godfrey: He said, "oh, Bob, have you ever taken LSD?" And I said "Oh, God, no, George, nothing stronger than aspirin really, no" he said "oh, that's a pity, because the whole film is a psychedelic trip".

Narrator: From the beginning, Yellow Submarine was unusual: An animated film aimed at grown ups, not children.

John Coates: We wanted to do something that would be appreciated, not by kiddies, young kids, but right across the board, which meant that a lot of the humour and things in the script are fairly adult.

Narrator: The film was a challenge to established animators used to a more disciplined working environment.

Bob Godfrey: I said "where's the storyboard, where's the script" he says "there's no storyboard, there's no script", and I said "well, I see. So what do you want me to do - what do you want me to do, what do we do?" he said "well, you come in, and you tell me jokes." And I knew he didn't like jokes very much, so I said "okay". I got a joke into the Sea of Monsters, there was this terrible monster, and so I had the submarine fire a cigar like a torpedo into this monster's mouth, and then I had the submarine's sort of conning tower sort of open up and became a cigarette lighter, and lit the cigar which the monster puffed at and then it exploded.

Footage from Yellow Submarine.

Narrator: It was to graphic artist Heinz Edelmann that Dunning turned to for the look of Yellow Submarine, the vivid and colourful designs which set its psychedelic style.

Terry Gilliam: To me, that was the sixties, late sixties - it was this brilliant colour, and again it was very great on distorting and being surreal, the way he pushed characters... his artwork I just adored. The thing I like most about Yellow Submarine is just his designs.

Narrator: Director George Dunning was interested in experiment. He wanted all his animators to take risks - to be quirky and surreal.

Jimmy Murakami: He instructed all the animators on how to become filmmakers. He was never happy to get footage from animators that was just safe and workable, he wanted to get something different, exciting.

Gillian Lacey: I was very young and it was my first job there, but it felt so different. You know, I hadn't a great love for traditional cartoon or American features - Disney, at that time, particularly .

Footage from Yellow Submarine's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds sequence.

Narrator: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds pushed the film's experimentation to the limit. It used an animation technique called rotoscoping, tracing live action images taken from old movies, but then overlayed these with brushstrokes to make the sequence more stylised and surreal.

Gillian Lacey: Don't know what it's about! Dare I say what it's about? But Bill Sewell designed that and it was very free-flowing, I mean it was based on live action sequences, paint was all over the place, so for me it was a quite druggy kind of experience, you know.

John Coates: Everybody sat up and said "hey, we don't have to imitate Disney any longer". I'm not knocking Disney 'cause their films were lovely, but we don't have to feel we're tied down to doing imitations of that, we can go off and do anything we like.

Narrator: Yellow Submarine reflected a message of peace and understanding which looked back to the 1967 summer of love. But by 1968, the mood had changed.

Robert Hewison: to be inn London in 1968 was really rather strange, because on one hand you could go down King's Road and there were all the dollybirds and the miniskirts and there was a lot of fun and affluence and you could go down the clubs. Everybody was having a good time. But at the same time suddenly you'd hear somewhere to your left or right you'd here "Out, out, out!" and suddenly there'd be a demonstration.

Narrator: In 1968 the atmosphere on the streets was harder-edged, more political and found its focus in the protests against the Vietnam war. One film picked up on the sense of unease the war had generated; this was a bold collaboration between an animator and a film director: The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Footage from The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Robert Hewison: It picks up on a contemporary issue, but filters it through a Victorian issue. The Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean war was a complete cock-up, and basically what they're trying to say in the film is that the people in charge of us don't know what they're doing.

Narrator: To reinforce the anti-establishment, anti-war message of his film, director Tony Richardson wanted animated inserts to punctuate live action sequences. So he turned to animation director Richard Williams.

Richard Williams: It was a metaphor for the Vietnam situation, like today, winding everybody up for a war - England was the policeman of the world, as America now is, and it was just getting everyone ready to be cannonfodder, you know, and to attack the dreadful Russians. And the terrible fear, fear, fear of the Russians, you know, the Russians are coming!

Narrator: The fine detail of the animation meant that Williams' reputation for perfectionism was well-tested.

Richard Williams: It was terrifying, and thrilling, and he stood right by us. And whenever we delivered something good he'd send over champagne, we'd all get drunk and fall on the floor and start again, you know. I have to say it's probably the best job I ever got offered. I had a tiny little unit, about five of us, and we worked ourselves crazy, and we went three or four days at a time, working all day and all night and collapsing, doing all this crosshatching.

Narrator: Using a graphic style and images from the 1850s, but infusing it with the spirit of 1968 created a powerful satire about empire and Britain's role in the world. But despite their quality and invention, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Yellow Submarine failed to make the kind of money which had movie moguls clamouring for more. So the animation houses of London waited in vain for the next big animation gig. But, in a lean period, Bob Godfrey's studio on Wardour Street could be relied on as a source of work.

Bob Godfrey: The animators about that time were coming into my studio from being laid off by Yellow Submarine, you know, because Yellow Submarine was finished and at the end of each feature people get laid off and they'd come round to me and I'd give them work, you know, because they were good.

Footage of Bob Godfrey working in his studio.

Narrator: Godfrey's reputation also attracted those looking for their first break.

Terry Gilliam: When I got to London, somehow his name kept popping up, and I was running around with my portfolio trying to get work, and I went to Bob's studio because people said this was an exiting place to be.

Narrator: Although Terry Gilliam never got a job with Bob, he had a profound respect for his sense of mischief.

Terry Gilliam: It was such a life spirit there, and a joy being crude and childish sometimes - especially when he got into his sex stuff, he just couldn't wait to show tits and bums!

Footage from Kama Sutra Rides Again.

Narrator: Taking advantage of a more liberal climate of censorship, Godfrey made Kama Sutra Rides Again: one man's search for sexual health and efficiency.

Bob Godfrey: He as like, er... screwing for Britain, you know! He was an enthusiast, his wife just went, you know, like wives, "oh, here he goes again, its his hobby".

Terry Gilliam illustrates naughtiness.

Terry Gilliam: It was a very British kind of thing - naughtiness, I think that's what it's about. It's like the postcards at the beach, they're naughty, and Bob just pushed it a little bit further.

Bob Godfrey: I gave each animator a sort of sexual position, you know. "You will do the, er, the hammock, you'll do the hammock" "Oh, thanks!" "An you will do something else, you know, the bicycle"

Bob Godfrey: We were kind of satirising the permissive society, I suppose, really. That's what we were doing.

Narrator: Kama Sutra was a hit on the adult film club circuit, but had limited distribution in the cinema. In the early seventies it was a new television show which brought an animated kind of subversion to a mass audience, and gave Terry Gilliam his big break. Gilliam's cutout animation from Monty Python, with its bizarre juxtaposition of familiar images, had a vital role in this surreal form of comedy. The animation's visual humour broadened the Pythons' appeal.

Terry Gilliam: I keep hearing this as a I get older and people come out of the woodwork and say "John wasn't really funny, Mike was a bit boring, Terry was over the top, but your animations - that's why I watched the show."

Narrator: As Gilliam demonstrated on Bob Godfrey's very own TV show, his own style of cutting and assembling images was simple but effective.

Terry Gilliam: Sometimes I really felt the technique was dictating the material I was doing. By staying within those limited parameters it forced me to deal with certain things in certain ways, and I guess the violence came out - 'cause crude actions, boom! Do that - you couldn't do beautiful, articulated flying creatures that wafted around the place and were incredibly beautiful, they were just simple, they went DUM DUM DUM, BANG!

Bob Godfrey: Terry's work used to link the other things, and I thought it fitted in terribly well, because it was surrealist, and a lot of their sketches were surrealist.

Footage from Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Terry Gilliam: I was torn in some ways 'cause I love these paintings, I love them just for being beautiful paintings. But just because it's beautiful and wonderful and classical and done by a great artist doesn't mean I can't fuck it up. We did that, the Michelangelo one during the age with Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, these were the great censors that were out there trying to stamp out all the indecency in television in particular and there was something about - you know, you take a classic statue like Michelangelo's David, everybody's seen it and it's nude. So, well, I put a fig leaf on it. Finally, it's pulled off and it's Lord Longford's face rather than Michelangelo's genitals.




Terry Gilliam: It was very juvenile, what we were doing, basically. If there was somebody who was in a position of authority, somebody who was pompous, something that was hypocritical, you go for it because they need to be attacked all the time, because the world sort of aspires to pomposity and seriousness, and if you can undermine it you're doing, I think, some important work.




Robert Hewison: Suddenly, there it was in your living room. Suddenly, the kind of surrealism of the Pythons was part of a mass medium, and of course it changed the way people acted, it changed the way people spoke, it changed the way people thought about the previous hierarchical world of deference and authority.

Narrator: If Python and Terry Gilliam's animation mocked authority, then in the hands of political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe it became a more savage weapon of satire with a darker portrayal of the world. In 1973, Scarfe decided to turn to animation to record a trip to America. He used the medium to satirise the sacred idols of American power and culture.

Footage from Long Drawn-Out Trip. More stills here.

Gerald Scarfe: In the 1970s film A Long Drawn Out Trip there was very much an effort to satirise America. I mean, I love America, and when I was growing up in the fifties in England everything exciting and fantastic was in America - Elvis Presley movies, automobile cars and so forth, but when I went there since I was known as a satirist in this country, I knew that that's what they wanted from me, and yes, I satirised everything I could, and I had Mickey Mouse on drugs, oh horror of horrors! I mean, that was something you just didn't do.

Narrator: Long Drawn-Out Trip attracted the attention of Pink Floyd, who invited Scarfe to provide animation for a new musical project they were planning: The Wall. Rock star patronage gave Scarfe the freedom to produce a series of iconic images which defined an era as the seventies collapsed into the eighties.

Footage from The Wall.

Gerald Scarfe: I think when I was working on the images in The Wall there was a political purpose there behind them. It wasn't really specifically against any government or any personalities in particular, but it was against The System, a system. I was an asthmatic child and therefore missed a lot of my education, and at what schools I went to I was always behind, and I was always scared of the teacher, and I kind of had this feeling that I was being shoved through some kind of mincing machine, through some sort of system. And being made to come out the other end, not exactly cannon fodder, but some kind of fodder. The Wall itself is about the way we all build up walls within ourselves, to stop our vulnerability being damaged. Anyone can get in, past and get to you and upset you, you build up a kind of defence against them and that's the wall. When I had to think up something for the forces of oppression, I tried to think of something unyielding, something unforgiving, something thoughtless and something that was blind to any kind of feeling . After a while, the image of the hammer became so obvious to me.

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