Thalma Goldman-Cohen to become subject of book

I first came across the animation of Thalma Goldman-Cohen while researching for this post, but I still know very little about her. I know that she made a few shorts in the seventies entitled Green Man Yellow Woman, Amateur Night, Night Call and Stanley, the last of which is available online here, but beyond that I found out very little.

So I am pleased to announce that a book about her life and work is underway. Edited by her personal friends Richard Hallam and Sylvie Venet-Tupy, Thalma: An Artist's Life will hopefully bring more attention to this oft-neglected animator.

If you want to help the project to get off the ground, please pay a visit to the book's Sponsume page where you can make a donation towards printing costs.

From the page:

Thalma produced her award-winning animation films in the 1970s and 80s and showed them in festivals at Annecy, Melbourne, Cambridge, Berlin, Ottawa, and Lucca. Her film Stanley (1979) was described as “Just about the most erotic thing I have seen on  television” (Sunday Times, 17 February 1980) but the Monthly Film Bulletin (1977, 44, no 513) described Amateur Night (1975), an earlier film, as ‘misogynistic’ and ‘sadly devoid of both grace and charm’. Look at the first clip on our video and decide for yourself. Some films were featured on Channel Four television, which was actively promoting animated films at the time.

Thalma came to London in the late 1960s and studied at St Martin’s School of Art and the London Film School. Animation was then a cottage industry despite some notable successes such as Yellow Submarine. Animators had to draw and colour each cel separately, each one an artwork in itself. Thalma became friendly with outstanding exponents of the medium such as Bob Godfrey, Alison de Vere and Bill Sewell. Her work evokes admiration and shock in equal measure.

Thalma has continued to draw and paint in a style that is unmistakably her own. Her subjects are often the friends she knows or the people she meets in her local area of North London, in pubs and betting shops. It is time for her work to be celebrated and this high quality full colour retrospective of her work aims to give her the full credit it deserves. Her long-standing friends will be editing the book – Richard and Sylvie. The book will draw upon the reminiscences and insights of Thalma’s collaborators, who were part of this exciting period of experimentation in the arts.

WHAT WILL BE IN THE BOOK?
We are using a specialist arts printer to produce a full colour, illustrated book with at least 40 images of some of her original cels and examples of recent paintings and drawings. The more money we collect, the more images we can reproduce. There will be commentary from many of her collaborators and from others who know her work well. Tributes of this kind are not commercial undertakings but we aim to cover the costs of production. We hope that it will enable Thalma’s art to be more widely and deservedly known.

WAYS YOU CAN HELP
If you are unable to donate money (see opposite) you can still help us out by spreading the word: please tell your friends, email or tweet the link to Sponsume to anyone who might be interested.

Thanks. Richard and Sylvie

Metal cartoon figures,1920-1954

I recently came across a copy of The Great Book of Hollow-Cast Figures by Norman Joplin. As the book focuses on British manufacturers, it gives us an idea of which cartoon, comic and puppet characters were popular enough to be merchandised in the UK during the first half of the twentieth century.

A set of 1932 figures based on the comic strip Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys. Manufactured by Kew.

1951 Sacul versions of Bill and Ben, complete with Little Weed and two terracotta pots.

More 1951 Sacul figures: Rag, Tag & Bobtail; Hank; Billy Bean; Andy Pandy, Looby Loo & Teddy; and Muffin the Mule.

The Bumblies, from 1951. Manufactured by H R Products.

1952 Luntoy figures of various puppet characters, complete with television-themed packaging.

More Luntoy products from 1952: Rag, Tag and Bobtail; Billy Bean; two versions of Hank (the second is actually a unique model made using a prototype mould); Andy Pandy and a Flowerpot Man.

1953 Luntoy puppets of Sooty and Mr. Turnip - the series also included a Flowerpot Man.

1953 figures of the Muffin the Mule and co-stars Peter the Dog, Peregrin the Penguin and Louise the Lamb, manufactured by Argosy.

A selection of prewar figures. In order, we have five versions of Felix the Cat; Dismal Desmond; Bonzo; Pip, Squeak and Wilfred; two penguins, which are probably Pip's Aunt Penny; two variant Squeaks and a variant Wilfred; four Winnie-the-Pooh characters (the set also included Christopher Robin, not pictured); Old Mother Hubbard; the cat and the fiddle; and finally, more versions of Squeak and Wilfred. The book attributes all of these figures, with varying degrees of certainty, to the related manufacturers Pixyland and Kew.

Finally, a selection of figures depicting American characters: a 1935 Felix, a 1937 Buck Rogers set and two 1939 Disney sets, all made by the illustrious Britains; 3 Little Pigs, made by Exella circa 1930; 1951 figures of Peter Pan and Captain Hook, by Sacul; and finally, a set of five superheroes manufactured by Timpo in 1954 (Captain Marvel and his two sidekicks, someone apparently called Icky, and Captain Midnight).

Laura Heit's Animation Sketchbooks

 

Thames & Hudson sent me a copy of their new book Animation Sketchbooks, edited by Laura Heit. The book collects samples from the sketchbooks of over fifty international animators, eight of whom hail from the United Kingdom: Luis Cook, Suzanne Deakin, Jonathan Hodgson, Stephen Irwin, Osbert Parker, David Shrigley, Paul Vester and Run Wrake.

Some of the work is familiar. All of Jonathan Hodgson's sketches are related to Wonderland: The Trouble with Love and Sex, so anyone who has seen that documentary will recognise some characters; Stephen Irwin's chapter, meanwhile, focuses on his storyboards and layout ideas for Horse Glue and The Black Dog's Progress, allowing us to see those films formulated in front of us. Run Wrake's sketchbook pieces could easily be mistaken for frames from his films, with chunky marker drawings overlapping with collages of found images.

At the other end of the scale we have Paul Vester's section. I am familiar with Vester's work primarily through his homage to classic Hollywood animation Sunbeam and the offbeat but still broadly traditional Abductees. His sketches turn out to be remarkably loose, with even Sunbeam represented by a simple, abstract image.

The artists all have their own individual methods of keeping their sketches together. Suzanne Deakin contributes a few pages consisting primarily of quick thumbnail character studies, while David Shrigley's artwork is resolutely minimalist, the little square and circle people of New Friends being the dominant motif. Osbert Parker turns stills from fifties crime films into photocollages, creating the aesthetic which fed into his noir shorts such as Yours Truly. Luis Cook keeps his sketches on densely-packed pages alongside rows of scrawled-out notes ("give a better sense of gritty realism") and a few oddities which clearly have stories behind them, such as a neat table of various Aardman directors' fingerprints.

Hopefully I don't seem provincial in focusing on the British artists showcased in this book. I do so simply because UK animation is the focus of this blog; the real joy of reading Animated Sketchbooks is sampling the wealth of work from around the world, from the striking woodblock-like art of Simone Massi and Regina Pessoa to J J Villard's primary coloured felt-tip renditions of H.R. Pufnstuf, Leatherface and other pop culture figures.

With more than three hundred pages of art by its raft of contributors, Animated Sketchbooks is a welcome look at the creative process behind contemporary animation.

Raymond Durgnat on British animation in 1970

Books on the history of British cinema often overlook animation. Raymond Durgnat's seminal 1970 volume A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence is a key exception; after briefly touching upon Animal Farm and namechecking Dustbin Parade and Richard Williams during the course of the book he dedicates his final sub-chapter to the subject of animation in Britain.

He begins this overview by returning to Halas & Batchelor, specifically The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra (which he credits with "spiritedly solving the problem which gave every Hollywood cartoon unit, from Disney to U.P.A., such difficulty; how to reconcile emphatic laugh gags with smartish post-Disney graphics") and Automania 2000.

The Rise and Fall of Emily Sprod. More stills here.

Durgnat then goes on to cover George Dunning's short films The Wardrobe, The Flying Man and The Apple, describing them as being "as near American wryness as any English tone", before going on to analyse the films of Bob Godfrey.

In a typical example of his characteristic writing style Durgnat describes The Do-It-Yourself Cartoon Kit as "a prestidigitous jingle-jumble of iconographies, from Goonish to Gothic, by way of empire-builders' emblems, admen's knickknacks, cultural doodads and assorted oojamaflips" before going on to make some very intriguing comments on the animator's potential future. Although Godfrey is now firmly associated with bawdy knockabout, Durgnat had something quite different in mind after discussing the proto-Gilliam visual style of The Rise and Fall of Emily Sprod:

The Rise and Fall of Emily Sprod... suggests that Godfrey might develop towards cartoons which are only incidentally humorous, and, primarily, dream-like, satirical, or even macabre, along the lines of the Polish school. For the Poles share the British ambivalence towards the past...

He then moves on to Richard Williams's Love Me, Love Me, Love Me and The Little Island. Of the former he has this to say:

If fratricidal strife, and ironies of cool and rage, are the covert theme of Tom and Jerry and the American cartoons, the corresponding English theme is a derisive nostalgia — not always the same thing as satire. Richard Williams's Love Me, Love Me, Love Me is a sharp send-up of British mediocrity as being self-protective masochism... all in all this cartoon is almost a classic crystallisation of the British character as Tex Avery's The Cat That Hated People of the American.

A Short Vision.

Finally, Durgnat concludes his book with a brief overview of Peter and Joan Foldes' Animated Genesis and A Short Vision:

The latter film, inspired by the irritatingly righteous, albeit naggingly plausible, spirit of C.N.D. insists, with its strong sculptural visuals, pointedly reminiscent of Henry Moore's wartime sketches of Londoners sleeping safely in tube shelters during the blitz, in making us feel, in skin and sinew, the unleashing of an atomic device that melts the bone under the face and snuffs the last spark of life from a blackened, superfluous, and shameful planet. The cartoon film, too, can be a moral sledgehammer.

 One of Henry Moore's sketch Pink and Green Sleepers.

Arthur Melbourne-Cooper and the Matches Appeal dispute

Matches Appeal

A short while ago I wrote my first post for the Norwich Film Festival's blog, focusing on Arthur Melbourne-Cooper and the dispute over whether Matches Appeal and his other animated matchstick shorts were made in 1899 and 1915. I picked Cooper as a subject because the information about him available online is somewhat scanty - and contentious too, as this anonymous edit to his Wikipedia article demonstrates.

Arthur Melbourne-Cooper's A Dream of Toyland, which can be viewed online here.

The single best source for information on Arthur Melbourne-Cooper is Tjitte de Vries and Ati Mull’s 2009 book They Thought it was a Marvel. This is one of the most remarkable books on animation I've read: the authors succeeded in penning a volume of over five hundred pages on a man whose combined extant filmography clocks in at under half an hour. This is a testament both to the scholarship of de Vries and Mull and to the genius of Melbourne-Cooper, whose films are still able to charm and fascinate today.

Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance by Barry Purves

Barry Purves' 2008 book Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance is not exactly a beginner's how-to guide. Those looking for help with choosing a camera or building an armature should start with Aardman's Cracking Animation, or something similar.

If anything, the book is an autobiography, albeit one written for an audience of apprentices. Although not necessarily following chronological order Purves recounts his whole career - his childhood influences, his early days at Cosgrove-Hall, his string of famously lavish puppet shorts, his work in theatre, and his recent work on Rupert the Bear.

Anyone who has watched Purves' films will have noticed his interest in theatre: Shakespeare in Next, Japanese theatre in Screen Play, Greek tragedy in Achilles, classical opera in Rigoletto and comic opera in Gilbert and Sullivan: The Very Models. Throughout the book Purves draws on a wide knowledge of performance art, which informs his views on the craft of animation. His account of animation's history begins not with flipbooks and zoetropes, but with conjuring tricks and early stage effects such as Pepper's ghost, leading - naturally - into the work of magician-turned-filmmaker Georges Méliès. There is a tremendous amount of anecdotal material derived from Purves' work in stage drama, and this unique viewpoint - a focus on the common ground shared by animation and theatre - becomes a key theme of the book.

"I want to burst the bubble that separates animation from the other arts", writes Purves in a chapter entitled "Widening the Scope". "My eureka moment was the Royal Shakespeare Company's nine-hour Nicholas Nickleby in 1980. Seeing this, I became aware of great direction, great storytelling, and the unrivalled thrill of the relationship between audience and cast." He goes on to say:

Spectacle can become animated wallpaper, but with a single actor in front of you, you are rewardingly forced to join in and concentrate. By totally throwing the emphasis onto the puppets I've tried similarly to break down the barrier between performer and audience, even if I cannot help throwing in some telling visuals. I strive to make a moment that matches the sheer emotion of Smike's death [in Nicholas Nickleby], or the finale of Swan Lake.

Purves is not the only contributor. Question-and-answer sections are included at various points, featuring feedback from a roster of several dozen worldwide animators; David Sproxton and the late Mark Hall amongst them.

In an example of necessity acting as the mother of invention, one of the book's most charmingly idiosyncratic touches appears to have arisen due to copyright reasons: Purves includes few stills from other directors' films, and instead provides specially-made illustrations of various well-known puppets by a team of illustrators. Early on in the book, rendered in coloured pencil by Saemi Takahashi, there is a group shot depicting Jack Skellington, Gromit, Cheburashka, Domo-kun, Pingu, the Good Soldier Schweik and some characters with whom I'm not familiar.

Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance will be of interest not only to stop-motion animators and to anyone who admires Barry Purves' films. But perhaps its biggest contribution to animation discourse is the relocation of animation theory from the context of filmmaking to the world of performance art.

Cracking Animation

First published in 1998, Peter Lord and Brian Sibley's Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation (known in America under the boring title of Creating 3-D Animation) has entrenched itself as a standard text on the subject of stop motion.

After a foreword by Nick Park and an introduction by Peter Lord, the book provides a history of stop-motion, starting with the predecessors of film animation - Muybridge photographs, zoetropes and so forth - before discussing model animation pioneers such as Arthur Melbourne Cooper and Ladislaw Starewich and their successors, amongst them George Pal, Ray Harryhausen, Alexander Ptushko, the Brothers Quay, Jiri Trnka, Jan Svankmajer, Postgate and Firmin, Henry Selick, Art Clokey and others, making for a concise and informative introduction to the medium.

The remainder of the book is an engaging mixture of how-to manual and behind-the-scenes book. Aardman's technical approaches are described at length in a manner clearly intended for people who want to animate themselves. The studio's model characters are shown being constructed from the armature up with advice on how to construct your own ("This Gromit consists basically of a ball-and-socket armature and a body made of fast-cast resin. Plastazote could also be used for the core of the body, which needs to be hard enough to be drilled for fixing the puppet's limbs to it"). Advice is also given on makes of camera, lighting techniques and so forth, and the book also gives introductions to blue-screen photography, the substitution method employed by George Pal. Alongside this are straightforward walkthroughs for such parts of animation production as lip-syncing and storyboarding.

Gromit construction.

All of this is illustrated with nearly five hundred illustrations covering everything from Wallace and Gromit to lesser-known Aardman productions such as TV adverts and early short films, ensuring that the book has value for Aardman fans with no plans to construct armatures for themselves themselves.

Inevitably, Cracking Animation soon began to date: two years after its publication the studio broke into the world of feature films, an area largely ignored by the book; meanwhile, the rise of computer animation led to a world where "3-D animation" took on a rather different meaning. And so, in 2004 the book was revised to include a lengthy section on the making of Chicken Run, coverage of CGI and Aardman's works in that area, an account of the making of the pixilated web series Angry Kid, a brief section on the Creature Comforts series and short bits on Flash animation and computer games. And now, in 2010, another revised edition - twenty-odd pages longer than the 2004 version, and fifty or so longer than the original - has been released.

Naturally, the newer Aardman productions are covered: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, A Matter of Life and Death, Shaun the Sheep and Timmy Time are all present and correct, as is Luis Cook's award-sweeping The Pearce Sisters, each earning 2-4 pages. Some of the studio's more recent advertising work is also included.

The 2004 edition's slightly vague "new directions for animators" has grown into a more solid section on web-based Flash animation and online games. Although perhaps a little out-of-place in a book on 3-D animation, these are still good introductions to the subjects and also welcome spotlights on an area of Aardman's work that tends to be overlooked in favour of the studio's trademark stop-motion.

A few new pages have been added to the stop-motion history chapter since the first edition; these focus mainly on Aardman's own productions, missing the opportunity to cover the likes of Fantastic Mr. Fox and Madame Tutli-Putli. A potted history of CGI is included but is, unfortunately, in places garbled and inaccurate and seems to have been a bit of rushed job, not up to the standards of the rest of the book.

The making of a Robinson's squash advert: included in the 2004 edition but since removed.

But if there is any reason to be disappointed with the new edition, it is the removal of material. The overhaul of the 2004 edition's sections on CGI and Flash means that the behind-the-scenes looks at Big Jeff and a couple of CGI adverts are nowhere to be found in the latest edition. True, these are not amongst Aardman's flagship productions, but the development work was still interesting to see.

This aside, it's good to see an already strong book periodically improving itself. Anyone who wants an introduction to the history of stop motion in general and Aardman in particular should give it a look.

Art and Animation: the Animate! scheme

In 1999 Channel 4 put out a booklet on the history of experimental animation made throughout the world. Here's a section dealing with the channel's "Animate!" (now "AnimateTV") scheme:

Animation is Fun by Sheila Graber

Hands-down the single sweetest how-to-animate book that I've come across has to be Sheila Graber's Animation is Fun, published in 1984. The entire book is illustrated with Graber's lovely cartoons, turning what could have been a dry checklist of technical specifications into something rather special.