Interview with Robert Morgan

With his heady mixtures of knockabout humour and outright nightmare, Robert Morgan is one of the most twisted animated filmmakers currently working in the UK - and probably the world. In this interview he discusses the background to his unique films.

---

LC: When did you first get into animation?

RM: I first got into animation at art college. I was painting and sculpting, but wanted to get into making films. I didn’t know how to go about writing a script or working with actors, so I decided to just start making my sculptures move around instead. That was basically how it started.

Bobby Yeah.

LC: Who are your main artistic influences?

RM: When I started out, I was mostly influenced by Francis Bacon, eighties horror films, Edgar Allan Poe, Jan Svankmajer, the Quay Brothers, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Joel Peter Witkin, Hans Bellmer. Loads more. But I think as you get older, a lot of those influences fall away and you tend to be less influenced by other artists because your own work sort of develops a life of its own.

 The Cat with Hands.

LC: Animation is not generally associated with horror, but your films have a following amongst horror enthusiasts - for example, FilmThreat ran an article describing The Cat With Hands as "mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to write a horror movie", and I also mentioned you in my article on British horror animation. Would you describe your works as horror films?

RM: I don’t really describe them in that way, but then again I try not to describe them at all if I can help it! I think it depends on how you define horror. Most people think of horror as a very narrow genre – like people getting killed by men in masks or zombies taking over the world or whatever. But I think it’s a lot more subtle and far-reaching than that. I don’t actively set out to make horror films, I just make the films I want to make. But I don’t mind if people think they’re horror films.

Bobby Yeah.

LC: Childhood is a recurring theme in your films - Monsters is about a literal child, while others such as Bobby Yeah have characters who behave like children. Would you say that you draw on childhood for inspiration?
 
RM: Not consciously (except for Monsters). But I think children perceive the world in a more interesting way than adults, because it’s all still new to them and so everything is imbued with possibilities. A blanket can be many different things to a kid – it can be a tent, a landscape, the ocean, a monster, anything, but to an adult it’s just a blanket. That’s a pretty basic skill for a stop-motion animator to have – to be able to transform objects, so I probably do try to think of things a bit like a kid and maybe it just comes out in the films.


LC: Is there any contemporary animation that you admire?

RM: Occasionally... Let me think… um... nothing comes to mind right now but I’m sure there’s some. Actually, It’s not very contemporary but I really like Hen, His Wife by Igor Kovalyov. I don’t like most stop-motion that I watch, ironically.

Separation.

LC: Do you have any current projects that you'd like to talk about?

RM: I’m in pre-production on a little three-minute film for Channel 4, called Invocation. It’s actually about an animator, who accidentally invokes a nasty, living doppelganger of the puppet he’s animating. Bad things ensue.


LC: Since you've worked in animation and live action, do you have any plans to branch out into other media?

RM: Well, I paint as well, which I'd like to do more of. I don't have a studio so I'm limited for space. I like music, too, but have never tried to make my own. Actually, that's a lie - I made a pop song with my wife once. My musician friend Mark and I want to make an album where we wear cowboy hats and drink whiskey and do music that makes drunks cry.


LC: Do you have any advice for aspiring animators?

RM: Don't know, really. Work hard? Eat your greens. Do it for love, not for money. Maybe a bit for money, but not too much. Be nice to people. Watch normal films, not just animation films, and older films too. Tune into your own channel and make what you love to watch. Persevere.

Interview with William Mather

This week it was my pleasure to interview William Mather, best known for helping to initiate the Animated Conversations series, which inspired Creature Comforts. In this interview he discusses some of his lesser-known work...

---

Puppets from William Mather's Magic Roundabout parody

LC: When did you first get in to animation?

WM: 1966, living next to a BBC producer, Colin Thomas, who saw some plasticine characters I’d made. He suggested we make a stop frame film for BBC Bristol. It was a skit on The Magic Roundabout using caricatures of Archbishop Ramsay, Malcolm Muggeridge and Bertrand Russell. After that we made a film called Pawns; this got me in touch with the design department at BBC Bristol where I started years of “short term contracts”. 1969 I was asked by the producer of a kids programme called Animal Magic to make a title sequence; after that animation requests kept coming until that’s all I was doing, but it was all accidental. I never set out to have a career in animation or indeed film.

Pawns

LC: According to Denis Gifford's book on British animation your first film to be shown in cinemas was a short called Classical Cartoon.

WM: Again, produced by Colin Thomas for BBC Bristol. It was shown for one week at the Arnolfini gallery cinema in Bristol to a “mixed” response.

The Animated Conversations pilot Audition, which can be viewed here.

LC: Can you tell us about the Animated Conversations series?

WM: Colin Thomas and I were at the 1968 Cambridge Animation Festival and saw a film by John Hubley, specifically Windy Day. We were blown away by the use of raw unpolished sound with a highly controlled medium like animation. Colin was a documentary maker at BBC Bristol; he put forward the idea of a series using secret/discrete recordings and Nancy Adele made a pilot film using a chef and a waiter. It failed to get approval but Colin tried once again with Choirboy using my son's audition. This succeeded and we went on to make a series using the animators Phil Austin, Derek Hayes, Andy Walker, Henry Lutman and Pete and Dave (Aardman).

Limo-Land, viewable here

LC: What was it like working with Aardman on the Limo-Land music video and the famous Scotch videotape advert with the singing skeleton?

WM: I think Scotch was possibly the first TV commercial Aardman did. It was a very free and relaxed production although Pete hated animating the large scale model. Limo-Land was tricky: “differences” between Tina and Barry meant they would not meet for filming, hence the need for animation. I scripted two ideas, Tina approved one and we started shooting. Apart from a last minute panic when someone insisted we insert a scene with Antonio Banderas, Wallace and Gromit, all went well. Tina loved it and used it as a mega backdrop for her live show. Barry’s lawyer saw it and immediately banned any showing. It was shown once on British TV then dumped. Later that year it picked up best direction and best animation awards.

Animation cel from 1980's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. The sequence can be viewed here

LC: Want to talk about The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle?

WM: Andy Walker and I had been working together on projects at BBC Bristol. He knew Phil Austin and Derek Hayes (Animation City) from their time together at Beaconsfield film school. They asked us to take on the band arriving at Heathrow and getting sacked to help share the work out. I’ve always done caricatures so I did the overall character designs for the Pistols. It was great fun.


LC: How did you come to make the move to computer graphics?

WM: Derek Hayes and Phil Austin recommended me to Andrew Berend at the Moving Picture Co., who was setting up the UK's first CGI system linked to motion control, and who was looking for a visual person not a programmer. I left the BBC and joined the dark side!

Victor Hugo, from 1973, can be viewed here

LC: Which of your projects would you say you have the fondest memories of?

WM: Animating my youngest son for his choirboy audition, Victor Hugo and The Digger, a weekly 20-second cut–out for BBC's Vision On.

Still from an episode of The Digger, which can be seen here

LC: The Animated Conversations series not only led to Creature Comforts, it also influenced the recent BBC documentary The Trouble with Love and Sex. Do you have any thoughts on that?

WM: I think although much of the animation got better, I regret that the films felt more scripted. Sound effects were added, and the original idea (eavesdropped, raw, minimally edited sound) got lost. We’re not now allowed to record people without their prior permission, an inconsistent mistake and another victim of fear of political correctness. Even when speech is unscripted, if people know they’re being recorded, they “clean up their act”. So all TV drifts towards processed entertainment U.S. style. When people are talking naturally, unscripted and unselfconsciously, set against animation I think is great.

The Trouble with Love and Sex felt like a sitcom. In the first series of Animated Conversations I discovered that the weirdest, most edgy and apparently visual soundtracks didn’t work. The problem was that all the “visual” work was done. The animator was left to either merely illustrate the soundtrack or out-do the imagery which produced a more mainstream effect.


LC: Any comments on the current state of animation?

WM: It’s impossible to overstate the impact of computers. In 1981 it took weeks to build a “wire-frame” high street and fly down it, or a glowing green grid to fly across. Now C.G.I. Rivals live action and if you can imagine it, you can create it relatively quickly. It’s brilliant but I’m glad to see there are still animators doing great things with simple drawing and whether it’s pencil, plasticine or Pixar, it’s still story and character that grabs a viewer.

Interview with Tony Johnson

Tony Johnson, director of the 1996 crime fantasy feature Fallen Angels and the Stonehouse Reunion series, kindly agreed to be interviewed about his life and work.

---

LC: How did you first get into animation?


TJ: I was tired of working in news graphics at ITN and read a book by Shamus Culhane called Animation: From Script to Screen. Love at first sight. I quit my job and set up an animation school in Cardiff based on the principal: You teach best what you most need to know.

Fallen Angels.

LC: How did you come to direct Fallen Angels?


TJ: Long story. I was trying to get a feature off the ground called Blackwater Rising; I met a producer called Jenny Barrett who liked the visuals but not the story. She asked me if I had any angel stories as her favourite film was It's A Wonderful Life, and I showed her a picture based on Paradise Lost. I made up a little story at the meeting about two of Satan's rebels trying to get home; it was a bit of a post-civil war western - soldiers from the losing side crossing battlefields and enemy territory on their way back to the South.

I took time out to make a documentary for S4C called Winnebago Blues about a journey across I-10 with my brother and ten friends; while I was editing in London I heard of a Japanese company called Fujisankei. I called the secretary who arranged a meeting with the Managing Director, the meeting went well but I didn't hear a word for two years.

Then I got a call from the blue and was invited to meet a lovely guy called Mister Ushikubo. They gave me a small amount of money to write the script, put together some visuals and I got my brother to record some demos; Fujisankei brought in another partner called ITEL (Now Granada) and gave me a budget of £240,000 to make the film. I got to produce and direct it because I was cheap.

Fallen Angels had mixed reviews; although I think some people missed the point I was proud of the achievement. It was the first British film commissioned at the development stage by a Japanese company and the first ever black British animated film. I thought the industry would be supportive of what we'd achieved on such a tight budget - no money for reshoots and a team of unemployed artists trained completely from scratch.


LC: What did you do between Fallen Angels and Stonehouse Reunion?


TJ: I spent the years after Fallen Angels working on other stories and sketches. A Welsh animation company optioned a project called The Island of the Dead and we were awarded £250,000 at the Cartoon Forum in Pottsdam; the development fizzled out after a couple of years so I left Cardiff and moved to London.

When Fallen Angels finished I span out a bit - my studio was robbed before I finished the film and I used the insurance money completing the last five minutes of ink and paint. A couple of months after the film was finished my company was bankrupt and I was homeless; I briefly shared a flat with a bunch of teenage villains called the Stonehouse crew. They used to go out every day and steal enough money each for a bottle of Stonehouse Cider and a bucket of mix; they all ended up in prison.

A friend paid my airfare to Oz, where I spent three months with some ten pound pom relatives. I then went to Beirut to teach for another three months at Notre Dame University.

The first of the Stonehouse Reunion films, which can be viewed online here.

LC: Can you tell us about the Stonehouse Reunion films? Some readers might be familiar with the first one, but may be unaware that it was actually the first in a series.


TJ: The first film was based on Shawshank Redemption. The storyboard, voices and music were recorded before I approached Channel 4; the first was financed by Channel 4 and another six were co produced with S4C. Three broadcast on TV and the others broadcast online. The second featured the voice of Howard Marks and was set in Woolangong.

They didn't turn out so good. Truth is my dad was sick and I only made them to help my mum pay the bills.

I didn't have a great relationship with the production company: as Shamus Culhane said, don't work with hacks.


LC: Who would you say your artistic influences are?


TJ: My biggest influences would have to be Don Martin and Will Eisner; I used to have a vintage Mad Magazine collection when I was a kid and used to spend all my time copying the artwork. I'm also a massive Stanley Spencer fan.

My animation is mostly inspired by Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane and Max Fleischer.


LC: Have you enjoyed any animation lately?


TJ: My favourite modern animated film would be Grave of the Fireflies by Takahata and my guilty pleasures would be Finding Nemo, Ratatouille and Boondocks.


LC: Any thoughts on your future?


TJ: My apparent lack of success is due to my own personal approach to my career: when I left college I was madly ambitious and as I grew up I realised there's more to life than money and success. I've probably turned down too many gigs for my own good and one mistake I made with Fallen Angels was turning a commission into a social experiment. I don't regret it though.

I haven't really had any dealings with the industry and I'm still surprised that nobody in the UK has managed to produce an independent feature length animation since Fallen Angels.

Interview with Ian Sachs

Another interview, and this time it's been my pleasure to speak to Ian Sachs, who has worked at such varied institutions as Halas & Batchelor, Bill Melendez's studio and FilmFair.

---

LC: How did you get into the animation industry?


IS: It was never my ambition to work in animation. I played football and wanted to play professionally; I was good and, I believe, would have made it at some level had I not been injured aged 18. I wouldn't have been a top star or anything like that but I was considered about third best in my position for my age so had experience with the England Youth team set-up but never got capped.

I had just left school, had my place at college (foundation art) lined up but my mum got tired of me lazying around the house during the summer holidays… after only two weeks! My dad [Peter Sachs], you obviously know about, but my mother also worked in animation and she was the head of the trace and paint department at Halas & Batchelor on the Jackson Five TV series. They needed a runner and she volunteered me.

I hated it.

All I did was punch paper and cel (registration holes for traditional animation in the paper and cels that matched the rostrum camera registration pegs, and carry boxes to and from the camera department.

About two weeks into the job my mother got flu and was off work for a week, she didn't have an assistant and because it was my mum I thought I'd help and stand in for her. No one asked me to and weirdly no one questioned it either and it all ran really well. So about week 6 just as I was preparing to leave to go to college the producer, Maurice Pooley, paid the studio a visit (we were an annexed studio from the main building) and I walked into my Mum's room as he was there talking to her, he asked how was I doing and I mumbled something like "OK, thanks". He then asked me who had taken over running the P&T department while my mum was ill and I said I had and he laughed and left.

I thought no more about it until I got summoned to the main building and offered a job beyond the series to be trained as a junior producer. it meant NOT going to college and as I didn't really want to be an artist and was just killing time, I chose money over college and stayed. I stayed there for about four years going from runner to junior producer on a thirty-minute film and worked on The Jackson Five, The Osmonds, The Addams Family, Butterfly Ball, some commercials and at the same time being assigned to different departments. That way I had a hands-on experience of most of the traditional animation departments. Later I was in the fortunate position of being the director of animation at FilmFair and was able to complete my education by sending myself to operate a rostrum camera and spent a lot of time in the edit suite and, much to the annoyance of the editor, continued my hands on approach to learn how to edit (still film in those days).

So I ended up being pretty much self-taught simply by being thrown into different departments.


LC: What was your next step?


IS: During those first few years at Halas and Batchelor I met Elphin Lloyd-Jones (if you have ever seen the Halas and Batchelor book Timing for Animation you will have seen a board for Noah and the ark - that was Elphin's work) Elphin decided to mentor me (I don't know why) and taught me about timing and a lot about directing. Later on he formed his own company from his home and Lynne my wife and I did a lot of paint and trace for him and when he decided to open a studio in London he took me with him. He ended up in partnership with John H Mills and running the company Telemagination. Elphin was a huge influence on me, but I stayed in animation for ten years simply because I needed to earn a living and I didn't know what else I wanted to do. I had been injured and couldn't pursue my dream job - footballer - so ten years went by as I worked for all the major London studios of the 1970s. I was mainly freelancing as a painter/tracer/checker or co-ordinator, more often than not I worked as a team with my wife, I'd trace and she'd paint.

At the end of my time with Halas and Batchelor I got a job at the Bill Melendez studios. He worked for Disney - an animator on the original Fantasia (I think he worked on the Beethoven part - Bacchus, he was quite vocal on the merits of animating half-naked nymphs with a drunken letch - said they thought it was cute at the time but looking back...!) - but if you know anything about Disney history you will know that the animators went on strike at one point. It was resolved so a production could be finished but after the strike the atmosphere at Disney changed Walt distrusted the animators and felt betrayed by them. A section of animators grew to hate the studio, the atmosphere and the style of work. These animators decided to leave Disney and together they formed UPA. Bill was one of those animators. Although he told me he also worked at Warner Bros - we were chatting socially so I can't be sure of the exact order or his exaggeration - he was a huge character, lovely, lovely man and loved telling stories, they might have gotten wilder and bigger in time, I don't know.

I don't know why he decided to form his own company, I think it was to do a Peanuts movie or TV series; my only knowledge about Melendez was from the man himself and it was often over a drink or just a mug of tea in the studio. he was one of the greats and a great man too.


LC: How did you get on at the Melendez studio?


IS: We worked on the Fred Bassett pilot film whilst setting up a feature film, Dick Deadeye, which was not a success. During this first time at Melendez I was pretty unhappy, it was nothing to do with the studio, in fact Steve Melendez was fantastic to me, I should have been fired, I was horrible, but I can put it down to the realisation that my football career really was over and I had to go through a lot of changes in my mental objectives for life. Nothing got resolved but I left Melendez and went back to Halas and Batchelor where I was a checker, no responsibility just as a worker and grateful to Maurice Pooley for taking me back.It was perfect, for me at that time because for the first time since my 6 weeks as a runner, I wasn't the boss of my department just a worker. It suited me fine.


LC: When did you end up working as a freelance animator?


IS: H&B closed down after that (the American Network series dept) and that is when I really started freelancing. Straight from H&B series I went to Wyatt Cattaneo and worked on Tetley Tea Folk commercials, back to H&B for their commercials department, Richard Williams offered me a full time job that I turned down. I just worked for any company that needed me and in those days work was pretty much constant and I don't think I ever had to make a phone call looking work.

Eventually I went back to Bill Melendez to work on a TV feature film and a TV series. One of the directors on the feature film was Nick Spargo. About a year after the Melendez work finished for him (I stayed on to the the TV series) he got the BBC to finance his Willo the Wisp TV series and wanted me and my wife to be his trace and paint department. That year changed my life. It was the first time I had worked as a part of such a small team: he used eight people in total, including his secretary-cum-book keeper. He worked from his home and we'd do 5 minutes per 2 weeks. He wrote and directed the series and it was simply the best year of my animation life so far. From not knowing what I wanted to do Nick inspired me to knowing exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted write and direct like Nick!


LC: What happened after you finished work on Willo the Wisp?


IS: At the end of Willo we have to jump back to Elphin. I was helping him set up his first London studio when Steve Melendez recommended me to FilmFair as a co-ordinator. I didn't want to go I wanted to help Elphin, but he convinced me to go and as I was costing him money I wondered if I was putting a financial strain on him so I agreed to go and be interviewed by Graham Clutterbuck, the Managing Director of FilmFair, London. I got the job and stayed at FilmFair for a little over eight years.

Graham died from cancer after about six years of being there and I genuinely think that if he hadn't died and FilmFair was still going I would have still been there. I quickly ended up writing and directing TV series for FilmFair - about 2 years after deciding that was what I wanted to do - and during that time HBO New York did a deal with us to produce a couple of Paddington Bear half-hour specials. I co-directed the first and contacted an award winning animator I had known from Wyatt Cattaneo to animate the cut-out characters, and she brought Sheila [Graber] along with her. It turned out that only Sheila stayed; I had 2-3 of my other regular animators work with me on it, but Sheila turned out to be an absolute star. She had problems getting into what I needed as it was an unusual job - 3D cut-outs - but ended up by animating huge amounts of it and we worked together on several other projects after that.

When I parted ways with FilmFair I worked with Michael Cole who had been the BBC producer on Willo the Wisp, and then worked at the Richard Williams studio on a feature film where I met a Bulgarian animator, Venelin Veltchev. That was about 20 years ago. This year Venelin asked me to join him on the biggest job I have ever been involved in, it's his job but I am doing a lot of management and client liaison.

Interview with Sheila Graber

For four decades Sheila Graber has been making animation, and has shown great enthusiasm for new developments and opportunities to teach future generations of animators; in this interview she sheds light on each of these aspects of her career. Most of her work is available on her YouTube channel, and so I'll be linking to her films where appropriate.

---

LC: When did you first start animating?


SG: In 1970 at the age of 30 I bought a Super 8 movie camera from Dixons to film my Summer Holiday; animation was not even in my mind. After all, at that time it was thought that the only people who could animate were big studios with loads of resources and heaps of people drawing, tracing, painting etc. I was a full time art teacher in a comprehensive school and played about with the camera in my spare time -I was newly divorced so I did have extra spare time. I discovered from the instruction booklet that you could "bump on your titles" by fixing the camera to a tripod and clicking a single frame release whilst shooting plastic letters.

So I bought a tripod and SFR but not letters - I used buttons instead. Move, click, move, click, and so on... The film came back 3 weeks later, the buttons were all out of focus but they MOVED of their own accord. Magic... I've been hooked ever since.

At that time I did a lot of oil paintings, so I stuck the camera on a tripod in front of an empty canvas, screwed in the single frame release, made a brush stroke, click etc. Three weeks later when it came back the paint reflected and it was still a bit out of focus but once again to see strokes paint themselves was magic. I then went on to experiment with anything I could lay my hands on, from cut-outs and pastel to plasticine.

Puff the Magic Dragon.

LC: What were the earliest animated shorts you made?


SG: An example of a complete film is Puff the Magic Dragon, shot in1972. Loved the tune and the story - so inspired by this I set out to make a movie linked to the soundtrack. In those days before computers or video the only way of tightly timing a sound track frame by frame was by a mechanical gadget called a "Pic Sync" which literally synced up each sprocketed frame of film to every sprocket on magnetic tape. However, I could not afford this until much later, but I could afford a stop watch - so I used that and home made bar sheets to time the track. The images do fit to the words - which is more than be said for the horizon line fitting to the sky!

I met the author of Puff the Magic Dragon years later whilst running some animation workshops in Tunisia. When asked could I buy the copyright (in order to make a proper broadcast quality version) he said, sorry, he needed the money so had sold it to the highest bidder: Disney. Ten years later I tried this plasticine mixed-media approach again (and the same home built set - with better join) to shoot a film based on Dance Macabre.

This was not only screened in over 25 countries but has also proved to be by far the most popular movie I have up there on YouTube. So I guess this proves that you should not be put off by naivety of your first movies - just keep going and who knows what will develop.

The Lady of Shalott.

LC: Early in your career you made a large number of films in a small space of time. What's the story here?

SG: From 1974 to 1979 I was teaching full time, so had an income and made films for fun at night and weekends. Bit like Tony Hancock in The Rebel. During the day, a normal job; at night, an artist doing whatever I felt like in my head and putting it into movies. I had time, enough money to live on and freedom - the ideal combination to create.

I was able to follow my own "body clock" and that's why the animations just poured out.

The Boy and The Cat - a vehicle to explore cels and character movement. The Twelve Days of Christmas - I had always drawn crazy Xmas decorations for the school hall; just put these in a movie. Michelangelo - I taught the history of art; this was my first go at making a film that would be fun to watch and hopefully get kids interested in art. I had no interest at this time in using this for broadcast so used any music I liked, no thought of copyright clearance. I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General - cut-out experiment in lip sync with lyrics that are just crazy and great...

...so it goes on, just following what I was interested in and exploring what felt to be the next logical step; e.g. I wanted a slow moving piece in which I could experiment with pastel and multi-plane shot so chose The Lady of Shalott, which I heard uttered by Dr Finlay to a dying patient in Dr Finlay's Casebook. After completion I wanted to try something much faster so chose a bit of Mozart which suggested trains and cars... Moving On - the history of transport.

One or two small commissions like Inside Look North and Larn Yersel Geordie crept in. The last film I made just for myself was Evolution; I then became "professional", and when you make a living at animation you have no time or energy to do your own work... well, some, like Alison de Vere, managed it, but I could not.

I finally managed it in Lifeline, in 2004 - a gap of 25 years. I think you can see why I'm now living in Ireland surrounded by trees and cows and am finally managing to make my own stuff again... full circle... I hope!

The Elephant's Child, an episode of Just So Stories.

LC: How did you come to form a partnership with Jen Miller?

SG: My interest in animation grew hugely on two linked paths. One was using it as a tool to get the children I taught interest in learning. I started a cine club after school and was amazed at the interest this generated amongst students who normally wanted to get away from school as quickly as possible. We finally managed to introduce animation as a full CSE subject at National Level. The second was exploring my own ideas through animation. After 10 years I had produced over 30 short films, the later ones in broadcast quality 16mm film. An agent from France, Nicole Jouve, saw my work on Clapperboard, a now defunct TV program that showed amateur award-winning shorts. She enabled these shorts, ranging from The Boy and the Cat to Mondarian, to be screened on world TV. In 1980, thanks to her backing, I produced a complete TV series of 10X10 min programmes based on Kipling's Just So Stories. Thus discovering that you don't need huge studios to produce work - you can go it alone.

So in 1980 I gave up my day job of teaching (though I still do many animation workshops) and became a full-time professional animator.

It is often the case that if you are efficient at art/animation you are not efficient at managing the business side of your production. It is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, job to sell yourself. I was not very good at it, and although I was producing work by the mile I was running at a loss. Luckily an artist friend who was part of the quite large workforce that I employed introduced me to Jen Miller.

Jen, initially, did some catering for a range of in-house training days that we ran. She was just so efficient that the corporate clients involved were much more impressed with the style and range of their lunch from her than their training from me. (Could have been the champagne on ice that swung it!) It seemed to me that anyone who could manage catering with such efficiency (her budget had only been £50 for the lot) could manage an animation company- and she did! As fellow directors we formed "Sheila Graber Animation Limited" in 1996, which went from strength to strength under her down-to-earth, wise management.

I guess we, in a tiny way, were a bit like Disney - Walt being arty with head in the clouds and his brother Roy providing the sensible feet on the ground side. Both sides are needed to make a successful animation company.

In 2004 Jen asked if I'd ever give up doing jobs for everyone else and concentrate on my own work. I reckoned I never would get the chance if I stayed in the UK as there was a constant stream of jobs. So we closed the company (whilst we were winning!) and moved to Ireland. Here I've been able to produce my book Animation: A Handy Guide, with the backing of the University of Sunderland .

I also run a number of workshops with Jen for adults with learning difficulties - which was an aim of mine from 1970 when I first saw how the practice of animation could be used to break through barriers in teaching.

The influence of Fantasia is evident in Danse Macabre.

LC: Is there any animation that has influenced your work?


SG: Yes - Walt Disney's Fantasia. It was created in 1940 when I was.. I must have first seen it when I was about 7 and just loved the way images moved to the music. Really fell for the devil coming out the mountain- Bill Tytla is my all time fave animator. The way I much prefer to animate is to start with a sound track and create images to it.

In my book Animation: A Handy Guide I explain and show many of the influences of Fantasia upon my work as an animator. Fantasia used to be released along with all his classics about once every 6/7 years - and wherever it was available I tried to see it. Today it's easy to see anything instantly - however maybe there is a sort of magic in the fact you can't see something unless you really put yourself out to find it!

Excerpt from Animation is Fun. See this post for more.

LC: How did you come to write Animation is Fun?

SG: In 1973 I started experimenting with plastic cels and created a little film about a boy falling down a microscope and meeting all sorts of crazy little characters down there. I think the best thing at the start is to build upon things you like and know. I had studied Science in my earlier days and was always fascinated by the new worlds visible via microscopes and telescopes. My little nephew aged 7 was jumping about the place so I used him as a model. At our local newsagent I came across a magazine called Movie Maker in which there were many very useful articles for beginners like myself. There was also an annual competition called the 'Ten Best" in which anyone could enter any sort of film. What was great about this mag was that its editor Tony Rose and team offered invaluable feedback on all entrants. So I entered the microscope movie and it gained 4 stars (one of the lowest grades) but the feedback said - "there is a glimmer of life here - keep going."

So I did - and made The Boy and the Cat - same boy, with my own cat Whitey - and entered it in 1974. It won a "10 Best Trophy" meaning it was one of the ten best entrants in the country. The extra bonus here was that all ten winners were screened at the National Film Theatre in London and you got to be in the audience. They always had a star to present the trophies in this case it was Jimmy Stewart. I always remember his great speech before hand where he said he'd been paid all his life just to be himself! I also remember how soft his handshake was - I guess I expected a big tough grip - but he was just himself, gentle and genuine.

Encouraged by the positive feedback I went on to make more movies and gained 5 more "Ten Best" trophies until I went professional in 1980. During these years Movie Maker asked me to write a monthly series of A4 double page spread articles on animation. I created them in strongly graphic form and simply based the subject matter on my own methods and progress and those of the students I had taught at school. I held the master drawings and copyright of these articles. In 1982 the Tyneside Cinema - an arts cinema linked to the NFT - backed me to publish them in a book. This book I entitled Animation is Fun to hopefully attract beginners into this lively art and find out for themselves how effective their own work could be!

Movie Maker is now sadly, like Tony Rose, no more - however it helped me and many more film makers bridge the gap between Amateur and Professional. Today animation can be created easily on computers, video, Nintendo DS, but most young people watch and interact with animation made by others.

Lifeline.

LC: When did you begin working with computer animation?

SG: I first saw BBC computers in schools when I was Media Adviser for South Tyneside LEA in 1985. However, they were so DOS-based that they were of no interest to me as an animator, though I did manage to grab in a gym shoe and tweak the image about a bit - and actually print it out- a great achievement in those days. I bought an Amstrad in 1988 because with extra software you could actually draw with a mouse.

However, it was the Apple Mac in 1991 that really got me interested using a program called Macromedia Director and a Wacom tablet I was actually able to draw frame by frame animation... my interest and available software/hardware grew until finally I stopped using 16mm film in 1994/5 and have used computers ever since.

A good example of an animated movie made completely on Mac computer/Wacom tablet and Painter is "Lifeline."

Hans Christian Andersen for the Youth of Today.

LC: Can you tell us more about your move to series work, and your pilot films that weren't picked up?


SG: A French agent, Nicole Jouve of Interama (who was also agent for The Magic Roundabout) saw some of my short movies thanks to them being screened on TV after winning some "Ten Best" amateur awards. She asked to distribute; I finally agreed. After 3/4 years she got me the world TV commission to animate the 1981 10X10 min Just So Stories. All this is more clearly explained in a short video on YouTube. She later commissioned the 10X5 minute Best Friends series, and later on in 1985 12X5 min La Famille Fenouillard.

In 1990 The Dumpies came from quite a different route. John Patience is an excellent illustrator of Children's Books; one series of books he wrote and illustrated himself was based on characters called the Dumpies. He saw some of my stuff on TV and contacted me regarding possibility of making a TV pilot from his work. I agreed as I liked his books - they are really genuine - as was he; in fact, when I first saw his tall figure as he ambled up the path, I thought "He's a Dumpy!". True self expression. We were all happy with the pilot but the BBC said "we have enough science fiction at the moment, thanks". So we still wait for someone to take it up!

In 1991 the Great British Pioneers series grew from Tyne Tees TV asking me to make short inserts for their new TV series Power House exploring inventions. Excellent scripts were written - alas can't remember the writer's name - and with the help of free access to TTTV library footage I was able to play and get paid for it! This was the first time I'd used a Mac Computer and Macromedia Director Software (instead of 16mm film) for broadcast work. I was just pleased it all worked and could actually be screened.

Hans Christian Andersen for the Youth of Today... By 1996 I was running Sheila Graber Animation ltd. employing two full time and many part-time staff. I also feel I was really getting into computer animation - particulary rotoscoping. High Level Recording Studios and Dodgy Clutch Theatre company were invaluable in helping this pilot happen. H.C. Andersen's stories are quite deep and often dark - not always Danny Kay 's interpretation. I felt there was so much good stuff in them that if they were animated in a lively way the material would appeal to the "Youth of Today". Using everyone's talents I really feel we produced a pilot that would have led to a dynamic and relevant set of stories for today's youth... maybe the youth of tomorrow?




LC: How did you come to write your second book, Animation: A Handy Guide?


SG: I was invited by the University of Sunderland to be their "reader" - which means you get a chance to do research as well as teach part time. One of the staff, Shirley Wheeler, suggested I write a book about animation. I had been considering this for years - ever since Animation is Fun - so I leapt at the chance. I began the first draft in 2000. It was only when I moved to Ireland in 2004 that I had the time and space to create the book. I wanted to create something that would really help animation students get a grasp of history, methods, and creativity.

Watching animation students doing research I noticed they rarely went to books; instead it was straight to the internet. So I thought I'd make a book that covered 20 key items in the history of animation, with loads of pictures and with a matching DVD that linked all key items to the internet and showed my own and student animation footage wherever needed.

Within the DVD are printable pages from Animation is Fun updated to take in digital cameras and computers. Those that have seen it find it easy to use and useful. Not enough colleges or unis know it's out there - I hope readers of your blog might check it out!

LC: Is there any animation you've been enjoying lately?

SG: I like all the blockbusters from Shrek to Toy Story; however, my real interest is in individuals using animation to explore their own world in their own way. So now I mainly enjoy animations by students round the world, thanks to YouTube - it's great to see original ideas and methods being used to express personal feelings.

I'll just use two as examples:
I presently teach at the University of Sunderland now and then I see a lot of their work; one I really like is The Highwayman, set to the famous poem by Alfred Noyes. Alas, due to copyright on this poem, the student had to re-cut it to music to show on YouTube. I saw it with the original voiced soundtrack - it was extremely moving. You can hear Noyes voicing his own poem here.

In quite a different style is a short crazy animation on evolution. I like it because it's original. simple and tells it's story well. One of Disney's key phrases to his team was "Keep It Simple" - so true.

I have always enjoyed any images (animated or otherwise) well edited to a sound track - e.g. the real two talking cats are great, and the re-dubbed sound track is terrific - highly animated!

In July this year I shot and edited a short movie about swallows nesting in our decking - this gave me as much enjoyment as actually animating the images (and it's a lot quicker!) and hopefully as much fun to watch.

I have only recently discovered the wonders of Russian animation including Yuri Norstein andbAlexander Petrov. Their style is much deeper and stronger than our "western" approach - well worth a look!

I'm currently working on "Quizi-Cat's Quest", a large multi-media project (book/DVD/animation/web site) to help children learn about the world and be creative at the same time, that will hopefully get every child in the country (and maybe the world) animated at school/home and use animation as a way into learning and having fun whilst they do it... watch this space!

Interview with Alan Gilbey

Alan Gilbey heading a workshop at the Bradford Animation Festival.

Alan Gilbey has been active in animation writing since the late nineties, playing key roles in such series as Rex the Runt, Aaagh! It's The Mr Hell Show!, Bounty Hamster, The Foxbusters, the revived Pinky And Perky Show and Frankenstein's Cat and co-founded Peafur Productions with Dave Freedman. In this interview he speaks out on his past, present and future.

LC: How did your first experiences with the animation industry go?

AG: I'd always drawn comics and cartoons and when I left school at seventeen (I went to the kind of East End secondary modern where kids who went to university were rarer than Elephant Men) the Central London Careers office sent me for interviews at animation companies.

This was in the days when there was still lots of advertising money in animation and lots of animators actually animating around Soho Square, but you had to start at the bottom. They were looking for runners. I failed to get a job at Richard Williams Animation. In fact I didn't get any further than the foyer (I was a chubby kid so perhaps they thought I wouldn't be much good at running) but I did get to see the Oscar he'd just won for A Christmas Carol.

Next I was sent over to Halas and Bachelor in Covent Garden and climbed ten thousand stairs in an old warehouse to be interviewed with Mr Halas himself. When I showed him my comic strip work, which was a bit Sex Pistols meets Jack Kirby, he frowned and said he found it too aggressive (well, he had made the Jackson Five and Osmonds cartoons!) So it was back down those ten thousand stairs again and the end of my attempts to get into animation for a very long time.

Fast forward twenty years and a visit to Hibbert Ralph Animation (later Silver Fox Films) for a chat about scripting a new BBC Christmas special, The First Snow Of Winter. This was one of our first paid jobs and I couldn't put my finger on why the place felt familiar, but when my eyes wandered round the room they fell upon an old metal sign, wedged down the back of a filing cabinet. It said 'Halas And Batchelor.'

LC: How did you meet Dave Freedman?

AG: We were both gigging around the sub-basements of the London comedy circuit. I had been in a musical double act for a year or so and Dave was just starting out as a stand-up. He was American, a graduate of the New York School Of Visual Arts and was working in advertising art direction, which meant he knew many animators - like Golly (Richard Goleszowski) the creator of Rex the Runt.

We both drew. We both loved cartoons. We both had all the same books. One day Dave suggested that perhaps the standard of animation writing in the UK was now lagging behind that of the sassier new US shows like Rocko's Modern Life (of which we were both fans) and The Simpsons. But if a couple of British based writers who had done well in other fields but understood animation got together perhaps we might make a bit of an impact. So we did. And we did.

LC: Can you tell us a little about setting up Peafur Productions with him?

AG: In the early days the name was just a way of being taken seriously. Two guys in a room writing is just two guys in a room writing, but Peafur Productions sounds like it has a receptionist and pot plants. Dave worked from home and I had a part time job as a community drama worker for Tower Hamlets Council so a lot of our early stuff was written in a swimming pool on the Isle of Dogs! This went on for several years as we worked towards the point we could give up our day jobs completely.

We got an agent in the States because Dave is American and not scared of making phone calls. The third agent he rang expressed an interest and asked us to write a spec script for a US series we liked. We did The Tick and the agent almost sold it! Then she got us a couple of episodes of Casper the Friendly Ghost for Universal, which was unusual for UK based writers. We also began to come up for hundreds of ideas for our own series, one of which was Mr Hell.

When we got the go-ahead to make The Mr Hell Show (eight years later!) we needed a production base for the series and staff had to take on, so Peafur finally became a proper company. Core members included animator/character designer Barry Baker (perhaps best known for his recently revived 'Red Car/Blue Car' Milky Way ad) and Jeff 'Swampy' Marsh, now co-creator of current Disney hit Phineas and Ferb.) Swampy had worked on The Simpsons and bringing him over was a factor in swinging the show with the BBC. They wanted someone with adult comedy animation experience on the team and he still owes me for a sandwich.

We all ended up in a small two story building round the back of a shop on Clapham High Street, which got broken into constantly. It was cramped but had just enough room for a spiral staircase up to the ‘executive’ offices , where the pot plants lived. Mr Hell was partly made here and later Bounty Hamster too.

Rex the Runt.

LC: How did you end up working with Aardman on Rex the Runt?

AG: It's not what you know. It's who you know – a bit (although if you really don't know anything they soon find out!) Dave had already worked with Golly on some animation for the ad agency he was with then. So when he needed some help with Rex The Runt he thought of Dave.

In the wake of the early success of Wallace and Gromit Micheal Rose at the BBC animation department in Bristol (who has just produced The Gruffalo) was interested in other Aardman ideas, but Rex was a madder, more maverick prospect. The BBC were intrigued, but not convinced, so Dave and I were asked to help Golly write more structured stories.

We all sat about together, chatted a lot, played lots of games of consequences to keep the very random feel of Rex, then we went off and wrote thirteen five minute episodes based on all of that. These got the show commissioned. Indeed the BBC liked them so much they extending the running time to ten minutes.

After that Michael asked us to write some English dialogue for a French film the BBC were a partner in (Sylvain Chomet's The Old Lady and the Pigeons) and we got an interview with Brian Cosgrove of Cosgrove Hall. He handed us a children's book, The Foxbusters by Dick King-Smith, and asked what we would be with if it were an animated series. A few weeks later we pitched our take on it, got the gig and eventually our first TV series.

It all sounds a bit jammy really, but we starved a fair bit too!

Aaagh! It's The Mr Hell Show!

LC: The Mr Hell Show and Rex the Runt are adult series, which is unusual for British animation - how did you find working in this area?

AG: It was great – and very frustrating. There were no rules for trying to be 'Britain's answer to The Simpsons' so you had to learn them on the job. But there's no cutting room floor in animation, especially animation produced to the kind of schedules we had on Mr Hell, so all your mistakes end up on the screen... and they're your first episodes! Add to that the way UK broadcasters seemed to lose faith in adult animation series incredibly quickly and slide them around the schedules so no one can find them, and you end up with a situation where your very best episodes are screened after midnight on a Sunday!

There's so much we could do with adult animation, but it needs time to fully bloom and consistent broadcaster support to find it's audience.. like most live action comedy does.

LC: Shortly after Rex the Runt first aired, I remember a letter printed in The Radio Times - very prominently placed, too, with a picture of Rex to go with it - that said something along the lines of "I want to express my disgust at the BBC's Rex the Runt. It was advertised during daytime television as an animated series about dogs, implying that it was for children, and I was shocked by the language it contained" (Funny how these things can stick in your mind). What do you make of this criticism?

AG: Although the animation department knew what they were getting, the schedulers (allegedly) didn't watch any of the actual shows and stuck it on the wrong time. Ignoring any notions that Rex was always supposed to be a quirky adult show, they just saw the name Aardman and thought 'Nice bit of cheese Gromit' then scheduled it for lunch times right across Christmas. As a consequence disturbed children everywhere got to see Bad Bob shooting Vince and calling him a bastard!

Really, there's not much of that kind of stuff in the show at all, just random weirdness, but I've been told that once you're labelled a problem series the label sticks and the BBC don't forgive you. So they've never shown any interest in repeating it since, although I suspect the Mighty Boosh generation would love it. In Japan there used to be a Rex themed bar!

LC: What cartoon would you say you enjoyed working on the most?

AG: It's usually any of them when they're in pre-production before executive notes come in and it all goes pear shaped!

Mr Hell was hell to make because of the insanely tight production schedule (thirteen shows from scratch to completion in nine months) so it was hard to enjoy it, but in retrospect those later episodes were really turning into something good. Foxbusters was fun because it was our first show and I still miss the characters. On Bounty Hamster I got to design spaceships, which made the nine year Alan very happy and Frankenstein's Cat looked so nice you felt great just being a part of it.

Today I'm loving two pre-school series that I've developed. One is about philosophy for very small kids (not easy!) and just won an award in Seoul...which was nice. The other I've created in a very deliberate attempt to honour the Oliver Postgate gentle storytelling tradition. All the characters are named after my uncles and aunts and I really, really hope we'll get it into production.

LC: Who would you say your influences are?

AG: For comedy it's definitely Spike Milligan and early Mad Magazine, whose influence you'll see all over Mr Hell. In comics it was Leo Baxendale, Jack Kirby and Don Martin. In animation it's all the stuff I watched as a kid, especially Ivor The Engine, Captain Pugwash and lots of Warner Bros. By the time I realised that people actually directed these things it became Tex Avery, probably the first director whose style I began to recognise and seek out more of . As a kid I also absorbed all those odd little public information films, whose stories I now know more about because of your blog.

Dave always said I had a mixed US/UK approach to things and I think that's true.

LC: What does your role as a consultant on Channel 4's animation schemes involve?

AG: It changes from scheme to scheme, but generally it's helping individual film makers with the thing I used to be pretty bad at myself – story structure. Often an animator's film looks great but there's just not enough going on to fully satisfy a viewer by the end. It's got a great technique and a nice initial idea but there's no extra development. Rather than taking you on a journey the film just stops.

I run active workshops for scheme participants where we explore story structure, then become one of the people looking at their subsequent scripts and animatics and giving my reactions.

The knack of it is not to swamp them with my own ideas of what their film should be, but simply help unlock any extra stuff they haven't thought of yet. You're not trying to impose some cliched Hollywood story template on them. It's more like song writing You're helping them find all of the riffs, rhythms and choruses which will make their films sing better.

LC: Is there anything you think is missing from British TV animation?

AG: Rolf's Cartoon Time. Really!

Just seeing him mentioned on your blog made me think how important that show, and later shows with Tony Robinson, were. To have a very popular kid's TV programme that celebrated the past, that exposed kids to all kinds of animation, that made them think 'Maybe I could make something like that one day too' was massively important – and massively missed.

Conveying a sense of authorship, be it Chuck Jones, Oliver Postgate, Nick Park or Marc Craste is vital to a healthy animation future, especially in the UK. We need to show children not all animation pours off a production line on the other side of the world. The best was and is made by all kinds of different people with all kinds of different voices, and maybe one day theirs might be amongst them too.

Apart from that, to the BBC and C4 generally, please just value what you have and show it, old and new. Treat it like it's got a bit of value and perhaps people will ask for more. BBC Bristol helped pay for Sylvain Chomet's first film but they never screen it. In Australia and Canada The Mr Hell Show was shown in consistent time slots, got decent audiences and won awards. But you'll never see it here again. Not that I'm still bitter. Grrrrrr.

LC: If a channel gave you sack of cash, complete creative control and a talented crew and told you to break new ground, what would you do?

AG: See if Rolf was busy!

Also I'd make animated inserts for live action comedy shows: bumpers like they added to the Tracy Ullman Show in the States. By breaking new characters to a mass audience this way we might also build an interest in seeing more of them and finally create the show that really was 'Britain's answer to The Simpsons'. And I'd make my really funny kid's show about a ferret.

LC: Any future projects that you're at liberty to tell us about?

AG: I've done a lot of development this year and, although it's dodgy to count cartoon chickens before they're hatched, things are looking good for quite a few of them. They're ridiculously diverse and range from the pre-school philosophy series I mentioned earlier - to a comedy adventure martial arts series based on a computer game - to a deliberately silly show about Belgium's number one girl band! (Sadly because of the state of the UK industry a lot of my projects come from mainland Europe now.) I'm also about to adapt a children's book by Michael Dudok de Wit into a series.

Frankenstein's Cat.

LC: Did you work on any projects that ended up axed?

AG: Billions. Mr Hell died three times before we finally got him to the screen and we just lost the second series of Frankenstein's Cat because the full finance package didn't arrive in time. It's a great shame as that show was really taking off with kids and the next series would have been animated in the UK (the first was made in France.) There's also been some lovely stuff which never made it even to partial finance. Have I mentioned a show about a ferret?

LC: Is there any advice you'd give to people who are hoping to enter the animation field?

AG: It's a tough question in this tough time. We really need to get tax breaks for UK animation from the government or all the work will continue to haemorrhage abroad and learning French or French-Canadian might be the best advice I can give aspiring animators. Being willing to travel may be essential for the cartoonists of the future who are seeking commercial work.

If you want to make your own films be prepared to go it alone and use all the new channels of distribution out there to build an audience for your films - like the Brothers McLeod have done so well. Other opportunities may follow.

If you're a writer, watch tons of animation - all kinds - all techniques - all different ways of telling stories. Please don't write lots of people just sitting around talking. That only works for Ricky Gervais.