Following up on Bendazzi, part 3 (1940-1969)

Continuing the series of posts examining the British animators listed in Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation by Giannalberto Bendazzi. Part one can be found here.

Here's what Bendazzi has to say about British animation during the period:

Propaganda and war-related educational films helped keep British animation alive during the war while advertising, which had traditionally supported production, amost (sic) disappeared.

The animators and productions that he lists are:

Halas & Batchelor

Larkins

Anson Dyer
Squirrel War

David Hand/GB-Animation
Animaland

George Moreno
Bubble & Squeak

Gerard Holdsworth
His Story of Time (1951)

John Daborn/the Grasshopper Group
Two's Company
Bride and Groom
The Battle of Wangapore

Peter Földes
Animated Genesis
A Short Vision

Bendazzi depicts the period as being dominated by two new studios, Halas & Batchelor and Larkins. It's worth mentioning that the book focuses more on animated films than on television series, hence why the section overlooks a number of notable figures who were active at the time, such as John Ryan, Oliver Postgate, Peter Firmin, Gordon Murray and Ivor Wood. A biography of John Halas concludes the survey.

Part 1 - 2 - 3- 4

The W.M. Larkins Studio

The W.M. Larkins Studio (also known simply as Larkins) is a poorly-documented studio responsible for some brilliant work from the likes of Peter Sachs and Richard Taylor. The BFI database has a filmography for the studio split across two entries, one titled W.M. Larkins Studio and the other just Larkins Studio; the films listed date from 1945 to 1983. Giannalberto Bendazzi in Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation gives a brief history of the studio:

Bill Larkins opened his own business after a short-lived partnership with veteran Anson Dyer; the studio produced many educational works and survived even after its founder left. With Peter Sachs and Denis Gilpin, Larkins created graphically advanced films which led some to claim that the British had preceded UPA in revolutionizing style.

Cartoon Modern by Amid Amidi, meanwhile, says that

Larkins is one of the great "lost" studios of animation history, and it is tragic that its work isn't better known today. The primary reason for its obscurity is that, unlike Halas & Batchelor, it didn't produce entertainment films, focusing almost entirely on industrial films and commercials for TV and theatres.

This is the only Larkins image in Cartoon Modern. The film is identified as a theatrical advert for Barclays Bank, but no title or year is given.

The first episode of BBC4's Animation Nation documentary series from 2005 discusses Larkins. I took some stills from the clips that were shown:


In Skymaster, an instructional film made with the RAF Film Unit, Sachs uses animation to tell gunners how to distinguish between aircraft.


T for Teacher is another one of Sachs' films, made in 1947 for the Tea Bureau; it tells audiences how to make the most of tea while rationing was taking place. Amidi says that the short is "an incredible exercise in graphic animation and equals (if not exceeds) the level of graphic maturity of UPA and other American studios during the same period".









In 1948's Men of Merit, where a lecturer's slides come to life, Sachs combines stop motion with drawn animation. "A mixture of cartoon and puppetry concerning fuel economy and electricity council public relations", says the BFI database.







The documentary doesn't name this film, but says that it was made for the British Iron and Steel Federation. It could be River of Steel - if that's the case then it was directed by William Larkins himself, with Sachs handling the designs. The documentary says that the backgrounds were painted by Bob Godfrey ("he was like Mr. Toad - he was always having these terrific enthusiasms" says Godfrey of Sachs).







Balance 1950, from 1952, was influenced by the Bauhaus artist Paul Klee. It was made to be viewed by the employees of Imperial Chemical Industries.







Put Una Money for There is a 1956 Barclays Bank advert directed by Denis Gilpin and shown in West Africa. Sam Akpabot provided a song in dialect.


The documentary was shown alongside two complete Larkins films: the propaganda short Without Fear and another Barclays advert, both of which I've covered here.

Following up on Bendazzi, part 2 (1930-1939)

The second part of my series of posts taking a closer look at the British animators who are mentioned in Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation by Giannalberto Bendazzi (click here for part one). This time I'll look through his section on the thirties, in which he tells us that

In the thirties, the majority of British animators worked in advertising, with only a few involved in the production of entertainment feature films [...] While lacking in native talents ([Norman] McLaren's unique talent was still in the making), Great Britain became a stopover for foreign animators, including Lotte Reiniger, Hector Hoppin, Anthony Gross and Len Lye.

Here are the animators and their work that the section brings up:

Anson Dyer/Anglia Films
Carmen
Sam Small
The King with the Terrible Temper

Roland Davies
Steve the Horse

This short overview is concluded with a biography of Len Lye.

Part 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

"Really explosive": Bruno Edera on late 70s British animation; plus animated features that never were

Bruno Edera's 1977 book Full Length Animated Feature Films (part of the Library of Animation Technology series, edited by John Halas) provides an interesting glimpse into the state of British animation of the late 70s. The book is divided up geographically, and in the section on Great Britain Edera tells us that

British animation is really explosive. In London there is the "Soho Crowd", which includes most of the London animators, with an atmosphere of collaboration between directors, animators and producers which is probably unique in the world.

He goes on to point out that British animation studios focus far more on shorts than on feature films. One reason he gives for this is that, as the studios receive much of their income from producing commercials, they lack the time needed to produce riskier, longer-format work. He also makes a claim that gives an interesting summery of the kind of animation that was being produced back then:

British animation is most effective when it is caricature, or when it takes the form of a moral or satirical fable.

Most of the section is spent discussing the few animated features that had come out of the country at the time: Halas & Batchelor's Handling Ships (1946), Water for Fire-Fighting (1949), Animal Farm (1954) and Ruddigore (1966); John Halas and Ralph Alswang's part-animated stage play Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? (1964); TVC's Yellow Submarine (1967); the Monty Python film And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), which contains 25 minutes of animation by "newcomer to the British scene" Terry Gilliam; John Halas and Gabriele Crisanti's The Glorious Musketeers (1974); and Bill Melendez's Dick Deadeye (1975).

There are also mentions of four features that were being planned at the time: Yellow Submarine director George Dunning's adaptations of Gulliver's Travels and Le Morte d'Arthur; Richard Williams' Nasruddin; and Charlie Jenkins' adaptation of Gunter Grass's book The Tin Drum. Nasruddin eventually became The Thief and the Cobbler, but as far as I know the other three never saw the light of day.

Near the back of the book is a catalogue of various in-development features, including a few more British examples. Of these, there are only two that I know for sure were completed: Watership Down and Max and Moritz , the latter actually a series of German-British films directed by John Halas. The other British films listed in this section are George Dunning's The Tempest, which was left unfinished at the director's death, and two films that I can find no information about online: Ray Jackson's Carroll adaptation Alice Through the Looking Glass and John Halas' Discovery of America, an hour-long special made for the Educational Film Centre in London.

There's one last historical detail here. In a section on cancelled animated features, Edera lists a British adaptation of The Hobbit:

A newly formed organisation by James Nurse, Euroanimation's attempt to film Tolkien's well-known novel for Rankin and Bass, New York. The project may be revived.

The Rankin-Bass Hobbit was indeed revived and was released in 1977, the year of the book's publication. However, it was animated by Topcraft, the Japanese studio better known for animating the proto-Ghibli Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I have no idea exactly what happened to Euroanimation, which I can find no mention of on the web.

Following up on Bendazzi, part 1 (1899-1929)

Giannalberto Bendazzi's book Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation is a classic of animation scholarship. It covers a vast range of subjects, the history of British animation amongst them. However, given the sheer scope of the book, it is inevitable that its commentary on most of the lesser-known films that it brings up is somewhat thin.

And so, with this series of blog posts I'll be turning to Bendazzi's coverage of British animation and seeing what can be found online about the filmmakers that he mentions.

In its section on British animation from 1899-1929, Cartoons discusses the following animators and their films. Where possible I have linked to pages of interest to anyone who wants to find out more:

Arthur Melbourne Cooper
Matches: An Appeal
Noah's Ark (1906)
Dreams of Toyland
Cinderella (1912)
Wooden Athletes
The Toymaker's Dream

Walter R. Booth (referred to as Walter P. Booth by Bendazzi)
The Hand of the Artist (1906)
The Sorcerer's Scissors

Charles Armstrong (referred to as Samuel Armstrong by Bendazzi)
The Clown and his Donkey

Harry Furniss
Peace and War Pencillings
Winchelsea and its Environs (1914)

Dudley Tempest
War Cartoons

Lancelot Speed
Bully Boy
Sea Dreams
The "U" Tube
Pip, Squeak and Wilfred

Dudley Buxton
War Cartoons: Ever Been Had? (1917)
John Bull's Animated Sketchbook (with Anson Dyer)
Kiddigraphs (With Anson Dyer)
Memoirs of Miffy
Bucky's Burlesques

Anson Dyer
The Story of the Flag

George Ernest Studdy
Bonzo (started 1920)

Joe Noble
Sammy and Sausage

Sid Griffiths
Jerry the Troublesome Tyke

Tom Webster
Tishy the X-Legged Horse

Bendazzi concludes the section by telling us that, like its live action counterpart, British animation of this period was mostly exhibited only in the UK and had little or no influence on animators elsewhere. Oh well.

Part 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

Introduction

The title of this blog is borrowed from Julian Petley's 1986 essay of the same name, in which he argued that the British critical establishment's preoccupation with realism resulted in the neglect of non-realist films such as the Hitchcock thriller, the Hammer horror and the Gainsborough melodrama. Petley concluded his essay by expressing his hope for a time when such films "look less like isolated islands revealing themselves, and more like the peaks of a long submerged lost continent".

I'm here to chart another lost continent of British cinema: its animation. We all know about our animated TV series, from Bagpuss and The Wombles to Danger Mouse and Count Duckula. We also know Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and Chicken Run, not to mention Yellow Submarine and Watership Down. But how many of us know that in the era of theatrical shorts, when America created Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, we came up with Bonzo, Sam Small and Tishy the X-Legged Horse? How about all of the adverts and TV graphics, some of which rank amongst the best commercial animation to be produced by this country, that have fallen into obscurity? And what about all of the independent animation that was never in the mainstream consciousness in the first place?

This blog is not meant to be a comprehensive, self-contained, one-stop guide to British animation; it's meant more to help fill the gaps. I'll be focusing mainly on bodies of work that lack coverage elsewhere online, while also directing readers to key points of interest - sites, books, anything - that'll help give anyone who's interested a better look at the history of animation in the UK. With that in mind, I'll round off this introduction by listing the sites that are good places to start:

If you want information on British animated TV series, feature films and TV specials - the more mainstream end of the spectrum, in other words - then Toonhound should be your first stop. The site also covers British comics and live action puppet shows such as Sooty and Thunderbirds.

That great benefactor of British independent animation, Channel 4, is regrettably tight-lipped when it comes to online coverage of its animation history; there is no single page on the channel's website dedicated to its notable contributions to animation. Nevertheless, there are several smaller sites that are well worth looking at, not least because they contain animated shorts available to watch online. One of them is the Animate Projects site, run by the Channel 4/Arts Council England-funded organisation of the same name: a vast amount of short films dating back to 1991 can be viewed there. The 4mations YouTube channel contains a selection of animated shorts both old and new, while the 4mations blog provides a good look at new work from rising talents.

Another good resource is the BFI's Screenonline website. Focusing on British films in general, the site has a range of articles pertaining to animation, covering everything from The Snowman to female directors. It has a number of video files, including complete short films, but these are only viewable from libraries and educational institutions in the UK.

Enjoy your reading, and I hope that this blog will also be of use to you.