Live Action: A Brief History of British Animation by Elaine Burrows

Along with the Julian Petley essay that I named this blog after, All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (published by the BFI in 1986) also contains an essay by Elaine Burrows titled Live Action: A Brief History of British Animation.

Burrows' historical overview starts with Matches: An Appeal; carries on through World War I; covers the postwar adaptations of comic strips; charts the career of Anson Dyer into the thirties; discusses the work from Len Lye, Norman McLaren and the GPO in the same decade; covers Halas & Batchelor and the coming of animated features; talks about G-B Animation and Larkins; goes on to the arrival of TV advertising and its support for animators such as Bob Godfrey and George Dunning; points to Richard Williams' arrival from Canada and his subsequent creation of The Little Island as "something of a renaissance" in British independent animation; goes on to praise the animation studio that Williams later founded; discusses the addition in the late sixties of animation to art school syllabuses; comments on the coming of computer animation, with the work of Cucumber Studios brought up; carries on to cover music videos from other outfits; takes a sideways step into race and gender issues, commenting on Seaside Woman, Sunbeam, Bob Godfrey, the Leeds Animation Workshop and Vera Neubauer; talks about financial support from organisations such as the Arts Council and Channel 4; and comes to rest on children's series from Cosgrove-Hall, Bob Godfrey and Siriol.

The underlying sense given by the essay is that, although British animation has produced a number of masterpieces in its time, something's not right. Burrows laments the poor state of critical discourse on animation and points to ingrained prejudice towards the medium, but argues that British animation itself is to blame for at least some of its failings - "Although British films in general suffered from a wartime influx of American films, it was, in addition, British film-makers' reluctance to move from cut-out to cel which held back British animation for several years", she says of silent animation. She is particularly harsh on perceived racism and sexism:

Seaside Woman won awards at Cannes, Chicago and Zagreb, but was attacked in some quarters for its racist imagery. So, too, was Sunbeam, a slick 30s pastiche made by Paul Vester's Speedy Cartoons company in 1980. Socio-political issues, other than those promoted by the government, have largely been ignored by animators; ignorance or disregard of current debates has enabled film-makers to perpetuate old stereotypes in the name of 'humour'. One of the worst offenders has been Bob Godfrey, with films like Henry 9 Till 5 (1970) and Dream Doll (1979). It is true, of course, that advertising relies heavily on stereotypes; sexism, in particular, is rampant in all forms of promotional material. No doubt financial pressures have an effect on animators, making them unwilling to bite the hands that feed them by taking a strong line on such issues. It is also true that, because 'It's only a cartoon', many people who would be critical of similar images in photographs or live-action film tend not to notice, or turn a blind eye to, animated images.

Such criticisms seem very much of their time - British women animators, a number of them making films with overtly feminist themes, were surfacing at around the time the essay was written (Burrows cites Vera Neubauer and the Leeds Animation Workshop) and would rise in prominence throughout the next decade. Later writers looking at depictions of women in British animation have had a range of more sophisticated portrayals to analyse, and as such I can't think of any other commentators who saw Bob Godfrey's films as problematic. Burrows' underlying argument, however, is that animated filmmakers should be doing more to engage with issues facing contemporary society, and this point remains pertinent.

(Sunbeam, it should be noted, has since been defended by Irene Kotlarz and others - see Karl F. Cohen's Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America for more.)

Burrows concludes the essay by calling for more critical attention to British animation:

It is paradoxical that, when the excellence of the work of British animators is demonstrated nightly in television advertising, and when British films take prizes at all major film festivals, there should still be such a disregard for them in the minds of distributors and exhibitors.

If more work could be done on documentation and research, then perhaps animation would achieve the kind of respectability that live-action cinema now enjoys. A better educated audience might increase the demand for good animated films, and distributors and exhibitors would therefore be encouraged to make more films available. This, in turn, would help the animators' financial situation, making them less reliant on commercial sponsorship, and enabling them to spend time on personal, artistic, and even politically committed projects.

Tufty Under 5's

In 1973 our screens were hit by a series of five road safety films starring a stop-motion squirrel named Tufty. The National Archives website gives a brief history of the character, who predates the shorts:

Tufty Fluffytail was born in 1953. It was a hugely successful road safety campaign aimed at young children. The late Elsie Mills MBE created Tufty, who featured in stories for The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). The squirrel and his friends introduced clear and simple safety messages to children.

In 1961 The Tufty Club for under fives was launched. More than 30,000 books about road safety were issued to parents. At its peak there were nearly 25,000 branches throughout the country. By the early 1970s an estimated 2m children were members. The movement continued well into the 1980s.

The films feature Tufty, his mum Mrs. Fluffytail, and his friend Bobby Brown Rabbit. Other characters include Willy Weasel and Harry Hare - who exist to show what happens when children forget road safety - and Mr. Policeman Badger. Or possibly Mr. Policeman-Badger - could be a double-barrelled affair.

This BBC article sums up the world of Tufty:

This film, narrated by the legendary Bernard Cribbins (who must have spent nearly the entire 1970s being one children's character or another), neatly illustrates how the world has changed: it was a place in which children called their mother "mummy", in which they were in awe of policemen, and in which they might have actually seen a red squirrel.

Tufty's still around - as the official website for the Tufty Club testifies, he lives on in the form of books, stickers and hand puppets. To the best of my knowledge, though, he has been in no more animated films.

All five stop-motion Tufty films can be found on the DVD compilation Charley Says. One of them's included in both English and Welsh, and you can't ask for more than that.

See also More Tufty.

John Halas on cartoon violence

Above: Fit to be Tied

The 28 January 1960 issue of The Times carried the following letter from Pamela Hansford Johnson :

Sir. - I would like to draw the attention of parents who take their small children to film cartoon programmes, to the nightmarish cruelty of some of these offerings. Nearly all are concerned with violence: but some of the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons are revolting. I saw to-day one called Fit to be Tied, in which a dog, chained up and helpless, was battered all over the face, had his teeth bashed out with an iron bar and was shown (in close up) spitting out the few remaining stumps. Roars of laughter from the audience.

No, it isn't all right because it is just a comic dog in a drawing. I was ashamed to have a young child with me, ashamed to watch it myself, and ashamed of the adults who thought it such fun. Professional film critics are not normally asked to report on some of these hideous shorts. I wish they could make a point, for once, of spending an afternoon in one or two of the newsreel cinemas.

A supportive letter was printed in the 2 February edition:

[W]e took our seven-year-old son to the cinema for the first time. The first film, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, he enjoyed from beginning to end: a good film for small boys - fights, excitement and humour without a hint of horror or cruelty.

But Disney's Bambi that followed was quite another matter. Apart from the sentimentality, which our son obviously found spurious and embarrassing, he got no enjoyment from Bambi's terror, alone and motherless, in the great forest, nor from the drawn-out savagery of the forest fire, nor from the nauseating hounds with their jagged teeth, baying and mouthing after Bambi's blood - no, no! this is no food for children. (...) If grown-ups care for such titillation that is their business, but the assumption that Disney programmes are a child's treat needs looking into.

A number of other letters followed. Some were supportive: "Our investigations disclosed that a great number of small children are more terrified by cartoons than by anything else they see on the screen... I sat next to a child of six, who the moment the cartoon began shut his eyes tightly, put her hands over her ears and said to me: 'Tell me when it's over, Miss.' The next film was a Western, full of violence and killing which she seemed to enjoy thoroughly", read a letter from a former member of a departmental committee looking into the effects of films on children. Some refuted the claims, such as the letter that pointed out that the average child viewer "will most certainly smile through his tears at the end when he sees Bambi living a calm life again having survived the many trials of the forest", before concluding that "Surely if a child is allowed to watch only films about cowboys and Indians, which rarely arouse any depth of feeling, be it sorrow or gladness, he will grow up to be an extremely insensitive person?"

"By all means persuade film critics to attend the newsreel cinemas. An hour's uninhibited laughter would allow them to criticize the films of Ingmar Bergman without being swallowed in his swamps of misery and self-pity", added another reader.

In the 3 February edition a letter from none other than John Halas was printed:

Sir, - Miss Pamela Hansford Johnson, in her letter published in The Times on January 28, expresses her concern at the "nightmarish cruelty" in certain cartoon entertainment films shown in the cinemas. All those concerned professionally in the production of animated films will, I am sure, want to point out to her that by far the greater part of this branch of film-making is, like live-action production, free from the kind of violence to which she rightly objects. Only a small fraction of animation nowadays is, in fact, produced for purely entertainment purposes in cinemas and on television.

The question of violence is one which must always be watched in the cinema and on television, as elsewhere. The particular bearing this has on the drawn characters shown in animated films as distinct from the real people and animals who appear as characters in live-action films, is that the simplest minded audience recognizes that these creatures are wholly unreal and possess, by the convention of the medium, an infinite resilience however drastic the treatment they may receive.

The laughter with which the audience responds to the ill-treatment of these creatures of fantasy depends on this knowledge, and is basically entirely different from the reaction that same audience would give were the creatures on the screen real and therefore capable of actual suffering. Many notable fairy tales and folk tales reveal the greatest cruelty, but the perpetual vitality of magic restores life to these creatures of fantasy, and so, perhaps, restores some confidence to the vulnerable human beings who originally invented them, partly for the purpose of giving themselves courage in the face of the actual sufferings of real life.

The violence in many, particularly American, cartoons keeps within the legitimate bounds of fantasy, but the wholly ugly, vicious, and gratuitous violence shown in a minority of these cartoons must, of course, be condemned.

Halas's argument was backed up by Roger Manvell, who stated that "Cartoon characters in a serious dramatic context can achieve active sympathy and emotional identification in their audience just as readily as live actors if that becomes the intention of the film, as was shown in Mr. John Halas's own cartoon version of Orwell's Animal Farm."

The whole controversy is plainly the product of a different era. This was before such landmarks of animated violence as Heavy Metal and Akira, The Simpsons and South Park, or Happy Tree Friends and Akumi.

I'm intrigued by John Halas's condemnation of the "wholly ugly, vicious, and gratuitous violence shown in a minority of these cartoons"; he clearly had specific works in mind and I can't help but wonder what they were. I'm also wondering if he approved of Heavy Metal, which his studio would work on two decades later.

To close this post here is a second letter sent in by Johnson and printed in the 11 February edition, in which she elaborates on her views:

Sir. - I was afraid that discussion of brutal and degraded cartoon films might be obfuscated by references to Bambi and fairy-tales. It is important to keep to the point. Bambi may be alarming, but it is in intention neither brutal nor vulgar: some fairy-tales may provoke a nightmare or two, but their enrichment of the child's imagination far outweighs their damaging qualities. I have nothing against Red Riding Hood, Westerns, or The Three Little Pigs, nor did I ever give my children, in place of toy forts and soldiers (as in Saki's The Toys of Peace), a model of municipal baths, fitted out with Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, and John Stuart Mill.

My complaint is quite specifically against the deliberate exploitation of sheer brutality. several anonymous correspondents (what are they afraid of?) have tried to blackmail me by deploring my lack of humour. I am quite unmoved by this sort of thing. The moment I find myself rocking with laughter at the spectacle of torture in any form, graphic or otherwise, I shall go to a psychiatrist.

As for correspondents who point out to me that in this best of all possible worlds the cartoons turn out all right in the end, may I ask what their emotions would be at the sight of a cartoon depicting animal A driving a nail through a block of wood into the skull of animal B, A then being caught and sentenced at the end? The cartoons I am talking about are as bad as this, quite as bad: they are part and parcel of the terrifying wave of violence which is sweeping all over the western world.

Let us stop making ourselves comfortable by trying to equate it with The Little Mermaid and cowboys and Indians, and start considering whether in this, as in all things, there is not a question of degree, and whether we ought not to set our minds towards defining it.

Seventies Richard Williams Studio adverts: Count Pushkin and Discovery Train

Two more adverts from the Richard Williams Studio, this time from the 1970s.


Here's a remarkably elaborate advert for Count Pushkin Vodka, titled Imperial Guard Cavalry. The BFI database claims that it was released in 1976, although Denis Gifford's British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography gives the year as 1977. It was directed by Russell Hall.

"The time: eighteen-hundred and sixty. The place: Kazan, in old imperial Russia."


"The men are cadets of the Imperial Guard Cavalry."


"The day begins. Sabre training - a cadet learns the cuts, the parries and defenses"

Lance against lance, mounted. Lance against sword, dismounted."


"The ability to pluck a ring from the ground at full gallop."

"Day after day, until the youth becomes a man, the man a soldier."



"Winter comes. The cadet learns to survive the most terrible of Siberian blizzards."







"With Spring come the final manoeuvres and the ultimate test of horsemanship: to open rank at the canter, and close at the gallop."



"The spirit has been forged, never to falter."




"And at the graduation ball of Saint Petersberg, the proudest moment of his life: the cadet, now an officer, receives his epaulettes from the Emperor himself."



"Nazdrovia! A toast to Count Pushkin - the noblest name in Vodka!"











Next is a 1979 advert listed in the BFI database simply as Discovery Train. Again, it was directed by Russell Hall.


"They're gathered from the past, to tell our story..."



"...of surival, courage..."


"...hardship, heritage..."



"...discovery, challange..."




"...good times..."



"...struggles, and conflict..."





"...to let us all discover the greatestcountry in the world."


"Discovery Train: it's Canada on the move! Catch it!"