Paul Vester's Abductees

Paul Vester's 1995 film Abductees is a mixed-media piece. It contains live-action interviews with people who claim to have been abducted by aliens; when the abductees provide drawings of their experiences, the film uses animation - in an array of different styles - to bring their illustrations to life.

I remember reading a review of Abductees years ago that, summerising the film, said something along the lines of "either fascinating or hilarious, depending on how you view the subject matter" This seems to be taking the film too literally: the short's not a straightforward documentary about alien abduction, but rather a meditation on the emotions, sensations and iconography associated with the subject. Anyone going in expecting a flying saucer documentary may be in for a disappointment as this is really a film about humans, not aliens.

Clare Kitson's book on Channel 4 animation has a chapter devoted to the film, describing how the illustrations by alien abductees of their memories tied in with Vester's interest in outsider art, and how he had trouble getting the film funded as broadcasters wanted a film that'd come to a conclusion as to whether or not the interviewees were really abducted by aliens, as opposed to the more subjective piece that the film ended up as.

Abductees is fortunate enough to be available on at least two DVD compilations: in the UK as part of British Animation Classics Volume 2, and in the US as part of Cartoon Noir.

Denis Gifford's British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography

A book I've drawn on a few times for this blog is British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography by Denis Gifford. It really is a tremendous piece of work, attempting to cover every single British animation to have a cinema release - be it a full-length feature, a short, a public information film or an advert. In all, the book lists one thousand, two hundred and eighty-four films, with information on all of them.

The book begins with a brief (eight-page) history of British animation, which makes for an interesting comparison with other such histories. Most notably, more than half of Gifford's overview focuses on an area that tends to be glossed over by other writers: the pre-World War II (and pre-Halas & Batchelor) period. Gifford begins with nineteenth century live-action films of the cartoonist Tom Merry drawing caricatures before the camera, and then moves on to true animation with the work of Walter R. Booth (also discussing America's J. Stuart Blackton and France's Émile Cohl for context). Gifford goes on to touch upon George Ernest Studdy, Lancelot Speed ("the real Founding Father of what soon came to be called the British School of animation"), Anson Dyer, Dudley Buxton ("who first animated the sinking of the Lusitania in all its terrifying drama, three years before Winsor McCay tackled the same subject in the United states. Yet according to film history, McCay's version was the world's first dramatic cartoon film!"), Sid Griffiths and Joe Noble before reaching the era of Halas & Batchelor, Biographic and TVC.

Unfortunately, the book is hard to get hold of nowadays: at the time of writing only four copies are turned up by a search on BookFinder.com, each of them priced at more than forty pounds.

Over the next few months I hope to write a series of posts using Gifford's book to create a decade-by-decade overview of British animation.

Further posts in this series:

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9

Halas & Batchelor's Snip and Snap

One of the more obscure British animated series is Snip and Snap, a stop-motion production from Halas & Batchelor that premiered in 1960. According to Vivien Halas and Paul Wells' book Halas & Batchelor Cartoons: An Animated History, the series was sponsored by the American broadcaster ABC.

The series was animated by Thoki Yenn (working under the pseudonym of "Thok"), a Danish toymaker whom Halas had met during a lecture visit to Copenhagen, and boasted writing from Elisabeth Beresford, who would later create The Wombles. The main characters are Snip (an ordinary pair of scissors brought to life by animation - shades of Svankmajer), a little paper dog named Snap, and a larger dog named Snarl who serves as the antagonist of the series but is not as vicious as his name implies - he comes across more as a selfish lug. Snip is able to bring other objects to life; for example, turning some cotton wool into a animated cat to disrupt a dog show that Snarl has rigged in his own favour.

The series' opening sequence shows a pair of live-action hands cutting Snap out of paper while a woman's voice sings "Snip the magic scissors that go snip, snip, snip and cuts out Snap the dog who goes yap, yap, yap". Shades here of Fingerbobs, the seventies puppet series.

A full episode, titled Top Dogs, is included in the French DVD compilation Halas & Batchelor: Le best of "so British"!; a clip from the same episode can be viewed on the Halas & Batchelor Collection website.

The Big Cartoon Database has the most thorough history of the series that I've come across so far:

This TV series aired in Britain under the title "Snip The Magic Scissors," and featured three paper dogs: Snap, Snarl and Sniff.

This series ran for 26 episodes.

Before the release of the series, Halas and Batchelor promoted it as a new technique marking the transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional object animation.

Paper sculptures were made in origami and kirigami by Danish artist Thoki Yenn, working under the pseudonym Thok. The characters' figures, made from folded cards, were animated using single-frame shooting. Story settings were often compositions of origami backgrounds and everyday objects.

To increase awareness for "Snip And Snap>," [sic] Halas and Batchelor produced sets of flat model sheets that the public could make into figures from the series.

The detail about the series going under a different title in Britain is interesting - entering "Snip The Magic Scissors" into Google turns up only a handful of mentions, so if the BCDB is right in this detail then the British airing seems to be very poorly documented

UPDATE: Toonhound now has a page on the series. As a correction to the above, it turns out that the "selfish lug" who rigs the dog show is not Snarl but Sniff, a second antagonist. My mistake.





















Part of another episode, Snapshots, has been posted onto YouTube by Vivien Halas: