Arthur Christmas: Aardman and Sony go transatlantic

Earlier this year I made a post about the UK/US co-production Gnomeo & Juliet taking a look at exactly what either country was responsible for during the making of the film. In this post I'll be doing the same for the similarly transatlantic Arthur Christmas, a co-production between Aardman and Sony Pictures Animation.

The film was directed by Sarah Smith, whose only prior involvement with animation appears to have been working as a writer on the TV series I Am Not an Animal; according to IMDB she has previously worked primarily as a producer on various live-action TV series such as The League of Gentlemen. Her co-writer on Arthur Christmas was fellow I Am Not an Animal scribe Peter Baynham, who also wrote for I'm Alan Partridge, Big Train, Brass Eye, Borat and, apparently, those "It's not leafy, it's too gorgeous" Pot Noodle adverts, which he starred in. So, then, Arthur Christmas has a UK director and - like Gnomeo - a writing crew culled largely from the world of British live action comedy.

Taking a look at the film's IMDB page, we see that the main cast is largely British - James McAvoy (who, funnily enough, voiced both Arthur and Gnomeo), Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent, Michael Palin, Imelda Staunton and others.

The American talent, then, appears to be in the animation department. Amongst the senior animators we find Wee Brian (Flushed Away and a few DreamWorks films); Joel Foster (The Incredible Hulk, Night in the Museum 2 and other special effects films); Jean-Dominique Fievet (a French-born animator who has worked primarily on American films such as Open Season 2); Aldo Gagliardi (who appears to have started out in Spanish and Italian animated films before going on to animate for US productions such as Iron Man 2, sometimes with the London company Double Negative); David Anthony Gibson (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and several photorealistic talking animals from Tippett Studio); Boris Hiestand (a Bristol-based Dutchman who has worked on European productions such as Asterix and the Vikings and Aardman's upcoming The Pirates!); Andrew Lawson (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Tale of Despereaux and others); Jeremy Lazare (who has worked with Cinesite Europe and MPC on the Harry Potter series); Matthew Meyer (the recent Alvin, Yogi Bear and Smurfsfilms); Ryan Page (I Am Legend, Open Season 2 and more); Tim Pixton (various Rhythm & Hues projects such as Yogi Bear and The Wolfman); Alan Short (British wildlife documentaries and a short film called Fly). The storyboard and character design teams likewise consist mainly, but not exclusively, of American animation veterans.

And there we have it - like Gnomeo, a collaboration between generally British writers and actors and generally American animators.

Alfred Wurmser

A couple of weeks ago I came across a second-hand copy of The Human Sum, a 1957 book on overpopulation which I bought mainly because of the lovely illustrations by Alfred G. Wurmser, such as the one pictured above. Out of curiosity I decided to do a little more research on the cartoonist.

Image of Alfred Wurmser from the BBC website. Original caption: "Alfred Wurmser, designer of animated captions, altering one of the caption cards used to show the state of the parties before the swingometer was invented."

According to IMDB, Alfred Gaston Wurmser was born in Vienna in 1912. His earliest involvement with British television appears to have been assisting ventriloquist Francis Coudrill on the fifties children's variety show Whirligig (according to this fansite). Coudrill's act, revolving around a cowboy named Hank and his friends, mixed traditional ventriloquism with a form of cutout puppetry similar to the technique used by John Ryan in Captain Pugwash - presumably Wurmser's contribution was to the latter segments, as it is the same basic concept as the primitive TV graphics demonstrated above.

Indeed, Wurmser became so closely associated with these sliding captions that his name became a byword for them. TV Studio History quotes Patrick Moore on the matter:

In pursuit of "props" we went to see Alfred Wurmser, a charming Viennese who lived in Goldhawk Road. He had a dog named Till, half-Alsatian and half-wolf, who weighed about a ton but was under the strange delusion that he was a lap-dog. Alfred made moving diagrams out of cardboard, and he soon became enthusiastic, so that we continued to use the "wurmsers" until he decided to return to his native Austria. The original title of our programme was to be Star Map, but we changed it to The Sky at Night almost at once - to make sure that the new title went into the Radio Times.

As an aside, I've always been a little unsure of what to call series like Captain Pugwash, which are generally classed as animation but were technically made using live action puppetry. Perhaps it's time we revived this piece of terminology...

IMDB states that Wurmser also worked on Jackanory, Great Captains and 1951 versions of Aladdin and The Tempest. According to this fansite for the puppet series Sara & Hoppity, he also worked on three programmes narrated by Jean Ford: Christmas Story, Clara the Little Red Car and Janie's Toys.

More about him can be read at the LE Confidential blog, which has a fifties magazine article about him posted.


Here are some more of Alfred Wurmser's illustrations from The Human Sum:

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a 1998 adaptation of Chaucer's masterwork presided over by S4C (whose contributions to animation I summerised here). It is divided into three episodes, each containing three stories, alongside linking sequences featuring the pilgrim storytellers and even a stop-motion Chaucer as narrator. A DVD was released in 2005, but is unfortunately now out of print.
The series was a collaboration between Moscow-based Christmas Films, who animated the linking sequences and some of the stories, and various British studios. The first of the UK-animated sequences is The Nun's Priest's Tale, directed by Ashley Potter and Dave Antrobus of aka Pizazz (now Studio AKA).















Next is The Knight's Tale, also by aka Pizazz, but this time directed by Dave Antrobus and Mic Graves.

















And finally, the most acclaimed sequence in the whole series - Joanna Quinn's interpretation of The Wife of Bath's Tale. This one is available online; I've embedded it below.

Two years of blogging

Today is this blog's second birthday - fancy that, and it only seems like yesterday I started it. As with last year, I decided to take a look though my stats to see what my readers have been looking at...

The most-viewed pages on this blog are Gifford's '70s, Gifford's '40s, Save UK Animation, Richard Taylor's Swimsong, Richard Williams ads for Levi's, Jōvan and Limara, British anime, the closure of Cosgrove Hall, Joe & Petunia, Gifford's '80s and obscure adult comedy series.

The search terms that brought the most people to my blog are "Cosgrove Hall", "Daddy's Little Bit of Dresden China", "Soloflex", the blog's URL, "Halas and Batchelor", "Owl and the Pussycat 2011" (I'm not sure what these people were searching for, but I'm afraid the only version of The Owl and the Pussy-cat I've covered so far was from 1952), "BBC2 ident", "BIC Perfume" and "history of British animation".

Thanks go out to my top referrers: Cartoon Brew, Peter Gray's Cartoons and Comics and Asterisk Animation.

The picture at the top of my post, incidentally, is from John J. Miller's Act V, and is the picture most clicked by people who find my blog via Google images.

Now, on with year three...