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...

Cara Confused

In compiling this blog I've begun to really miss the days of gorgeous hand-drawn ads from the Richard Williams studio and its contemporaries. With even Joanna Quinn's delicately pencilled grizzly - the last remnant of a dying tradition - replaced by a CGI koala, I'll take any attempt to keep the flame alive, no matter how small.

The Confused.com adverts by Dan & Jason of New York-based Hornet Inc, while digitally animated, at least have their roots in a hand-drawn aesthetic. They're not the most sophisticated works around but they're vibrant, bouncy and get a surprising amount of mileage out of the site's original, rather static logo (top). Good on Hornet for keeping some 2D work going in Britain's commercial breaks.












The Hornet Inc website has caricatures of the studio's staff drawn in the style of the ads:

More late 4mations idents

Some more of the late nineties 4mations idents contributed by students (see here for my first post about them).