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Pioneering British animator Anson Dyer (who was active from the First World War to the 1950s) made a number of satirical Shakespeare cut-out animations from 1919-20, including 'Amlet, Oh'phelia, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew.
Oh'phelia and a fragment of Othello are all that survive today, and on this evidence it's a sad loss: although primitive both technically and conceptually, they're immensely charming and often genuinely witty, with some gags that wouldn't have disgraced a Tex Avery cartoon made a couple of decades later (a snail's shell whose occupant has recently perished hanging out a 'To Let' sign; the censor popping up to examine a title beginning "This is indeed a bloo..." before departing mollified when the sentence ends "...ming business", adding "(Shakespeare)" as if to emphasise the line's essential moral worthiness).
Any connection with Shakespeare, though, is at best tenuous and at worst irrelevant - the few references to the text are there purely as punchlines to a visual joke ("A very palpable hit!" comments the King's parrot as Ophelia pelts his master with vegetables), madness in both 'Amlet and Ophelia is exploited purely for the purposes of knockabout comedy, Ophelia's falling into the river is entirely down to her own carelessness, and nothing truly tragic happens to anyone beyond a temporary loss of dignity. That said, Oh'phelia has as much visual and conceptual wit as any other surviving British Shakespeare film of its era, and rather more than most.
Michael Brooke
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Complete film (13:16)
