The first 'animated' picture in Britain was not strictly animated, but a film of lightning cartoonist, Tom Merry, drawing a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm, made by Birt Acres at the end of 1895. There
were several such productions around the turn of the century, together with
trick films such as Walter R. Booth's The Devil in the Studio
(1901), but the first animated film that could properly claim this name was
probably Dolly's Toys (1901), a mixture of live action and stop-motion
puppet animation believed to be the work of Arthur Melbourne-Cooper who
went on to make many similar films such as Dreams of Toyland (1908).
Alongside these came the cut-out mixed with lightning sketch films made by
Booth and, later, Anson Dyer, Dudley Buxton and others.
Surviving examples date mainly from the Great War and include the John Bull's
Animated Sketchbook series from 1915 and 1916, as well as Lancelot
Speed's Bully Boy titles (1914). Though the cel system had been
devised by John Randolph Bray in the mid-1910s, cut-out and
three-dimensional models were still the norm for British animation -
Speed even produced a 26-episode cut-out serial, The Wonderful
Adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfred in 1921 - right up to 1924 and the
advent of Bonzo, based on the character created by G.E. Studdy.
Anson Dyer's The Story of the
Flag (1927) would have been Britain's first feature-length animated film,
about an hour long, but producer Archibald Nettlefold lost confidence,
and it was finally issued as six short films. The use of colour processes in
British animation was constrained by the fact that Disney had a monopoly
on the use of three-colour Technicolor until 1934. Thus, although systems
such as Dunning Colour were employed in the early part of the decade, the
first three-colour British animated film, Fox Hunt, by Anthony
Gross and Hector Hoppin, didn't appear until 1935.
Sponsorship has been a crucial factor in the
continuing development of British animation. In the 1930s, it came in the form
of the General Post Office, whose GPO Film Unit allowed filmmakers free
reign to be innovative and experimental in the cause of promoting Post Office
services. The Ministry of Information, which took over from the Post
Office as the chief government sponsor when war broke out in 1939, enabled
Halas and Batchelor, Larkins and several other smaller companies
to continue their activities for the duration. Post-war financial support very
often came from commercial companies, though the British Film Institute's
Experimental Film Fund and Production Board put money into a number
of titles, as did the Arts Council. The most important non-commercial
sponsor, however, was Channel Four, where, during the 1980s and 1990s,
animation had its own Commissioning Editor, on a par with other television
subjects such as sport and drama.
In the 1930s, animation was dominated by
figures like Len Lye and Norman McLaren. Lye's A Colour
Box (1935) and Rainbow Dance (1936) remain classics of the animator's
craft, while McLaren, having made Camera Makes Whoopee (1935) and
Hell Unltd (with Helen Biggar, 1936) produced the wonderfully mad
Love On The Wing (1938), intended as an advertisement for air mail
services, but banned by the Post Office for its erotic imagery. John
Halas made his first film in Britain, Music Man, in 1938, and set up
Halas and Batchelor with his wife, Joy, in 1940. Halas and
Batchelor were among the most prolific, and certainly the longest-lived of
any British animation company by the time they closed in 1983. They successfully
combined working for sponsors, notably British government departments and
advertising companies, with more personal projects, a combination employed by
animators throughout Britain's cinematic history.
After the Second World War, J. Arthur
Rank attempted to create a British rival to Disney by bringing
David Hand (director of Bambi) to England, in 1946, to run G-B
Animation. The animators, many of them ex-servicemen, made advertising films
as well as two popular series, Animaland (1948-50) and Musical
Paintbox (1949-50), before the unit was closed in 1950 because, even with
the revenue from its commercial activities, it proved
uneconomical.
The 1950s and 1960s saw another creative spurt
when the British Film Institute's Experimental Film Fund funded
films like Peter King's 13 Cantos Of Hell (1955), Peter and
Joan Foldes's A Short Vision (1956) and Animated Genesis
(1960) and Mel Calman's The Arrow (1969). In the same period,
animators such as Bob Godfrey left the older established groups to set up
on their own (Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit (1959) was made for
Godfrey's company, Biographic), and George Dunning and
Richard Williams arrived from Canada. Dunning produced innovative work
such as the feature length Yellow Submarine (1968) and Damon The
Mower (1973), while Williams developed a very personal style,
probably best remembered from the opening credits of Tony Richardson's
The Charge Of The Light Brigade (1968).
The successor to the Experimental Film
Fund, the BFI's Production Board, continued to fund animation,
notably some of the work of the Quay Brothers, e.g., Street Of
Crocodiles (1986), co-funded by Channel Four, and Vera Neubauer's
Animation For Live Action (1978) and The Decision (1981). Channel
Four also commissioned Diana Jackson's The Snowman (1982),
Aardman's Conversation Pieces and Sweet Disaster series (both
1983), Animation City's radical The Victor (1985), the four-part
Blind Justice series (1987) - including Murders Most Foul and
Some Protection - as well as Phil Mulloy's grotesque shorts such
as the Cowboys and The Ten Commandments series (both 1996).
The establishing of animation courses in film
schools and art colleges in the 1970s and '80s was the foundation for a burst of
creativity which coincided with a huge growth in the number of women animation
directors. While women have worked in great numbers in animation studios in the
more routine jobs such as paint and trace, few - with the notable exception of
the all-woman co-operative, Leeds Animation Workshop - had had the
opportunity to develop their own projects. Many of these were very personal,
such as Karen Watson Daddy's Little Bit Of Dresden China (West
Surrey College of Art and Design, now Surrey Institute of Art and
Design, 1988), while others, like Joanna Quinn's Girls' Night Out
(1987) and Candy Guard's Fatty Issues (1988) combined
humour with social observation. More idiosyncratic was the work of
Alison de Vere, who started with Halas and Batchelor in the 1950s,
worked on films for a variety of organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, but
really came into her own with productions like Café Bar (1975) and
Black Dog (1987).
In the last twenty years, the variety of styles
and formats developed, and the technical skill employed by British animators has
become renowned worldwide. Aardman's Nick Park won the first
of his three Oscars for Creature Comforts in the Lip Synch series
(1989). The success of this and the three Wallace and Gromit films, A Grand
Day Out (1990), The Wrong Trousers (1993), and A Close Shave
(1995), encouraged DreamWorks to co-produce the feature-length Chicken Run
(2000). Daniel Greaves was awarded his Oscar for
Manipulation (1991), while Alison Snowden and David Fine won theirs for Bob's Birthday (1993), which was the basis for their later
series, Bob and Margaret (1998).
Elaine Burrows
|
