It was a Mickey Mouse cartoon, Mickey's Gala Premiere, which was cut short
when war was declared and BBC Television closed down on 1 September 1939 - the
same film re-opened the service on 7 June 1946. Animation on British television
was for many years almost always bought in from America; MGM's Tom and Jerry
(first shown in US cinemas in the 1930s) propped up schedules for decades, as
did Warner Bros' Looney Tunes, starring characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy
Duck.
The time-consuming process of filming 25 successive drawings per second to
produce the illusion of motion could not be afforded by British television in
the '50s. Instead anthropomorphised animals appeared via the theatre tradition
of puppetry, simply and cheaply reproduced in TV studios. String puppets Muffin
the Mule, Andy Pandy and Pinky and Perky and glove puppet Sooty were among early TV's biggest stars.
Gerry Anderson was filming traditional string puppets made from papier maché in The Adventures of Twizzle (ITV, 1958-59), but his productions became
increasingly sophisticated and expensive. Explosive special effects in series
like Thunderbirds (ITV, 1965-66) revolutionised TV puppetry in the 1960s.
Animators like John Ryan (creator of pirate Captain Pugwash, BBC, 1957-75) were still filming manually-operated cardboard assemblies in the early '60s, but
the first moves into 'stop frame' animation - a complex technique somewhere
between puppets and cartoon animation - were made by small independent
filmmakers like Bob Bura and John Hardwick (who filmed Gordon Murray's Trumpton stories) and Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin (creators of Bagpuss, BBC, 1974).
The BBC sourced animations from such contractors - only the simplest animations
for news or schools programmes were made in-house by their graphics
department.
Output from the US animation factory run by former Tom and Jerry animators
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera plugged gaps in UK children's schedules.
Huckleberry Hound (US, 1958-62) was their first cartoon success, shown in the UK
by ITV from 1960. Hits like Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and Wacky
Races followed. By the '70s, most Hanna-Barbera shows were made by Japanese animators. Parents have often complained about cultural erosion by 'cheap and
trashy' American cartoons - as far back as 1969, BBC Head of Children's, Monica
Sims, defended them as "first class entertainment... so expensive to make that
we could never afford to make our own".
Perhaps spurred on by the arrival of colour TV, the '70s saw an upswing in
activity by independent British animators. Ivor Wood at FilmFair had learned his trade working in France on The Magic Roundabout (BBC, 1965-77) and now produced
The Wombles (BBC, 1973-75), Paddington (BBC, 1975-75) and Postman Pat (BBC,
1981-2). Cosgrove Hall, subsidised by ITV company Thames, had successes
including Dangermouse (ITV, 1981-92). Bob Godfrey became famous for his energetic, 'wobbly' style, which came about because he could only afford to draw
his cartoons on paper rather than clear plastic 'cels' - series included Roobarb
and Custard (BBC, 1974-75) and Henry's Cat (BBC, 1983-87). The '80s saw attempts
to kickstart an animation cluster in Wales, with Welsh-language channel S4C
funding Superted (S4C/BBC 1983-87; 1990) and Fireman Sam (BBC/S4C, 1987-90;
1994) which became global hits when translated into English.
Most animation today is computer-based - ReBoot (ITV, 1995-7) was the first
fully 3D computer-generated series, made in Canada by a team of four British
animators, primarily for the US market. Two-dimensional cartoons are no longer
created by tracing and painting but assembled on computer screens using software
like Director and After Effects.
Longstanding puppet/animation 'properties' now do worldwide business,
character rights owned by concerns like Entertainment Rights (Postman Pat and
Basil Brush), Chorion (Noddy, Mr Men) and HIT (Bob the Builder). Broadcast revenues can constitute just 20 per cent of these series' total income - 80 per
cent coming from associated merchandising. Such revenues have meant many
remakes; even Muffin the Mule is due to be relaunched as a digital-age donkey.
Alistair McGown
Further reading
Home, Anna, Into the Box of Delights: a history of children's television,
BBC, 1993. esp Chapter 2: 'Puppets and Pre-school Programmes'
Tibballs, Geoff, The Golden Age of Children's Television, Titan Books, 1991.
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