British Television Animation 1997-2010

Drawing Comic Tradition

V. Norris

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137330949
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

British Television Animation 1997-2010 charts a moment in TV history where UK comic animation graduated from the margins as part of a post-Simpsons broadcast landscape. Shows like Monkey Dust, Modern Toss and Stressed Eric not only reflected the times but they ushered in an era of ambition and belief in British adult animation.

1

From There to Here – First, Second and Third Wave Animation

To proceed to highlight what Third Wave Animation might be, we need to establish what comprises each of the eras that have led to this point. In doing so this chapter will perform a slightly different function from the ones that follow, in that it will be focused more on an overview of distinct periods of production and will define what typifies each of these eras. Here we will discuss three definite movements as part of a historical framework detailing the evolution of UK TV animation and we will outline the sharp distinctions between different periods in order to establish what it is I mean by Third Wave Animation.

As raised previously in the Introduction, comedy as much as animation will be a central preoccupation here. For as the amount of narrative-based animation work significantly increased through the 1990s in the wake of American shows like The Simpsons and its descendants, it became apparent during this time that British animation work was reactive to these successes and we can see that the moment under discussion here has to be considered as both emancipation and accession. The freedoms that were promised with these animated television shows appeared to be contained within specific boundaries. For these post-Simpsons UK narratives claimed to be challenging, tonally and thematically, but the reiteration of traditional sitcom and sketch show forms demonstrated that a more pronounced industrial expediency ultimately informed this entire moment. The term adult animation – one so often lazily ascribed to these new works throughout the late 1990s onwards – whilst undoubtedly inferring a sense of confidence in the possibilities of the medium, did at the same time reveal a problematic set of limitations that we will discuss across each of the following chapters in more depth.

Here issues of agency, industry and animation’s shifting relationship within British culture need to be considered as foreground and ongoing background themes throughout the book. This Third Wave of mainstream animation production, 1997–2010, was characterised by (and was informed by) a number of very specific factors, which meant this moment was notably different to what had gone before. The texts under study throughout this book can now be seen as markers of their times. They embodied the aesthetics and ethos of the contemporary postmodern cultural condition as they were revelatory of animation’s recent elevation in terms of their status and through their performative role as ironic, cultural commentary. As a sub-narrative that will inform all of the chapters directly and indirectly, this is undoubtedly animation that spoke as much of the past as it did the present.

It is important to note that Third Wave Animation also contributes to a picture of a hitherto ignored aspect of British TV comedy. Its shape tells us much about tone, taste and comic trends. It processes a time in live-action, as well as animated comedy when comedians and performers took on the challenges of embracing humour that reported on our culture and society, but also set about challenging perceived orthodoxies within comedy. That Third Wave Animation can be seen as post-politically correct comedy suggests a range of issues that will be explored throughout the rest of the book in more detail. What I will be ascertaining here, however, is the nature of millennial mainstream animation in a post-deregulated broadcast environment by posing a number of questions about how functionality and genuine artistic intent converged to shape the way animation was presented and constructed in the first decade of the 21st century on UK TV.

First Wave Animation: energy and movement (1955–1978)

The idea of compromise appears built into British television animation from its inception. Burrow’s précis of British cinema, and latterly television, animation adheres to common contemporary suspicions around the mainstream form as being constructed solely for the province of children and advertising (1986, p. 273). She notes the importance of the arrival of commercial television in September 1955 as a revitalisation of the British animation industry, yet she also observes that this moment, historically, has also been equated with a cheapening and diminution of the British form. This perception has been intensified through the demand for ‘advertising and entertainment’ work that dominates this period and, undoubtedly as a result of this, more personal television projects within the landscape of the 1950s were sublimated or sidelined (Burrows, 1986, pp. 280–281). This situation was also recognised by Darley, who observed that advertising promoted a new-found ubiquity of the animation medium through jingles, idents, brands and, what he refers to as, ‘the information film’ – which is an extension from the propaganda shorts of the 1930s and 1940s and a communication tool utilised for educative purposes by the Central Office of Information that became a large part of British visual culture from the 1950s onwards (1997, p. 50). Walker too saw that by 1957 the industry had expanded radically to meet those demands as, ‘In Britain alone there were about forty producers of cartoon films ... [that] sprung up with the arrival of ITV’ (2008, para 8). This emphasis cast the arrival of television as a boon and a curse for the animation industry of the 1950s and 1960s. John Halas – with his wife Joy Batchelor, arguably Britain’s most prolific generators of animation – argued that this moment was in fact a revival that refocused the animation trade and that went some way to undermine the malaise enforced by the dominance of US animation – Britain’s ‘inferiority complex’ as he put it – that they had seen characterise the UK industry (‘Personality of the Month – John Halas’, 1957, p. 3).

Functionality undoubtedly appears as a key determinant in this tentative, highly fragmented first wave of production that bleeds from cinema production into television. Certainly this is apparent when casting an eye over the vast range of work produced during this time. What emerges when considering the various historical narratives that surround British animation, in cinema and in television, is that they tend to uniformly express a story of sporadic, but notable, touchstones of production. This can be seen in the observations of Anson Dyer’s work as an independent, as a supplier of advertising film and as intersecting with music hall and musical forms (DeVries & Mul, 2009, pp. 11–29), through to J. Arthur Rank’s invitation to David Hand in 1944 for him to consolidate UK animation via a Disney-style production method (Macnab, 1993, pp. 212–261), or via Halas and Batchelor’s relationship with the Ministry of Information and COI (Wells, 2006, pp. 90–92), or indeed through Len Lye’s abstracted 1930s collaborations with the GPO film unit (Armes, 1978, p. 138). These all appear now as fixed points within Britain’s historical production story and, more often than not, British animation has been shaped by what Bendazzi terms ‘individualists’ liberated through the freedom of ‘poverty’ (1994, p. 25).

Early 20th century British cinema work paralleled European production in that it was propelled by small-scale, experimental efforts conducted on limited budgets and away from any support by large production/exhibition/distribution combines, which the American system has traditionally favoured. Thus Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, Dudley Buxton, Sid Griffiths and Dyer et al. all worked in stop-motion, cut-out and celluloid forms to make short films that remained distributed within the UK cinema market and owed as much to newspaper strip origins as the fine line portraits of Winsor McCay and latter within the work of the more industrial creatives such as Otto Messmer. Of the UK studios that did find moderate success, as Burrows states, were those that were formed in the 1940s:

... British Animated Productions; British Industrial Films ... Analysis Films; The British Instructional Films animation unit; Diagram Films; The Mack Cartoon Unit; Pinschewer Films; Signal Films ... were among the many names which survived longer or shorter time by turning out advertising, educational or instructional films, all financed by outside sponsorship, with varying degrees of artistry. (1986, p. 280)

Only Halas and Batchelor and the Larkins studios – established in 1939 and ran by ex-German POW Peter Sachs from 1941 onwards – went on to survive as institutions across several decades and continued to dominate the industry in terms of output and ubiquity (Wells, 2006, p. 158). These foundations of First Wave TV Animation extend from European traditions and both overseers had served with Hungarian filmmaker George Pal before the breakout of World War II. Halas’s shrewdness and understanding of ‘the importance of having the factory behind you’, in particular cemented his own outfit in terms of versatility and ubiquity (Halas cited by Holliss, 1985, p. 22). As undoubtedly the most well-organised, expansive and prolific industrial template, Halas and Batchelor embodied the adaptability and pragmatism that typifies First Wave UK animation, working in a rapidly evolving industry landscape hand-in-hand with creative progress. This ethos can be seen throughout the late 1930s into the 1940s in their contributions to propaganda shorts, information cartoons and cinema advertising alongside their more personal, experimental projects such as The Magic Canvas (1949) and The Owl and the Pussycat (1953). By the very beginning of 1959 they had doubled their previous year’s production schedule to 39 one-reel shorts for theatrical and television exhibition and had initiated alongside ten industrial reels, some 250 television commercials (Maucer, 1958, p. 4). They embraced not only celluloid animation – a form favoured for its speed and manageability in industrial situations – but also variations on stop-motion, glass work and cut-out figurative and non-figurative forms. In their commercial guise the company supplied public relation films typified by titles such as Invisible Exchange (1956) for Esso and All Lit Up (1957) for the Gas Council, and children’s TV programmes such as Snip and Snap (1960), Foo-Foo (1960) and Habatale (1960) as part of an ongoing funding relationship with US TV network ABC. Halas and Batchelor also internationally distributed shows like Do-Do: The Kid from Outer Space (T5: 1965–1970), along with a raft of TV adverts and titles for films such as Passport to Pimlico (1949), animating Maurice Binder’s title designs for Surprise Package (1960) and Once More With Feeling (1960), providing lettering, maps and effects for The Guns of Navarone (1960) and animation effects for the Titanus film The Thief of Baghdad (1961). Kitson notes that Halas and Batchelor’s prominence also had a lasting effect in training a generation of young animators across not only a range of techniques but also in positioning them to be able to meet the demands of this profound industry shift (2008, p. 15).

As effective as this model was, there was still room for smaller, less ambitious, studios like Larkins, which ran alongside them and preferred to remain predominantly in the commercial sector, initiating long term-relationships with the likes of Barclays, British Petroleum, Coca-Cola, Fisons and Max Factor, among others (Rider, 1963, p. 35). The sheer amount of activity engendered by TV soon transmitted to other UK animation pioneers. Thus to colour this milieu even further, we have to consider the contributions of personnel such as ex-Larkins artists Bob Godfrey and Keith Learner, establishers of Biographic Films, whose ‘Crompton Bulbs’ advert was shown on ITV on its opening night. Among other prominent animators in this period are the likes of Vera Linnecar, Nancy Hanna and Richard Williams. Williams completed some 2000 adverts with his own self-titled company before moving on to the inserts for the 1968 The Charge of the Light Brigade and then to Hollywood for the 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit. George Dunning is another major name who not only founded his own influential ‘TV Cartoons’ company in 1957, as a result of this boom period, but also went on to produce the 1969 Beatles film, Yellow Submarine, which inspired UK practitioners and appeared as a welcome formal and industrial counterpoint to the dominance of Disney. Also less well-known contributors like Ron Wyatt, Tony Cattaneo, Charlie Jenkins, Mike Brown and Dick Taylor held key roles in organising and contributing to a variety of sub-divided companies that emerged in this period, from the ubiquitous ‘TV Cartoons’ to ‘Trickfilm’ to ‘Logo Films’ and so on (grouped into a loose movement of creatives, named at the time ‘The Soho Crowd’) (‘The Soho Crowd’, 1965–1966, p. 32). All of these found this sudden industrial movement beneficial after struggling in the rapidly eroding independent cinema sector (Rider, 1965, p. 38).

Godfrey, in particular, was vocal about the positive aspects of expansion within the commercial arena that had eventually funded his own company in 1965. He noted that any monolithic nature of studio production soon became subverted by what he referred to as a ‘boutique system’, whereby small groups of animators could hire equipment and flourish as ‘film production mushroomed into lots of little companies instead of a handful of bloody great big ones’ (cited by Harrigan, 1984, p. 6). Thus alongside the bigger names, an open, collective, creative approach was allowed to flourish, one that countered the hierarchical, Fordist Disney-style method of production favoured by the larger studio set-ups. Godfrey stated in 1979 that, initially, ‘We had more of a free hand in those days as the agency art director took a far less important part in the concept and design of the commercial’ (cited by Lockey, 1979, p. 20). The result of this was that some of the most distinctive TV ads from the period, such as the UPA-inspired ‘Esso Blue’ jingles that ran from 1958 into the late 1960s, emerged via the animator’s own creative expression. As ex-Richard Williams employee Cattaneo added, the creative freedom and financial benefits offered to animators within advertising was welcomed and cherished:

Basically we’re advertising film makers. We happen to enjoy making commercials as much as appreciating the money that comes with them which allows us to maintain a reasonable standard of living. I reckon we only need to work really hard for about four months a year – the rest of the time we can relax a little and mull over some of the ideas we can have for other films. (cited by Rider, 1965, p. 38)

Yet this creative moment had been tempered by the early 1960s. Once the advertising companies – who could be paying up to £1,200 for 30 seconds of film – realised they could control the product and dictate its form and structure from the secure position of investor, then this sense of freedom receded (Armitage, 1966, p. 27). Animator Nick Spargo confirmed this shift towards more constrictive conceptual and working practices when he added, ‘Hence it was a fait accompli; all the “i’s” had been dotted and all the production company had to do, and was in fact dared to do, was to “make it move”. We who had been architects were now bricklayers’ (cited by Armitage, 1966, p. 25).

Alongside the need for programme titles and the odd insert, such as Mike Brown’s occasional 1969 work for BBC TV’s quiz show All in the Family, Kitson states of the pre-Simpsons animation landscape, ‘TV schedules were already based on half-hour programmes which did not leave much room for shorts and – like the cinema – television could purchase any it needed from the USA’ (2008, p. 14). Thus animation became an expedient ‘filler’ of loose air time, and this meant that the most commonly available narrative-based material on individual commercial TV networks throughout this period up to the 1980s was not just home-grown functional product, but also American imports of UPA/Columbia, Walter Lantz, Fleischer, Disney and Warner Brothers cinema shorts. These were deployed from pools of available, bought-in cartoons by commercial and public service schedulers to plug five- to ten-minute gaps between afternoon and early evening schedules, or as a last-minute filler to compensate for under-running or timetable errors. Occasionally, these shorts would be collated into semi-regular compendium shows such as Thames Television’s The Bugs Bunny Show, shown across the independent networks every Monday at 4.55 p.m., but mainly they were seen as ballast or as a solution to scheduling problems (Rider, 1969b, p. 20). What little emerged from the more explicitly European arena of production through this period, still serving the purpose of ‘wadding’ across all time slots, was the odd anomaly, such as BBC TV showings of critically acclaimed works such as Dušan Vukotić’s Surogat (1961) or Ernest Pintoff’s The Violinist (1959) – animations that contrasted with US mainstream studio product and were fed out of the expanding festival circuit – which were pitched alongside the likes of Serge Danot’s La Manège enchanté (1963), imported, re-named and dubbed to great success for BBC UK audiences as The Magic Roundabout (McGown, 2006, paras 1–5), (‘The Soho Crowd’, 1965–66, p. 32), (‘Cambridge’, 1967, p. 43).

Curiously, it is within children’s UK production, in this First Wave, where narrative animation and auteurism actually flourished and a village-business model prevailed. Oliver Postgate productions and Peter Firmin’s Smallfilms (1959–to date) supplied stop-motion films like Ivor The Engine (BBC, 1959), The Clangers (BBC, 1969–1974) and Bagpuss (BBC, 1974), and the cardboard/puppet crossover techniques filmed in real time – as opposed to frame-by-frame stop-motion – that defined the work of John Ryan in shows such as The Adventures of Captain Pugwash (BBC, 1957–1959, then 1974) and Mary, Mungo and Midge (BBC, 1969) were also all given prominence within the schedules, as submitted through Freda Lingstrom/BBC’s Watch with Mother slot (1952–1973). This move complemented shows like Vision On (BBC, 1964–1976) that included full animation segments alongside live-action skits and occasional items that offered a rare, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  From There to Here – First, Second and Third Wave Animation
• 2  A Quotation of Normality – The Family Myth
• 3  ‘C’mon Mum, Monday Night Is Jihad Night’ – Race and Nostalgia
• 4  ‘Unpack That …’ – Animating the Male
• 5  Sacred Territory – Faith, Satire and the Third Wave
• 6  Conclusion: It’ll Never Be as Good Again
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index