Nick Park, Academy award-winner and creator of
Wallace and Gromit, once remarked that for all its reference points in American movies his film
The Wrong Trousers was as British as it comes. Referring to its train-chase finale, he said: “What was foremost in my mind was the chariot race in
Ben Hur, taking place in a living room in a terraced house in Wigan.”
Therein lies the rub. As the new BBC Four series Animation Nation insists, British animation has always fought not to look and feel American. Where an American cartoon whizzes, bangs and wallops, its British counterpart dwells more in sly wit and subtle observation.
Aardman Animation’s 3D stop motion clay puppet films, for example, are almost a wilful riposte to the slick computer-generated aesthetics of contemporary American animation. The subject matter, too, is singularly “British”. From Creature Comforts to Chicken Run to the forthcoming Wallace and Gromit opus Curse of the Wererabbit, the emphasis is on an Orwellian England of “stamp-collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players (and) crossword puzzle fans” — something that Park suggests is “understated, ordinary, yet quirky”. This is not Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry, but Bonzo the Dog, Boxer the Horse and the Beatles.
This singularity and small-scale difference has characterised British animation from its inception. Arguably, Britain produced the first animated film. Matches: An Appeal, made in 1899, by Arthur Melbourne Cooper, to raise funds for the Boer War, featured a box of Bryant & May matches. Cooper then made a series of “toys come to life” films during the early years of the century — Dreams of Toyland featured a miniature bus crash.
Even during the First World War when the first innovations in the American cartoon were beginning to emerge, based on the comic strip and the work of silent comedians such as Chaplin, Britain valued its “lightning sketch” artists, including Lancelot Speed and Harry Furniss. Both were steeped in literary illustration and caricature. Films featured Speed and Furniss drawing a lightning sketch, but the process was speeded up so that the emerging picture seemed to appear like magic on the screen.
This was the first kind of animation. These highly skilled sketch artists drew topical jokes and were wilfully “British” in their graphic punning.
The Cartoon Film Company, formed in 1915, was the first British outfit set up to make cartoons. The illustrator Dudley Buxton and a stained-glass window maker, Anson Dyer, animated topical scenarios in the John Bull’s Animated Sketchbook films. Their fourth film featured the sinking of the Lusitania, but the lack of an extant copy has prevented it from becoming acknowledged as the first animated documentary — that accord was given to the American Winsor McCay ’s film about the same event made some time later.
While Buxton created Pongo the Pup in 1924, to replace the popular Felix the Cat cartoons in the Pathé Pictorial, it was George Studdy’s Bonzo the Dog who became Britain’s first animated star. Though long forgotten, the bull terrier Bonzo featured in The Sketch and was so popular that he was used in a variety of advertisements. He also had his own toy range and was one of the first neon characters on display in Piccadilly Circus. The first of his 26 cartoons, A Sausage Snatching Sensation, made its debut at the Marble Arch Pavilion in 1924.
The cute and cuddly animal became a staple of the animated cartoon in America — Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy were major stars — and it was not until Halas and Batchelor’s Animal Farm, the first British animated feature, released in 1954, that “the animal” was represented in a serious way, proving distinctive and shocking in a form that until then had been populated by funny frogs, ducks and mice.
The Budapest-born John Halas came to England fleeing Fascist oppression, and, unsurprisingly, insisted that the film should have a more philosophically open stance. His anti-totalitarian perspective was a ringing endorsement of British democratic principles and a recognition of the need that British audiences had for hope in the face of what amounts to heroic failure — one of the key themes of British animated films.
Halas is only one of a number of “outsiders” in British animation. Len Lye (New Zealand), made abstract films with John Grierson during the 1930s; Bob Godfrey (Australia), with his music hall style, has satirised everything from Britain's sexual mores to Thatcherism; Terry Gilliam (US) created anarchic interludes for Monty Python's Flying Circus; while George Dunning (Canada), directed Yellow Submarine, which employed Heinz Edelmann’s graphic design and alluded to the best of 1960s Pop Art and counterculture, including the work of Peter Blake, Bridget Riley, Martin Sharp and Alan Aldridge.
For all its supposedly hallucinatory, drug- related, “alternative” quality, however, the film ultimately fetishises Edwardian art and culture, harks back to the music hall era, and presents a nostalgic view of the loveable Beatles before they embarked on their more independent visions.
This tension between looking back fondly and seeking to innovate underpins British animation. The rise of Channel Four-sponsored work during the 1980s and 1990s, and the “Brit-coms” — Pond Life, Crapston Villas, and Bob and Margaret — endorsed the independence of British artists. From work made specifically for children — Bagpuss, Jamie and the Magic Torch and Bob the Builder — through to the avant garde, Britain’s animators have always sought to engage with the serious, surreal, subversive and satirical. Joanna Quinn, Barry Purves, Phil Mulloy and the Quay Brothers are renowned auteurs, their work reflecting the desire to use the unique language of animation, not to be absorbed within the long shadow of Disney, and to offer an often radical point of view.
With the rise of “adult” animation in America in the guise of Beavis and Butthead and South Park came Britain’s inevitable response — satire with 2DTV; the surreal anti-cartoon in I am Not an Animal and, most notably, the cutting-edge black humour of Monkey Dust. One character, Fran Chappell, for example, uses the disappearance of her daughter and the now customary emotional appeal to the public to launch a showbiz career — the allure of celebrity and its rewards far outweighing any moral concern.
Well-observed, subversive, bleak and comically absurd, Monkey Dust encapsulates the inventiveness of British cartoonists. Not Bart, but Art nevertheless.
The three-part series Animation Nation starts on BBC Four, April 18, 9pm.
Professor Paul Wells is Director of Animation at Loughborough University and author of British Animation: A Critical Survey (BFI, £15.99; offer £12.79, call 0870 1608080)
Best of British
LOVE ON THE WING (1937 Norman McLaren’s abstract film advertising air mail was viewed as “too Freudian” by a Government minister.
ANIMAL FARM (1954) Halas and Batchelor’s adaptation was the greatest achievement of the most influential British animation studio.
GREAT (1975) Bob Godfrey’s Oscar- winning musical documentary about Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT (1986) Joanna Quinn’s hilarious depiction of middle-aged Welsh housewife Beryl as she encounters a male stripper.
DAD’S DEAD (2002) Chris Shepherd’s chilling combination of live action and animation, illustrating that animation is not an “innocent” language.
