History of British animation

The history of animation in the United Kingdom began at the very origins of the artform in the late 19th century. British animation has been strengthened by an influx of émigrés to the UK; renowned animators such as Lotte Reiniger (Germany), John Halas (Hungary), George Dunning and Richard Williams (Canada), Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton (United States) have all worked in the UK at various stages of their careers. Notable full-length animated features to be produced in the UK include Animal Farm (1954), Yellow Submarine (1968), Watership Down (1978), and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).

Conceptualising British animation history

The history of British animation has gone through several stages of development, significantly influenced by both internal and international political, economic and cultural factors. Important among these is the relative impact of the international animation industry, which in several instances has been seen as both a challenge to produce more local content, and as a creative and/or commercial inspiration to follow or work against.

In order to clarify the emergence and interplay of the different agendas, aesthetics and industrial relationships that have shaped British animation history, media scholar Van Norris posits a rough chronological taxonomy of animation's development in the UK along three distinct "waves", the first comprising the establishment of the British animation industry, the second detailing the impact of the incursion of dissident politics, fringe artistic communities and emergent distribution systems in the industry, and the third representing the neoliberal re-consolidation of all of these tendencies into more commercially driven and comedic popular media.

Early experiments in form and commerce

Animation was once thought to have been based on the phenomenon of 'persistence of vision', first identified in a paper by Peter Mark Roget published in 1825 by the Royal Society titled "Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel Seen through Vertical Apertures." It is now thought, however, that the illusion of movement in animation is due to the way in which the visual perception areas of our brain map movement in the real world. Our brain is thought to ''perceive'' movement by taking individual snapshots of the visual field and ''inducing'' that movement has occurred due to the changing position of things. Hence the brain interprets the quick succession of animated frames as moving images, as opposed to a succession of still images.

Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau introduced stroboscopic animation in 1833 and in the same year published his own designs with Ackermann in London as the ''Phantasmascope'' and later as the ''Fantascope'', after the device had become known as the phénakistiscope through a publisher in Paris. Many British stroboscopic disc releases followed.

In 1872, English-born Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer living in San Francisco, started his series of sequential photographs of animals in motion. Books of his work are still widely used for reference by artists and animators.

"Matches Appeal", produced by Arthur Melbourne-Cooper of St. Albans for the Bryant May match company is thought to have been a 1899 stop motion commercial (according to Dutch researchers Tjitte de Vries and Ati Mul). In this film, stop-frame puppets made of matches were filmed frame by frame as they wrote on a blackboard. According to Elaine Burrows of the British Film Institute, the first animated film proper made in Britain was Cooper's ''Dolly's Toys'', produced in 1901, and featuring a mixture of live-action and stop-motion puppetry. In 1925, Cardiff-based animator Sid Griffiths working with Brian White, created the silent short '' Jerry the Tyke'' for Pathe, which was shown on their fortnightly magazine, Pathe Pictorial, on cinema screens around the world. Griffiths and Brian White set up together in Charing Cross Road, London in 1929, producing animated advertisements for the Superads agency. In 1927 the 40 minutes long and now lost cutout animated movie ''The Story of the Flag'', by Anson Dyer, was released. Dyer's producer Archibald Nettlefold decided to split it into six parts and release them as a series of theatrical shorts instead, as he didn't have enough faith in it as the main theatrical attraction.

First wave: Establishment of an industry

By the 1930s, as commercial animation was established in the US, in the UK the creation of Government public information films from the GPO (Post Office) unit and later wartime and post-war information films allowed for greater experimentation than the more market driven work across the Atlantic. Established by documentary maker John Grierson the GPO Film Unit produced many films using animation as Grierson believed it was an ideal medium to communicate information. For these films he hired experimental animators such as Norman McLaren and Len Lye who would go on to make many more films and in the case of McLaren to later head up Griersons National Film Board of Canada animation department.

These GPO productions and the many wartime propaganda films led to an industry of animators with a diversity of design styles, well versed in conveying messages efficiently and clearly. As Van Norris notes, the influence of the combined demand from smaller commercial and governmental contracts would encourage the development of a variety of boutique production companies, as opposed to the more monolithic system developing concurrently in the United States. Coming from this background, Halas and Batchelor maintained their position as one of the leading European animation companies, producing many commercials and short films during most of the second half of the twentieth century and were responsible for producing the influential and ground breaking animated feature Animal Farm in 1954, a departure from the predominantly US-sourced animated films being exhibited at the time for its explicitly political content and more adult-oriented tone. Future animation production in the UK would likewise maintain a generally darker tone than U.S.-based productions.

Emergence of children's TV

The popularisation of television broadcasting in the UK during the 1950s brought with it both new avenues for animation production and a shift in the demographic orientation of animation to the realms of children's programming. The year 1950 saw the premier of the long-running children's TV series ''Watch with Mother'' (1950–74) which would not include animation per se, but would feature several puppet-based segments (such as " Andy Pandy" and "Flower Pot Men") that would later become staples of British children's popular imagery and animation. Such is the case as well with the children's book character Noddy, who has appeared in various iterations and with different means of animation ranging from stop-motion to CGI to this day. The BBC
...