British Animation of my Childhood

As the curtain falls at the end of an era of animation I thought I would reflect on the reasons why I originally got into this line of work. I thought it would be an opportunity to touch on what inspired me to animate in the first place.

I've been an animator for 36 years since I made TheVerucca Boy [1990] on my bedroom dresser. Whilst at Glasgow University I pitched the story to the Film & TV faculty and, in winning the McTaggart Prize, secured a small amount of money to make it. It was shot on Super 8 film.

After a stretch concentrating on drawing comics, Road [1999] was my first foray into animating in the digital realm. I taught myself After Effects 3.0 so as to be able to make this animation. Acquiring that skill led to a long career working with design companies, post-production houses, and advertising agencies.

I've absolutely loved working with After Effects all these years. Along the way I picked up other animation software, notably Nuke, Maya, and Cinema 4D, but After Effects was my gateway to practicing animation as a paying job. That's kept bread on the table for twenty five years while I have, not just made a bunch of animations, but pontificated about music, set up a forum, spewed out a series of albums, and written some books.

The legendary creative director Paul Arden was a fan of Road and as result I was signed up as a director to his production, Arden Sutherland-Dodd.

Curry [2001] was a 3d animation about a Vampire buying a curry.
 

Nevertheless, in spite of providing my employment, I always nursed an ambition to bring my own little drawn world alive. Pussy is a Star [2002] was an attempt to achieve that. It was pitched to a cable TV channel as a pilot for a series called "Party Animals".

The film was the fruit of a year I spent studying traditional cel animation at St Martins Art School's London Animation Studios flicking sheets of paper by hand. I did the drawing here digitally though - directly into Toon Boom Studio with a Wacom Tablet. For many years I dreamed of becoming Old Street's answer to Matt Groening.

Methuselah [2009], which I made for the WOEBOT.tv series was, I thought, very beautiful. However, at once cute and uncomfortably obscene, I think it proved difficult to swallow.

Rave Bum [2012] was a pop video for one of the tracks off my album "Hallo".

Vitamin C [2016]

Vitamin C was the last animation I made purely for myself and not for work. If The Verucca Boy was my homage to Morph, Vitamin C was my tribute to John Ryan (the Pugwash sailors had a cameo). Both Ryan and Peter Firmin were acknowledged in the credits. The staging of the twenty-minute animation on a theatre set that was physically consistent was my attempt to ground the film in the same degree-zero-creativity that I also appreciate in stage plays. 

After Vitamin C – in part from a sense of failure – I stopped working on my own animations and concentrated on three books, "Retreat"[2020], "The "S" Word" [2022], and "The Garden" [2025]. I did keep my drawing hand "in" with the comic book "TPM" [2022].

One's supposed to be very bullish about all one's activity, but, in spite of some glimmers of recognition and the satisfaction that naturally comes with making anything, my own animations have been unsuccessful. This stings a bit because the process is such bloody hard work. Vitamin C was especially time-consuming; the production itself took a year.

My animations have not been slick, dazzling, fleet, or technically virtuous. But this relates to my admiration of the shoe-string productions that I grew up on. These were aimed at children, executed by a handful of people, and were often the spin-off of children's books. They were shown on the BBC in the nineteen seventies. Nevertheless, at odds with their naivety, these films have an emotional and philosophical sophistication.

I did enjoy other animation in this era which wasn't British: The Pink Panther, Hong-Kong Phooey, the Peanuts films, and Disney's The Rescuers - but none got under my skin in the same way. The amateurish production values of our home-grown animation not only broke down the imposing barriers professionalism erects around culture, but their rudimentary "ground-zero" creativity made one's own imagination work much harder. There's an intense magic to the way that the most basic materials, plasticene, bits of card, magic marker doodles, blu tack, meccano-rigged puppets, and cotton wool came alive to describe imaginary worlds.

Roobarb and Custard

Probably the first animation I encountered, Roobarb and Custard was a series shown on BBC1 in the late afternoon after school. Its creator Bob Godfrey made a virtue of the raw animation techniques he used. When you want a static frame in an animation you don't want it to look like you're staring at a still image, so you trace over the hold frame as closely as you can, cycle between the two frames, and that gives the hold a little life.

 

However Godfrey, rather than making accurate copies of these stills, made the difference between the two hold frames very pronounced. This animation effect is called "boiling" and Roobarb and Custard is always held as the textbook example of it. It draws attention to the artifice of the animation itself.

 

Another technique Godrey used a lot was "pose-to-pose" animation. Just as "boiling" is a great way to draw a lot of animation from restricted resources, so is "pose-to-pose". In Disney films, where there are unlimited budgets and they had animators labouring over thousands of in-between frames, there exist long flowing sequences of movement. The animation of the tiger Shere Khan's in the original Jungle Book is an example. In contrast Godfrey has his characters snap "pose-to-pose." The boiling frames work very well with pose-to-pose, covering the stretches of time between the fixed poses. The effect of combining these two techniques is manic: jagged shifts in position and crazy meandering drawing lines – ideal in tone for the madcap adventures of this green dog and pink cat.

 

Needless to say people don't make animations like this any more. But when I started animating the old guard were still about. When I was a student at the London Animation Studio we had a visit from a very sage animator who had been one of Bob Godfrey's assistants.

 

I grabbed these stills directly from the Roobarb DVD. What's remarkable is how wildly the "white" backgrounds differ. It's the kind of mistake that never would never have happened on an American animation.

 

We must mention Johnny Hawksworth's deliciously rambunctious Roobarb and Custard soundtrack, like Alan Hawkshaw who made the Grange Hill theme, Hawksworth is British Library music royalty. The tune ended up being recycled in Shaft's early rave hit "Roobarb and Custard" by subsequent intelligent techno brainiac, Mark Pritchard.

 

Godfrey wrote the excellent "The Do-It-Yourself Film Animation Book" which is a gas, and a sight more lively than that bible of animation by, another Englishman, Richard Williams "The Animator's Survival Kit."

Morph

Morph was magic. It was delightful and inspiring for a six year old. There doesn't exist a DVD which collects together the animations Peter Lord and David Sproxton made of Morph for the Tony Hart "Take Hart" TV show. That was Morph 101. But this nineties reboot, which has Neil Morrissey not Hart doing the voice-over, is good anyway.

However, Aardman have archived the old sequences form the "Take Hart" show they did with Tony Hart and you can watch them on YouTube. The acting that went into something like the clip below of Morph walking into a framed piece of glass is excellent.

I certainly wouldn't criticise them for it - but Morph was animated and also filmed exquisitely. It's a good example of how excellent production values needn't get in the way of this "creativity-at-degree-zero" aesthetic that I'm describing. Because, after all, what was Morph but a lump of plasticene? It's not surprising from this point-of-view that with Wallace and Gromit they went on to "greater" things. 

Mr. Men

Sadly, Roger Hargreaves' Mr Men is animated poorly. Characters walk in the most basic way, there's lots of zooming into pictures by rostrum cameras, and shameless recycling of shots. However, I still loved the show because it was so rudimentary and the imagery itself was so beautiful. Arthur Lowe's voice-over was precious too.

 

I don't HATE the CG Paddington, but equally I've never terribly cared for it. But what I did love was the original TV series of Paddington. This, below, is the cover of a first edition of Paddington by Michael Bond, from which we can deduce that the Paddington we know from British TV, a stuffed toy wired with pose-able metal rods, was invented for the TV show itself.

 

Paddington

What the original TV series of Paddington has over the movies is atmosphere, an atmosphere ushered on to tea-time telly by the wombling jazz of the title sequence. Just as the gruff voice of Arthur Lowe elevated Mr. Men (Lowe was recognisable as Captain Mainwaring from Dad's Army), Michael Horden's grandfatherly tones cast a gentle spell over Paddington.

 

Its rendering is highly unusual. The films are a remarkable mix of stop-frame puppetry (Paddington himself) and drawings mounted on cards, the whole assemblage is lit carefully to create gentle pools of light. The effect is to imply that the bear himself, the Peruvian immigrant, is somehow the only real individual in this urbane drama. When you factor in his "hard stares" Paddington's insouciant charm comes across, not as stupidity, but as the hard-won grace of life growing up in the developing world.

 

As origin stories go the opening episode is hard to beat...

Captain Pugwash

There are a few unforgettable soundtracks in this breakdown, not least of them being the marvelous rendition of the hornpipe in Captain Pugwash. I'm a huge fan of John Ryan and adore the Pugwash animations and books he did. This film of their production process should be a real eye-opener to people coming into animation in 2026.

The top left image shows Ryan at work in his supposedly "large studio" which looks more like an attic room. He has two assistants, Sarah and Hazel, to ink and cut out his drawings. They then film themselves moving these two-dimensional puppets live to camera. Only one man does all the voices, with no cuts in the dialogue to allow himself to recompose himself as he switches from Master Mates to Barnabas. It's impossibly basic, but created very evocative films.

John Ryan's children's books are absolutely beautiful too. The illustrations are first class. I didn't have these as a child, but read them to my son when he was growing up.

 

 

Ivor the Engine

I never liked Bagpuss, which although I know is widely-loved, I felt was slightly creepy. We switched off the telly the moment we saw it. Small Films' The Clangers and Pogles' Wood predated me. I had the Noggin the Nog books, but never saw any of the animation. But growing up in the countryside of Gloucestershire, not very dissimilar from Wales across the border, Ivor the Engine was luminous. I remember that my mother loved it too, and would laugh about the "Psh-de-kouf" sounds that the little engine would make.

This image shows Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin in the barn in which they did all their work. It comes from this short film for BBC4, made in 2005, which reveals how, with their modular figures and their swappable heads (and no pesky lipsync), the duo could motor through 120 seconds a day of animation a day, where most studios could scarcely manage 10 seconds.

It was interesting to me that Postgate explains that the full soundtrack, with all the voices, sound effects and music came first – because that's what I tell my clients every day: Get the script signed-off and the voice-over recorded, and we'll take it from there...

I found out recently, as I was correcting the Ivor the Engine Wikipedia page, that Postgate and Firmin created a map of their fictional railway which was adhered to rigidly during filming. This world-building, and its strict consistency, is something I always admired in A.A. Milne's "Winnie-the-Pooh" and in its illustration by E.H. Shepherd. Imagining worlds; better ones.

These are some images from the episodes, "The Railway" and "The Dragon" - it's particularly revealing to closely inspect Ivor's steam, which of course is cotton wool.

As well as these Ivor the Engine books (which don't recycle stills from the film – and feature original drawings), I have this LP of "Original television music by The Vernon Elliot Ensemble". It was assembled by Johnny Trunk and mastered by Jon Brooks, both of whom I came across with Jim and Julian and Ghost Box.

In 2017, when he was still alive, I bought this gorgeous signed print from Peter Firmin of his left hand for £45; the hand being the symbol of the craftsman. When I received it I wrote in thanks, also to direct him to my "Vitamin C" animation which credited him. This hangs on the wall in my study.

What unites all the British animation of this period and my own scruffy animation work could be summarised as: everyday settings, made by a few or two people (in my case one person), handmade models or hand-drawn imaginary, animation breathing life into the inanimate, and fundamentally a demand being placed on the viewer's imagination. Needless to say this couldn't be more different to where animation has arrived in 2026, and also what a contemporary audience expects of animation.

In the BBC4 documentary Firmin says somewhat mournfully, "I was supposed to be a real artist" and Postgate replies blithely, "I was not supposed to be a real anything – so that was alright!" But I'm certain that both were united in a love for the practice itself; the gratification of labouring on something, and through that labour literally bringing things to life. I can't imagine they would have been terribly excited about the push-button buffet that beckons so many creative people today.