Animation in the United Kingdom began at the very origins of the art form 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).
Conceptualizing 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.
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 Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau introduced stroboscopic animation in 1833 and in the same year published his 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 did not have enough faith in it as the main theatrical attraction.Historical Dictionary of Animation and CartoonsThe lesser-spotted British animated featureThe Story of the Flag
First wave: establishment of an industry In the 1930s, the creation of 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.Norris, Van. British Television 1997-2010: Drawing Comic Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 23. John Grierson established GPO Film Unit and 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.
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. 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.Norris, Van. British Television 1997-2010: Drawing Comic Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 26. 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 in 1954 produced the influential and groundbreaking animated feature Animal Farm. It would set a darker tone for future animation production in UK.
Emergence of children's TV The popularization 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. In 1950, the children's TV series Watch with Mother (1950–74) was broadcast, which featured several puppet-based segments (such as Andy Pandy and Flower Pot Men) that would go on to become staples of British children's popular imagery and animation.
BBC's investment in resources and personnel oriented to children's media during this time also provided avenues for the service's eventual inclusion of animation—particularly stop-motion animation, which could be derived from some of the same resources and skill-sets as live action puppetry. Puppeteer Gordon Murray for example, would branch off from his work on the Watch with Mother to create several stop motion animated children's series in the 1960s, including Camberwick Green (1966), Trumpton (1967) and Chigley (1969). Modelmaker Peter Firmin and writer Oliver Postgate similarly created several stop-motion animated works for children during this period, including Pingwings (1961–1964), Pogles' Wood (1966–1967) and Clangers (1969–1972).Sibley, Brian (1998). The Medium. In Lord, Peter; Sibley, Brian. Cracking Animation (1st ed.). Thames and Hudson. p. 38 It is also during this period that ties between children's animation and British media grew. The shows of this period provided a blueprint for future children's TV focusing on rural communities and day-to-day interpersonal relationships. The transition from puppetry to stop-motion also demonstrates the influence of Eastern European animation such as that of Czech animator Jiří Trnka, with its proclivity for wood and felt puppets and static facial features.
Aesthetics and influence The later impact of the music and film industries that brought the UK to the cultural fore during the 1960s and early 1970s created new markets and areas of influence for British pop culture. The 1968 animated feature film Yellow Submarine, which featured characters based on the Beatles and was produced by TVC Animation, was a worldwide success, and was highly influential in the course of animation and design in subsequent years for both its incorporation of psychedelic influences and the aesthetic continuity it established between these emergent aesthetics and the modernist graphic art. A few years later, Terry Gilliam developed his own distinctive style of anarchic cut out animation for Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974) by employing similar motifs drawn from British culture, figures, and localities. This deviation from the Disney-codified squash and stretch approach would become a staple of Britain's boutique-driven animation culture, and would inform the more experimental films and TV segments that emerged in the following decades.Norris, Van. British Television 1997-2010: Drawing Comic Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 35.
In the 1970s, this experimental tendency was fostered in large part by the British television system's commitment to and experimentation with educational programming formats. Vision On (1964–76) for example was a show created to cater to deaf children, featuring several animated segments, as well as fostering a growing pool of animation talent.Lord, Peter (1998). Introduction. In Lord, Peter; Sibley, Brian. Cracking Animation (1st ed.). Thames and Hudson. p. 12 Other programs in this vein included Take Hart, (1977-1983), a predominantly live-action educational show about art which featured some of Aardman's first work, with their character Morph, who would appear in a handful of other shows as well.Lord, Peter (1998). Making a Film. In Lord, Peter; Sibley, Brian. Cracking Animation (1st ed.). Thames and Hudson. p. 156.
In the realm of theatrical animation, 1978 saw the release of Watership Down, adapted from a novel of the same name, which was commercially successful while at the same time featuring a much darker thematic approach to the cel-animated artform than its US contemporaries.
Second wave (1979–1996) The growing diversity of artistic approaches fostered during the 1970s came to fruition in the next decade, helped in some cases by funding from Channel 4. Alison de Vere was one of the first independent women animators to make an impact such as Mr Pascal (1979), which gained the Grand Prix at the Annecy Festival, and The Black Dog (1987). Other women also began to emerge during the 1970s, making films with overtly feminist and political themes.
Channel 4 was a fundamental supporter of fringe media on British broadcast TV, pushing for increased representations of underexposed issues of ethnicity and sexuality, as well as fostering political critique and artistic experimentation. This, coupled with a political climate that fostered a strong cultural response from more leftist groups, provided a fertile environment for work produced by many animators who had been working on the fringes, including that of Aardman, Joanna Quinn, Alison de Vere, David Anderson, the Brothers Quay, Paul Vester, Phil Mulloy and others.Norris, Van. British Television 1997-2010: Drawing Comic Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 31 In addition to providing exposure and monetary support, this fostering of fringe animators allowed many of these animators to make contact with the wider artistic and entertainment community of the UK.
Though much of the animated work screened by Channel 4 during this time proved too experimental for mainstream tastes, some of it would yield global commercial successes. The television animated special The Snowman, an adaptation of Raymond Briggs novel, again produced by TVC Animation and directed by Dianne Jackson, was a substantial popular and financial success that remains a perennial Christmas favourite. It is during this time that Aardman would break through to the mainstream as well, thanks in large part to the shorts Creature Comforts (1989) and the Wallace and Gromit films, all of which were directed by Nick Park. Stop-motion would likewise continue to have a strong presence in children's TV, with Postman Pat. Mechanised puppetry mixed with limited stop-motion animation would similarly continue to be used in a few successful shows created during this time, such as Thomas the Tank Engine.
Cooperation and competition with American-based production companies