British Cartoon Films

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 499, 14 January 1949, Page 18

British Cartoon Films

EGULAR readers of The Listener will already know something about the British cartoon film industry from the interview with Robert Morrow which appeared in these pages last October. Morrow, who is now living in Wellington and intends to start a series of educational cartoons: for the National Film Dnit, was one of the original team of British animators which the Rank Organisation assembled in England under David Hand (a top man from the Disney studios), and it should be of interest

to hear that some of the first cartoons made by this group will shortly be released in local theatres. Two of the four films completed, The Lion and The Housecat, are part of: a projected Animaland series that aims at

bringing to the screen’ various amusing animal characters, including the cuckoo, .the platypus, and the ostrich-none of them, presumably, a great deal different in coneeption from the familiar Disney creations, as the accompanying illustration indicates. The other two completed films, The Thames and Wales, are the fitst of a (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) different series which may prove more interesting. It is called the Musical Paintbox, Each film in this group deals with a separate part of Britain, linking together in one sequence songs, music, old legends, English countryside scenery, and cartoon characters, In The Thames, for instance, the audience is taken through England from the river’s source down to the sea. From the Magdalen Tower at Oxford the scene passes to the Henley Regatta (where the ghost of the Vicar of Bray is encountered), to the playing fields of Eton, and, in the next sequence, as cartoons are able to move at will back and forth in time, to a shot of King John signing Magna Carta at Runnymede. Then the finish of the boat race is seen at Hammersmith, and finally the cartoon moves through London itself and ends up at Southend pier. Similar cartoons about Scotland, Yorkshire, and Devon are also reported to be near completion. * EA * HE British cartoon film industry is ‘at present located at Moor Hall in Berkshire, where 200 people are working under David Hand’s direction, Cartoons such as The Thames run for about eight minutes and are 700 feet long. And since for a 10-minute film at least 20,000 drawings are needed, and an expert animator can produce only about 15 feet of film each week, 80 or more artists have to work on-each production, Although it is difficult to know at this stage just how good these films will be, or even how different from the usual run of American products, they should at least be something worth looking out for in 1949,