Animating the Beatles In Vancouver

A short stroll along Burrard Street south of Davie Street in Vancouver’s West End reveals some fairly newish apartment towers and small shops. A half century earlier, the stroll would come across a different scene. The major film studios had sales offices in one building. There was a radio station where I had been employed four decades ago. And a little further down the street, there was a TV operation to which was attached the city’s animation studio.

If you think of animation in Canada, what comes to mind are several studios in Ontario—Nelvana being a fairly major player at one time; Crawley Films, which produced Videocraft’s Tales of the Wizard of Oz; and Trillium Productions, makers of Rocket Robin Hood, a series which somehow has fans despite its wretchedness. But Vancouver was the home of Canawest Film Productions, one of those (gasp!) runaway operations that accepted subcontracts for entertainment cartoons.

This being Canada Day, and having spent the majority of my life living not too far from the site of Canawest’s studio, I thought I’d post a little bit about it, as I suspect you are familiar with some of the animation turned out there. Several feature articles appeared in the local press over the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I’m only going to select two that outline the opening and closing of the studio.

First, a Canadian Press wire service story from November 5, 1964.

Cartoon Kind to Viewer
By VERN LACEY
VANCOUVER (CP) — Gordon Reid decided last year that the intelligence of the public is being insulted by television commercials.
So the television station manager started producing animated cartoon commercials designed to entertain rather than irritate as they deliver their sales pitch.
His station KVOS-TV (B.C.) Ltd invested $60,000, hired 14 more staff and established Canawest Film Productions. The television station is U.S.-owned and located in Bellingham, Wash., 40 miles south of here while Canawest is classified as a Canadian company located here. KVOS beams for B.C. markets.
Twelve profitable months and dozens of cartoons later, Canawest has customers across Canada and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
Mr. Reid says he decided to produce the cartoon commercials after he realized that even he, the station manager, was sick of some commercials.
"They just give the public credit for any intelligence . . . there was no originality.”
On the drawing board at Canawest now is an advertisement for hunting licences on sale at Alberta treasury branch offices.
The scene is a bank with dozens of people scurrying across the floor.
Suddenly a moose gallops past the wickets chased by a hunter.
No one in the bank seems surprised.
Moose and hunter return across the screen and a bank employee casually asks the hunter whether he has a hunting licence.
Hunter and hunted comes to a screeching halt. The hunter buys a licence and away they go again.
The commercial ends with the sound of a shot.
Depending on the time and talent involved, cartoons such as this cost from $2,000 to $8,000.
Production of the cartoons is a full-time job for four cartoonists. One minute of film time requires 1,440 to 2,880 separate drawings, says cartoon production manager Tom Ashdown.
Mr. Ashdown says his men are so good that each can sketch one cartoon character and all four sketches look identical.

You’d think drawing cartoons on model would be a requirement, not a major accomplishment.

Canawest got a real boost the following year. Two years after that, the studio convinced Hanna-Barbera it could get quality animation from Vancouver without relying on all those expensive (read “union”) artists on Cahuenga Boulevard. But almost all booms go bust, and such is what happened to Canawest. The problem had nothing to do with artists or American animation contracts. The blame lies, as it often does, with federal politicians and bureaucrats, protecting a Toronto magazine.

Michael Bennett’s film column in the Province newspaper of June 30, 1977 reported the end was near.

Canawest going, but not forgetting
The credits read like an obituary for some forgotten Hollywood studio interred beneath a shopping plaza somewhere off La Cienaga Boulevard: The Beatles, Abbott and Costello, and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home television cartoons, a syndicated series called The Canadians, the best English-language commercial in the country (1968), an ABC Mystery Movie, Canada's equivalent of an Oscar for a film called Way of Wood that was shot in five languages.
The mourning this time, though, isn't on the passing of Republic Pictures of another age. It's merely a dress rehearsal, because the largest commercial film producer north of Los Angeles and west of Toronto won't be clinically dead until New Year's Eve.
Canawest Films is still warm, winding down the years of bizarre adventure and equally confounding relations with the federal government. With irony peculiar to Canada, the legislation that killed the company was supposed to nurture the kind of work it has been doing since 1961.

As a Canadian subsidiary of KVOS-TV in Bellingham, which in turn is owned by the bottlers of Coca-Cola, Canawest got caught in the hysteria of the Time-Reader's Digest debate—which somehow equated cultural sovereignty with advertising revenue—when the intent of Bill C-58 was merely to help Maclean's newsstand sales.
Unfortunately, KVOS was lumped in with three stations beaming into Toronto from Buffalo (without so much as a dummy corporation registered in Ontario) when the House of Commons committee decided to include border broadcasters in the statute.
When it was passed late last year, despite the reasoned amendments proposed by the Senate banking committee, KVOS income was effectively cut in half because any money spent by its Canadian advertisers would no longer be deductible as a business expense. (Most corporations at roughly a 50-per-cent tax level. In the old days, if a company spent $1 to advertise on KVOS, 50 cents of it would be paid for by taxes, or rather the lack of them. Now the whole dollar comes out of the client's pocket.)
The only way for Channel 12 to stay competitive was to cut expenses—and rates for commercials—and Canawest was an expensive, expendable showpiece of good corporate citizenship. The inequities of the legislation, all too apparent to the people who drafted it, still rankle Dave Mintz, president of KVOS (B. C.) Ltd., who gets tired of defending the obvious.
"In the 10 years between 1965 and 1975, in terms of capital expenditures, payroll tax, personnel expenditures in Canada from KVOS, the film companies and others created by the reinvestment of profits—approximately $75.5 million came back into B. C.,” he says.
"That compares to exactly zero for every other station serving Canada from the other side of the line."
The problem Canawest confronted for 15 years was the sort of creative parochialism associated with government and cities like Toronto: If it doesn't happen there, it doesn't happen.
"We brought $500,000 a year here from the U. S. in industrial films, documentaries and that's all going back to Hollywood," says Mintz.
"We had work in Alberta and Saskatchewan (through Canawest-Master Films in Calgary) and those jobs will go east. What nobody in a position to do anything seemed to realize was that this was our contribution to Canadian-content production, because we couldn't make it like the other television stations."
Whether the honorable members were looking for a more quixotic affirmation of the "national fabric" or a more esoteric motivation, Bill C-58 became perhaps the first law in Canadian history to be proclaimed without change from its original draft.
Canawest has lost money, a lot of it, trying to provide something the country doesn't seem to want. Animation, despite the deficit financing by KVOS of several projects from Hanna-Barbera, remains an American art form, advertising agencies package most of the major commercials for television nowadays, and producers rent cameras, sets and sound stages rather than accumulate an inventory that would cost $750,000 to replace.
“If we were doing this in Toronto or Montreal, we wouldn't own a stick of equipment," says Mintz. "Out here, you have to, and keep people on staff 52 weeks a year."
It makes for high-priced memories—for actors waiting for an audition call from the Playhouse; grips, gaffers, inkers and electricians, who worked on a 30-second spot for B. C. Hydro or filmed the completion of the highway though the Darien Gap or got scared out of Zaire.
Canawest started simply enough: three guys in a cramped studio trying to put the merchandise in the best light. Before long, they were doing slide shows, film strips, and—with some help—live commercials with live performers, filming testimonials to the Alberta Wheat Pool, the Alberta centennial (featuring Burl Ives) and travelogues for Vincent Price and a show called If These Walls Could Talk.
Then there was the Canawest initiation into "the weird, wonderful world of animation" in 1965 when King Features needed The Beatles series in a hurry to go with the T-shirts, lunch buckets and wrist watches. A small group of artists and assistants did seven episodes. England and Australia got the rest.
By 1967, though, Saturday-morning television was more than the Hollywood animators could handle. Hanna-Barbera had gone to the networks in February with 11 ideas, expecting to sell four or five of them. ABC, CBS and NBC bought nine, and all of them had to be ready for the second week in September.
"They remembered The Beatles series and asked us if we could get that crew back together," says Andy Anderson, president of Canawest, "but by that time, they were scattered all over the world.
"We ended up flying people in from Yugoslavia, England, Czechoslovakia and Spain. Good animators are a rare breed."
Anderson hired students right out of art school, housewives bored with the limitations of creative meals, anyone who could draw, paint or mix the inks. Canawest even started an animation training program with Canada Manpower, and for almost a year, classes of 20 or more painted the muscles of Samson, the waves of Moby Dick and the slapstick gestures of Abbott and Costello.
There were 150 people alone working on the Wait Till Your Father Gets Home series. The next year, nothing. The comic-strip panic was over, and by the time the Canawest comptroller figured it all out, the lessons had cost $80,000.
Canadian television, too, was either hit, miss or apathetic, an attitude Mintz had encountered in Ottawa back in 1970 when he suggested KVOS would bankroll the scripts, and even some productions, given some government encouragement. "No thanks," he was informed, "we're not interested."
When Global Television was formed, though, Anderson put the hard sell on a series about the country getting to know itself, called The Canadians.
Look, he told Global, you're back in Toronto and there's this vast, enormous thing called Western Canada, particularly B. C., because you've got to get over those mountains, which form at least a psychological barrier.
Somebody liked the idea and Stanley Burke, the voice from the past of The National, put together a news magazine that visited a pirate on Vancouver Island, a whistle farm where the owner tests the kind of things you hear from boats and trains, and a couple of longhairs who mass-merchandised the artifacts of the Age of Aquarius and had to adjust to uncomfortable wealth.
Global collapsed into bankrupt reorganization shortly afterwards, and by the time Canawest got through with the receivers, The Canadians ended up costing the company $125,000.
"We wanted to use Canadian talent, technicians and labs to produce syndicated programs good enough to at least make their money back," says Anderson, "but the government steadfastly refused to be interested. "Maybe it felt it was being bribed . . . I don't know . . . I've given up reading people's minds."

For locals of a certain age, the idea of Andy Anderson hiring animators is funnier than any of those Hanna-Barbera cartoons they made. Anderson spent his career as a news anchor on KVOS-TV.

Fortunately, the demise of Canawest didn’t end Vancouver’s animation industry. People like Marv Newland, Gord Stanfield and Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong brought their own talents to drawing boards and on to screens. But all this is a stroll for another day.