The Land of Oz is in Canada

Being Canada Day today, it’s only appropriate to celebrate an early success in Canadian animation.

Before Nelvana and Trillium Productions (the folks who brought you Rocket Robin Hood), there was Crawley Films. It was an Ottawa company that made commercials (some animated) and short industrial films in the 1950s.

The Tales of the Wizard of Oz was an ambitious project. Crawley signed a contract with Videocraft International of New York for 130 five-minute cartoons. A story in the January 17, 1962 of The Financial Post said 45 cartoons had been sent to Videocraft, the company was working on number 60 and that 10 cartoons had to be made every month to meet the schedule. The company employed 45 people including artists (Rod Willis was a key animator), cameramen, checkers (led by Gerry Savage) and a sound-track reader.

The Montreal Gazette profiled the studio in a feature story published on Dec. 9, 1961.

TV Cartoon Series In Production At Ottawa
Crawley Making Wizard Of Oz
Marking a milestone in Canadian film making for international television, an animated color cartoon series, Tales Of The Wizard Of Oz, is underway at the Ottawa studios of Crawley Films.
With the largest group of artists in Canada engaged on the project, which may be worth approximately $500,000, nearly a third of the series has been completed. The series consists of 130 four-minute color cartoons with an option for another 130 segments.
What could result in a new industry for Canada, Tales Of The Wizard Of Oz is an international enterprise involving Videocraft International of New York and Crawley Film Limited of Ottawa. The series is based on the original characters of I. Frank Baum's [sic] book Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, which is now in the public domain. Videocraft is supplying the story line and the key outlines of the main characters.
Voices of the characters are being recorded in Toronto by Bernard Cowan with such well-known Canadians as Larry Mann, Paul Kligman, Alfie Scopp, James Doohan and Pegi Loder.
Crawley Films recruited trained animators from Canada, the United States, England and Spain to form a crew which is the largest in North America, outside of Hollywood.
Under Tom Glynn, producer, seven key animators are working on the project backed by seven junior animators. This crew follows the general story line and develops the action frame by frame.
Next step is the tracing and painting, with some 18 artists completing the action and adding color, all the time making sure the drawings line up with the sound track.
Then comes the actual photographing in color of each frame and, finally, the synchronization of the film with the sound track. While animations for TV commercials are being done in Canada, this project is the first of its type and magnitude here.
Graeme Fraser, vice president of Crawley Films, hopes that the Wizard of Oz may lead to the establishment of an animated industry for entertainment purposes in Canada. He noted that Crawley has had an animation department for many years but "this project is a great challenge for us in terms of the future."
The Wizard Of Oz series follows the new trend to "limited animation" in which not every move of the subject is drawn. This was first started by UPA's Mr. Magoo and broke the Walt Disney system of slavish attention to every movement.
For Tom Glynn, in his job as producer, the series means a return to the department where he started with Crawley Films 16 years ago.
He came to Crawley as an animation cameraman and then was head of the camera department for 11 years. A spell of three years as production manager followed and then he was production supervisor on the RCMP television series.

I have no recollection of these cartoons being on the air on the West Coast of Canada in the early ‘60s. Mind you, my cartoon-watching schedule in mornings and afternoons was full with old Warners and Fleischer Popeye shorts, Mighty Mouse, the Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Yogi Bear shows (along with Lippy the Lion and lesser Hanna-Barbera cartoons), the Famous Studio sausage factory stuff and a lot more. All American.

Perhaps the Wizard cartoons were entertaining for younger kids, but I don’t find them as funny as other TV cartoons of the era. If you’re looking for anything resembling the Oz books, don’t bother. The designs and colour are good. The flat and sponge-painted backgrounds remind me of Fernando Montealegre’s work at MGM and Hanna-Barbera. The animators copy the formula Mike Lah used at H-B, where the characters were held and mouth-lines on the face were all that were animated.

The actors from Toronto are top-notch. One of my favourite Canadian announcers, Bernard Cowan, can be heard as a commercial announcer in The Witch’s Boyfriend (some frames are below). You likely know that Videocraft, which later became Rankin-Bass, used Canadians quite a bit. I’ll spare you a list of credits you can find elsewhere on the internet. (Yeah, yeah, Yukon Cornelius. I know).

The Oz cartoons led to another Videocraft-Crawley deal for The New Adventures of Pinocchio. Cowan, Paul Kligman, Larry D. Mann and the rest were back for more voice work. It seems to have been a good pairing. But Crawley started moving in other directions and eventually foundered financially.

Even if you’re not enthralled with the Oz cartoons, they played an important in the history of Canadian animation and are worth a look on this Canada Day.

You can read more about Crawley and these cartoons in THIS POST and THIS POST.