We don’t talk a lot about non-American animation on the blog, as the focus is mainly on theatrical cartoons that appeared on TV in the 1960s (and a little earlier).
However, I enjoy much of the stylised artwork you can see on animated commercials and industrial films of the ‘50s, and not just from the United States.
Here’s a nice example in a 1959 commercial film for British Petroleum called The Key to Efficiency. When you think of British animation, Halas and Batchelor come to mind. This short was made by someone else. The designs are derivative of UPA but I quite like them. Frank Cordell’s score matches the action quite well.
I have not been able to find much information about this cartoon but this blog has intelligent readers who may know something.
It's interesting how midcentury animated industrial films, like animated commercials of the time, are so clever, entertaining, and arty--often more so than theatrical animation. Maybe because commercials and industrials invariably had larger budgets than the increasingly stingy studios grudgingly allowed their cartoon units.
ReplyDeletePart of the reason may be that the major cartoon characters were developed before 1950, so the designs weren't of the "modern" type. The best they could hope for was to get something new-looking into backgrounds.
DeleteI'm not crazy about the box-head design for Granny that Hawley Pratt came up with.
Not a Halas & Batchelor production, but made by people who had all worked there in the 1950s.
ReplyDeleteAllan Crick had been, I believe, a Commander in the Royal Navy, and after WWII he worrked as a scriptwriter on Naval training films being made by Halas & Batchelor. He became a regular scriptwriter and director for the studio, and finally set up his own company, Allan Crick Productions, and "The Key to Effeciency" was one of his films: he is the producer as well as the scriptwriter.
Going through the rest of the credits shown, Digby Turpin (Direction/Design) had just left the cartoon department of advertising film producers Pearl & Dean, after failing to get sufficient recognition for directing the award-winning "Pan-tele-tron" (1957); he had .worked for Halas and Batchrlor in the early 1950s.
Bob Privett learned to animate in the 1930s, working on advertising films for Publicity Pictures and then joining Anson Dyer's Anglia Films on the "Sam Small" series. He remained in London during the War when Dyer moved to Stroud, making government sponsored films for Publicity Pictures, and after the war joined Halas and Batchelor as a directing animator.
John Hawes (Layout design) had worked on backgrounds and layouts for Halas & Batchelor, joined Pearl & Dean with Digby Turpin, doing the layouts for "Pan-tele-tron", and had left with him.
Alison de Vere, before becoming an animator for "Wyatt-Cattaneo" in the 1970s, had been a background designer for Halas & Batchelor during the 1950s.
Arthur Butten had been an animator for Halas & Batchelor during the 1950s.
Roy Turk had been a rostrum cameraman at G-B Animation, the studio David Hand ran for Rank at Moor Hall, Cookham, and subsequently went to work for Halas & Batchelor. I do not know for sure, but he may have st up his own rostrum camera company by 1959
Sheila Willson edited films for Halas & Batchelor; Ron Abbot (Sound supervision) mainly recorded sound on live-action productions. And Frank Cordell had composed the music for "Pan-tele-tron".
This was a time of flux -- Britain's first commercial TV network had only been going a couple of years, and demand for (black-and-white) TV cartoon advertising was encouraging people to leave the big studios and set up smaller units of their own, or go freelance.
Having said all that, I note that although Denis Gifford dates this film as 1959, the BFI catalogue has it listed as 1953 -- which would make a mockery of this Comment! I will check this out next week.
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ReplyDeleteDish me up that Humble Pie!
ReplyDeleteJez Stewart, the animation curator at the British Film Institute assures me that the stock date on the material they hold, which includes the Technicolor colour separation promasters, is definitely 1953.
Allan Crick (Commander Edward Allan Crick, whose former career as an officer in the Royal Navy began in September 1915) started to work with Halas & Batchelor scripting Naval training films. By 1946 he had joined their board of directors, and by 1950 was in charge of their Diagram Unit, in Whitfield Street, producing and writing the scripts, with animator Bob Privett directing.
The films they made were by no means limited to diagrams. In an article from Animator Magazine (issue 21, winter 1987) character designer, animator and modelmaker Brian Borthwick fondly recalls working on two films for British Petroleum (then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company: "Moving Spirit" (1952, subtitled "The History and development of the horseless carriage") and "Power to Fly" (1953, subtitled "The History and development of the flying machine"), both scripted by Crick, directed by Privett and with backgrounds by Digby Turpin, which can be seen here. https://www.bpvideolibrary.com/record/411 https://www.bpvideolibrary.com/record/437
"Sales Promotion: The Key to Efficiency" was not released for distribution until 1958, when it was entered in the 7th Melbourne International Film Festival. The MIFF catalogue described it as "An animated cartoon made for staff training, and serving as an introduction to a series of filmstrips." Denis Gifford quotes the "Film User" magazine review as saying "An amusing little essay appropriate as a visual aid for a sales conference, but hardly able to stand up on its own."
So it may be that this was commissioned by Shell-Mex BP in 1953 for internal sales conference use only. Perhaps the price Halas & Batchelor asked was more than Shell wanted to pay, so to keep a valued customer happy Crick financed, or at least subsidized, the production. So it was made by Halas & Batchelor's studio, but ownership, presumably, devolved to Crick.
In 1954 Digby Turpin was hired by ex-UPA boss David Hilberman, who was in London running advertising film company Pearl & Dean's newly-formed animation studio. After directing the prize-winning "Pan-Tele-Tron" he fell out with Pearl & Dean and left, leaving George Moreno as the head directing animator (George then took over the studio from Pearl & Dean and ran it as Moreno Cartoons).
Allan Crick Productions also released a short whacky abstract cartoon, also directed by Turpin and scored by Frank Cordell, in 1959, advertising BP. Its the first item on this reel from the BP Film Library: https://www.bpvideolibrary.com/record/301
Allan Crick parted company with Halas and Batchelor around 1956 and joined the board of W M Larkins, which the Producers' Guild Ltd, a company that had acquired a collection of small documentary film companies which continued to operate under their own names, had recently taken over. He formed Allan Crick Productions as a subsidiary of The Producers' Guild. Edward Allan Crick died on the 4th of November 1958. His company continued working, and was combined with the diagram unit from W M Larkins, forming a new studio, Guild Animation ltd, to concentrate on diagram films.