CHILD: Mummy, how do you make a cartoon?
MAN: The process in itself is quite simple.
WOMAN: You move the figure, take the picture.
Boom, boom.
Here we are. Here's a clap.
You take a photograph.
Move the model.
Take a picture.
That's how it's done.
In the world of animation, one nation rules supreme.
SCREAMING
SCREECHING
America!
AMERICAN NATIONAL ANTHEM PLAYS
Since the golden era of Walt Disney, big budget animation has largely
been owned by the American studios.
While the Yanks won the box office, other countries got
the film festivals,
where they could show off their own distinctive styles.
The Polish films tend to be very dark.
Now, the Estonian films are totally off the wall!
You know, lots of fish.
French films - everybody goes, "Is that made by a human?"
You know, because they're so beautifully made.
And what makes British animation different?
Lack of money.
THEY LAUGH
A sense of innovation.
So many British animators were born outside the UK.
British animation is so much more than just kids' telly.
Its bloody-minded brilliance can be traced
from Victorian music halls
to the latest blockbuster.
BARKING AND WHINING
Even in today's digital age, this is an industry that is still
handmade at heart.
That's down to some unlikely pioneers, as extraordinary
as their films.
We always used to get high on these markers,
we used to...whoo!
HE LAUGHS
These are the secrets of British animation.
The story of those pioneers, and the magic ingredients
that have made this improbable industry what it is.
You know what? If there was a secret,
I'd love to know what that secret is.
At Aardman Animations in Bristol, their original star is limbering up.
MORPH SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Morph!
MORPH SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
For 40 years, he's pretty much been the handmade mascot
of British animation.
MORPH LAUGHS
MORPH SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
CHAS CRIES OUT, VOICE FADES AWAY
Standing by is a specially engineered piece of equipment
to make sure that Morph's camera-ready.
We did the first episode, and then thought,
"Well, I've got to reproduce him again next week."
And the easiest way to do it, the safest way to do it, was by weight.
At some stage in history, I see that
I've stuck a little yellow sticker with an M on,
and that's Morph's weight.
Morph was created by Aardman's David Sproxton and Peter Lord.
He's designed to work quickly.
He used to film 20 seconds of footage a day.
Three times what you'd expect of a fast worker now.
He is what he appears to be on the screen.
On the screen, he looks like a little guy that's...
Whatever that is - five inches tall or whatever.
But this is on your table top
and that's exactly what he is,
and I think there's, sort of, honesty about that.
Morph was just one of those beautiful creations.
So simple, kind of genius
in and of itself in that, you know,
the whole purpose and function of the character is that it
can become anything.
Et voila.
MORPH HICCUPS
HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
MORPH HICCUPS
Being made of clay means that there are some rather basic things
that Morph struggles with.
CHAS SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
Walking, for instance.
MORPH SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
What I can't do...
is that. with his heel off the ground - he's not strong enough.
So, he doesn't.
What actually happens - in one frame, one instance,
it goes from toe-down to heel-down...
..like that.
His foot has kind of gone, snap!
And that little snap of the foot, never leaving the ground,
gives him a kind of percussive, sort of, snappy, Morphy walk -
which is pure Morph.
I knew there was a secret somewhere.
That's the secret! That's the secret!
CHAS LAUGHS
MORPH SPEAKS STERNLY
Simple, handmade, and very funny.
For Aardman, Morph is the perfect star.
Well, almost perfect.
It wasn't a financial success, really, at all.
Which surprises everyone, I think, because he's been a popular success,
a cultural success.
But...but not economic.
As a business - hopeless.
We never made any money out of Morph, and we still don't.
We just love doing him.
MORPH HICCUPS
TRUMPET SOUNDS
British animation...
It's artisan!
But lurking in its past is a big secret.
Animated films started out as a way to make a bit of cash.
Imagine you're a late Victorian musical impresario.
All you care about is getting bums on seats.
When all those acrobats and comedians start
to look a bit tired,
you need a new attraction.
Enter motion pictures -
a new technology you can project in between the usual acts.
To delight the crowd, film-makers like Walter Booth packed
their productions full of gimmicks.
Walter Booth made it a kind of a career of, kind of,
coming up with special effects.
He was somebody who'd done lightning sketches himself -
this technique of going on a stage and drawing quick caricatures
of recognisable personalities, people from the audience...
And this was a skill that could be brought
into a cinema.
Booth stopped the camera to replace a drawing
with a real woman.
He ran film backwards so that cotton would weave itself.
SOFT PIANO MUSIC And in 1907, Booth went one step further,
into animation proper.
Can I fast forward it a bit?
Because it's all dancing, at the moment.
In The Sorcerer's Scissors, the sorcerer is Walter Booth himself,
cutting out photographs and moving them frame by frame under a camera.
Very good.
Gosh, that's clever!
Deeply impressed.
It's a technique we now call cut out animation.
It does actually remind me of things that I've done
with scissors, with collages.
Scissors - they're our, sort of, tools of the trade.
It is quite an artisanal technique.
It's a very basic one.
You don't have to draw a long sequence of drawings,
and then replace them one by one.
You can use basic cut-outs.
It's a tradition that really grows in the First World War...cinema.
It's really familiar to us
through Terry Gilliam's work in Monty Python.
CHOMPING
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
If you venture into the archives
of the British Film Institute, you can see
British animation's baby steps.
Trick films that experiment with stop motion,
and even colour photography.
Even in the most impressive films, something is absent...
..authentic human emotion.
When BFI curator Jez Stewart called up a forgotten
First World War propaganda film, he made a remarkable discovery...
..an early animated sequence that, if you could spot it,
had that missing ability to make you feel.
So, it's a film from 1915 that was catalogued
as John Bull's Sketch Book in our database.
It was kind of what I expected.
I could see that Dudley Buxton's name was signed on the screen
at one point, and that's who I thought would have made it.
And it was very typical of the time, in terms of
it was pieces of cut out animation, fairly basic.
Until I got to the last scene.
The last scene depicts the German Navy's bombardment
of Scarborough in December, 1914.
Dudley moves his hand away
and these three characters appear.
And the time that I was first watching it, it was interesting but
it hadn't completely engaged me.
It seemed familiar at the time, and then suddenly there was
this little flash and a blur, and something happened.
And I wasn't quite sure what it was.
And I was... Just that little blur bugs me, so I went back and had a look at it.
And what I found was these beautifully drawn characters had 15
frames of this extraordinary character animation
that was completely out of place.
If you look closely and slow it down, you can start to make out
extra little details that you don't see on the first notice.
You see that there's a flash from one the ships, just there.
And then you look on the coast...
...and it hits.
There's a flash there, and that's when they move.
Just this little, tiny movement... very human gesture.
So it explodes...
..there's a flash at this end,
possibly another shell, and her arm moves out towards her daughter
in a protective gesture.
Daughter clings to her, and the son grabs up to his face...
..the horror of the moment.
It's something that really spoke to me and really...
it still actually sends shivers down my spine.
These 15 frames, separate drawing upon separate drawing,
would have taken a painstaking amount of time.
Buxton, clearly, didn't think it worth the effort.
He never returned to this experimental style.
It was a former commercial illustrator
on the other side of the pond
who took this technique and ran with it.
The American market was vast, which meant that Walt Disney
could build an animation assembly line to make inventive shorts,
like his silly symphonies.
Animators in Britain struggled to compete.
And did better when they adopted a more abstract approach.
BRASS INSTRUMENT PLAYS
Living on a boat on the Thames in the early 1930s was a young
New Zealander, Len Lye.
He was experimenting with more traditional forms of animation.
Marrying them with one of his other great passions.
Lye loved to dance.
He was renowned within London social circles
for being this...whirlwind dancer.
And he wanted to create the same sense of musical
and movement interaction that you achieve in dance.
UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS
When funding fell through for his dancing monkey,
Lye had to rethink...
..and in his 1935 film, A Colour Box, he tried out
the cheapest technique imaginable -
animating without a camera.
FAST-PACED UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS
He didn't have a studio, he didn't have a large crew,
and instead was forced to go back to simple techniques
that were achievable on his own...with limited resources.
So he was acting directly upon 35mm film strip.
He was scratching on it, painting on it, using stencils
to apply regular patterns to them.
So it was a very physical interaction with the film material itself.
If you look at the film carefully
today, you can still see his own fingerprints,
just as a painter would, or a sculptor.
MUSIC CONTINUES
Lye worked with a composer, Jack Elliott, to break down
the soundtrack so his animation
would dance with the music.
I think it's the syncopation in the way the music, the musical
instruments, come in and out.
And that gives Len Lye the opportunity to change
the materials, to change the line, to change the colour,
so we don't get bored with it.
This is the essence of the soundtrack.
So he's not illustrating it. He's almost, as an artist,
reacting to the soundtrack.
By tethering music to DIY animation, Len Lye became a hero
to struggling animators.
In the 1980s, graphic design student Osbert Parker
was improvising with vintage clothes on the floor
of his flat...
..and hit upon his own way to capture the same spontaneity.
MUSIC: The Elks' Parade by Bobby Sherwood
Even though we're trying to make this perfect thing -
an animation is all about being precise -
I feel as though having this improvised moment,
allowing things to happen by chance, is really important.
For me, it's about using your whole body, moving these clothes
around the characters, and you're working the frame -
very much like dancers and performers.
And so, I felt as though in doing that, it captures
and it kind of records the way you move as a creator.
Osbert tried out different music as he worked...
..but nothing felt right.
Only once I started to play different soundtracks with the film,
I stumbled across a track by Bobby Sherwood...
RECORDING: Getting back in the groove, we strut on down
to the Dark Town Strutter's Ball.
..The Elks' Parade.
This track, it was saying something more about the characters.
Even though it wasn't completely in sync,
there were synchronised moments which I felt worked really well.
MUSIC: The Elks' Parade by Bobby Sherwood
Osbert went on to produce dazzling commercials for Nike
and Budweiser.
British animation requires money, and it does help that advertisers
always want their logo on cool stuff.
Back in the 1930s,
Len Lye dutifully plugged cigarettes
to get his film, Kaleidoscope, made.
Even A Colour Box had to pay its way.
The state, in the form of the General Post Office,
funded it in return for a mention of parcel post at the end.
John Grierson, who headed the GPO film unit,
wanted the most interesting film-makers in the world
to work for him.
As well as the New Zealand-born Len Lye, he secured one
of the greatest names in the history of animation -
German emigre Lotte Reiniger.
Which leads us to one of British animation's best kept secrets.
Many of Britain's most important animators came
here from other countries.
Len Lye, Richard Williams, Terry Gilliam - all chose to join
an industry that welcomes free spirits
from outside the mainstream.
Lotte Reiniger first came to the UK in the 1930s.
A German left-winger, she wanted to escape
what she described as "the whole Hitler thing".
In London, she created films like The Heavenly Post Office,
for the GPO.
She brought with her a silhouette style,
based on Chinese shadow plays.
GENTLE MUSIC PLAYS
Even the angels are cut-outs,
made from translucent paper.
OK, so this is a puppet, a silhouette puppet in the style
that Lotte Reiniger would have used.
It's fully jointed.
Black card is obviously the ideal,
but if you didn't have it - if it was wartime
or you were hard up - then Lotte Reiniger, I know,
used cardboard from her kitchen.
So, maybe cereal packets or powdered milk boxes.
But it doesn't really matter,
because whatever's on it
doesn't show up - the lighting only
comes from below and you just see
the elegant silhouette
of the character.
In classic British fashion,
Reiniger played to her limitations,
conjuring up fairy tale worlds with just
a light box and a pair of scissors.
I know you cut your silhouettes freehand.
Could you show me how you do it?
Oh, certainly.
Nothing easier than that.
Of course, I make some sketches of the skeleton,
but the real shape is done by the scissors, you see.
I have always been very quick with that.
Like all animation, it takes ages.
It's done very slowly, very carefully, and requires
lots of patience. I'm working directly under the camera - she
would have been working with film, so she
wouldn't have had video reference, or anything like that.
She had to work, sort of, blind, she had to work
just through her own instinct.
If you make a mistake, the shot's ruined.
So, if you do a bit that's wrong, if you kind of get a bit that
goes like that, and then you're like,
"Ah, I'll put it back to how it was."
It doesn't really work like that.
You know, you kind of would have to redo that sequence from the start,
or else you'd lose that fluidity.
TINKLING TUNE PLAYS
How do you get the fantastic fluidity of movement?
Well, I have the madness of making it really frame by frame and making
a motion with the things each frame.
So that...
This is the kind of thing
that you learn by the time,
like a piano player knows
how to touch the notes,
you see.
Lotte finally settled in Britain after the war,
taking citizenship and working here for the rest of her life.
You can spot her influence
in unlikely places,
like the Three Brothers sequence
in the Harry Potter films.
While Lotte has become an inspiration for later
British animators.
She sort of encapsulates a lot of those qualities which we think
of as being uniquely British but, of course, aren't at all -
since she was German.
She kind of had that quirkiness, she had that persistence of vision
that she wanted to follow.
Very low-tech and yet it's still possible to create
beautiful work that's still meaningful today.
How do you carry all these
different movements in your head?
This is how to speak the art, you know?
And a special gift, I can do that.
In 1939, "the whole Hitler thing"
reached the shores of Britain.
And in times of crisis, you sometimes need more than
a one-person band.
A ship which brings a load.
A torpedo blow which sinks a ship.
Animation had a good war.
Suddenly, the state was paying for companies to make films
about digging for victory and recycling scrap.
As it turned out, diagrams
had escaped rationing.
You look at some early examples of use of animation
in the Second World War, and they're really quite dry.
They're based around symbols
and icons, and ships disappearing,
in quite a diagrammatic approach to animation.
LOUD GROWL
But in 1942, a new information film really woke up the public.
Dustbin Parade was a high-quality animation on celluloid,
just like Disney.
With cute characters and backgrounds suffused
with modernist darkness.
It was the work of husband-and-wife team John Halas and Joy Batchelor.
through the quite familiar technique of
anthropomorphising animals,
objects - they made the stories
more palatable to everyday audiences.
Well, what do you want to be?
We want to be a shell.
And a shell you shall be.
Halas and Batchelor were a Anglo-European alliance
in their own right.
John Halas was a Hungarian animator,
strongly influenced
by the Bauhaus movement.
Working in London just before the war,
he found himself in need of help.
He put an ad in the paper for animators, and that's
how he found my mother.
He gave her a test, she did a line test
of a little ballet dancer.
GENTLE, TINKLING MUSIC PLAYS
He never said it until she died, but he felt that she was
the more talented one.
And she was.
CHARACTER WHISTLES Come on, boys!
She brought her own special style and fluidity.
She brought to it a knack for storytelling.
She could make something difficult accessible.
Getting the public to pay attention to vital
but often pretty boring information was essential
to the war effort.
If you haven't got a garden, go to your local council office
and ask for an allotment.
Between 1941 and '45, Halas
and Batchelor made over 70 films.
They'd got all this experience and they had no time
to think about it.
They got on with it.
And that's how they honed their skills, really.
Once Hitler was out of the way, the government had other
battles to fight.
John and Joy were fully behind the Attlee government's
radical programme for new towns...
..education reform...
..and National Health Service.
There have been many personal health services,
but different kinds of financial arrangements.
Morning, George!
Morning, Charles!
Morning.
And so Joy Batchelor designed Charley,
to sell the new welfare state to a sometimes sceptical public.
The Charley character is an everyman, he's someone
that people can understand.
And when he misunderstands the world, we would feel connected
to him, and therefore, when he suddenly understands
the world, we go along on that journey with him.
When you're ill, you won't have to pay for treatment.
I don't have to pay the doctor now. I'm on the panel.
Yes, that's true,
but your wife and children aren't.
In just eight minutes,
Your Very Good Health
shows the impact of the new NHS
right across society.
Here, what's your opinion of this new Health Act?
No use to me, old man.
Animation lets characters see their alternative futures -
with, and without, the NHS.
..call my doctor and have a private ward at the local hospital.
My parents made those information films for social security
and the beginning of the NHS.
They really believed in it. It was, you know, the socialist dream.
By the early '50s, Halas and Batchelor were the country's
leading animation studio - a British Disney.
So they were the obvious choice for American producer
Louis de Rochemont when he wanted to make a British
film of George Orwell's Animal Farm.
But they were about to learn another secret of British animation.
All animals are equal!
JEERING
Animal Farm, with its rebellious farmyard,
was perfect for the Halas and Batchelor treatment.
ANIMALS SING IN OINKS, BLEATS AND MOOS
This was the first full-length animated feature film
made in the UK.
It was in production for three years, and the working process
is preserved in the archives of the BFI.
This is the first colour storyboard.
In the first fight, you can see that it's almost exactly
as it is in the film.
And the colour palette as well is pretty much like the film,
which is a bit dark - and that's where it departs
from a Disney movie.
DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS
Halas and Batchelor's staff swelled from 20 to 80.
Animal Farm required 250,000 drawings,
1,800 backgrounds,
and two tonnes of paint - everything
planned with military precision.
These drawings look remarkably like the ones that they used
as a sort of living storyboard,
and they had hundreds and hundreds of drawings stuck through four rooms
on the wall.
And so they could chop and change.
If they didn't like a bit, they'd take one down
and put another one up.
But one decision remains controversial to this day.
Here's to a greater animal farm!
To peace
and plenty
under pig rule.
The film changes Orwell's bleak ending, where the animal
revolutionaries become just like their human oppressors.
Producer Louis de Rochemont had secrets of his own -
silent investors with particular views on revolutionary politics.
The CIA, no less.
There is no doubt that they were obliged
to have a more optimistic ending,
where there is - as my father would say - a glimmer of hope.
Halas and Batchelor always denied knowing the identity
of their backers.
But they accepted an ending where the rule of the Stalinist
porkers is shown to be temporary.
And they were used to working to the necessities of a sponsor,
and whoever was paying the bills.
That was work, that's what paid the bills,
that's what paid for this massive
growth in the number of employees that they had.
So, they were realists.
Animal Farm was commissioned to deliver a message,
not to kick-start an industry.
Which meant that,
as a British animated feature film,
it would be a rare beast indeed.
Instead of the cinema, animation in the UK reshaped itself
to fit a smaller screen.
When ITV launched in 1955,
it created the British television advertising industry.
They'll be in soon, like a herd of hungry elephants.
What can I give them?
Emerging from this new world was a young Soho-based animator,
who would tower over British animation for the next 50 years.
In both his commercials, and his own films,
Bob Godfrey had one secret that he lived by.
I couldn't imagine Bob producing a feature film,
because you couldn't sustain it that long.
His stuff was, you know, the vaudeville actor who comes
on and says his joke and goes off, and that's it.
By graphic, if you'll excuse the word,
present the first do-it-yourself cartoon.
At last, here's your chance to make your very own cartoon film
with our free do-it-yourself cartoon kit.
You'll get five Mickey Mouses,
three Tom and Jerrys,
six geese a laying,
ten fat old women, one Brazilian conjurer,
four flugelhorns, one Union Jack, seven little men in bowler hats,
one Florence Nightingale, four admirals.
A rear admiral, a front admiral, a red admiral, and a vice admiral.
It was all about finding the best creative solution,
with the minimal amount of work.
You'll also get one dozen assorted noises for use
in any cartoon situation.
These include a...
What was key to Bob's principle is,
if you could animate something with two drawings,
you know, like, one there,
one there, and just flick it on and off,
and it worked and it was funny,
why bother to draw, like, you know, 48 of them?
But do you realise it takes 8 million separate drawings to make
the lady's arm move from there, to there?
You know, animation is a lot of cliches - how to walk, how to run.
I don't do that, you know.
Part of my ethos is that I have no patience,
I want to get things done.
Boom, boom.
The beauty of Bob's ethos was it could be applied to anything.
Take the sexual revolution.
Something you could hardly ignore around Soho in the '60s and '70s.
It inspired Bob to try his hand at that
peculiar British genre - the unsexy sex comedy!
Many people lead dull,
boring, grey, monotonous,
dreary, uninteresting lives.
But not my wife, Ethel, and I.
In Kama Sutra Rides Again, Stanley and Ethel liven
up their marriage with a laundry list
of sexual positions.
It almost starts to feel like a Looney Tunes. Yes.
It's like each sexual position is, like, another item
in the Acme catalogue.
And, you know, then how they go awry each time,
increasingly toward the end.
And yet, again, paired with this gloriously,
quintessentially British dialogue.
CRASH!
CAR HORNS
A word of caution - the crossbar can be chilly
in inclement weather.
Bob's collaborator on the film was writer
Stan Hayward.
If you were working in a studio at the time,
you would end up in one of Bob's films,
sooner or later.
In Kama Sutra, the guy in that - that's me.
You know, the little guy there.
So Bob always used to draw me with my eyes wide apart,
and you know, one eye a bit boss-eyed because that's
how he saw me.
Yeah.
One unlikely fan was director Stanley Kubrick,
who put Kama Sutra on the same bill as A Clockwork Orange.
Britain in the early '70s!
When the next logical step from making a supporting feature
for Stanley Kubrick was...
Make a children's TV series!
When fellow adman Grange Calveley turned up
with an idea for a kids' show, Bob saw how it could suit his style.
Draw this green dog, like this, in outline...
And so Roobarb was born.
And he dived his nose towards the water, and crashed
it into the ice with a thud that could be heard
all over the garden.
As angry as an alligator, Roobarb demanded to know
who had double-glazed the pond in the night.
Bob Godfrey Films was the last studio that Grange went into.
He took it all around, it finally arrived with us.
And I looked at it, and, you know, we'd been doing commercials
for pretty good money, and suddenly there was this £2,000 for five
minutes. I thought, no wonder he can't get anybody interested.
But I liked it.
To make the money work,
they created their own low-budget
form of animation.
First of all, we did it in magic markers on paper,
because of the economy and we didn't have big budgets.
And we all used to get high on these markers,
we used to...
I don't know what they put in them, but wow!
Unlike traditional cel animation, where backgrounds were kept
on a separate layer, every frame of Roobarb
had to be completely redrawn.
I then flick, you see, between that and that, and you do get this kind
of discrepancy between the inks,
because they never dry the same way.
And this gives a kind of shimmering effect.
Well, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that because that gives
the film vitality.
That's called boiling, in the trade, and it's fantastic.
"That's show business," grinned Roobarb.
"That's show business!"
The economic animation going on there.
Felt tip pens, bright white pieces of paper -
this is stuff that you watched as a kid thinking,
"I could do that,
"I could be an animator!"
It was aspirational!
It was. It was aspirational, but it was so perfect!
Bob did more than anyone to demystify the art of animation.
He inspired hundreds of animators, and was never above sharing
even the most basic piece of advice.
I know a lot of people who have shot a whole
film with a lens hood on,
or no stock in the camera.
So, just check these things out before you start, right?
Up and down the land, polytechnics began
running animation courses.
And in the 1980s, a pack of art school animators
were released into the wild.
From Middlesex Polytechnic's graphic design department came Joanna Quinn.
Now based in Cardiff, she skewers British life in work
as brutal as it is beautiful.
SOMEONE FARTS Christ! Oh, God! What's that smell?
Digger! Ach! Oh, Digger!
You dirty dog! Have to put a nappy on him for the wedding, Ma!
For over 30 years, Joanna Quinn has
told stories from the life of Beryl - a working-class
Welsh everywoman.
This is a scene of the new film,
and this is Beryl talking to camera.
At the moment she's talking about her sister, Beverly,
who has strange habits.
So, she's saying, "She was quite weird, though."
Was quite weird.
Animated films were still quite... veering towards sexist.
And then Beryl comes along and she's a real women.
She's not a Betty Boop, she's not a Jessica Rabbit.
She's more real than any animated woman.
It's superb.
Beryl was born in a comic strip about a group of women who go to see
a male stripper.
Turning it into a student film
involved a rather unusual field trip.
I told some friends that I needed to go and see...
Do some sketching at a strip club.
Then suddenly I had all these friends going,
"Can I come, can I come?"
And so it was about ten of us ended up going.
But it was a bit scary, actually, I have to say.
It was a bit wild.
These women - they were mad!
The laughter, because it was just, like, mad laughter.
These women were just laughing, they were having such a fun time.
I think the fact that it was all women together,
just totally enjoying themselves.
Maybe the strippers are sort of irrelevant, in a way.
It was more about the camaraderie of all these women together.
Getting a bit drunk and just roaring with laughter and enjoying
each other's company.
And so that's what I wanted to get across in the film.
RAUCOUS LAUGHTER
EXCITED CHATTER
Get 'em off!
Everybody loves animation, so you can suck them in,
because people will just watch anything, you know?
If it's moving, it's magical.
And so you've got people hooked, that's when it twists,
and you think "whoa", because it's not what you expect.
Quinn's superb draughtsmanship often conceals
biting political observation.
Like in her 1993 film, Britannia.
So, these are the original ideas books for Britannia.
Here, she wanted to explore what makes the British...
There's Britannia!
..so British.
This is a professional Guinness drinker.
A teacher.
There's a judge.
Sloanes - you can tell when I made this film.
SHE LAUGHS
Public schoolboy, he looks very Rees-Moggian.
In the sketchbooks, Quinn shifts from observation
to vicious satire.
There you are, that's typically British.
A sort of conveyor belt of babies with corks up their bums.
The observation in Britannia itself came from political cartoons,
Gillray, Cruickshank, all those wonderful cartoonists
who were quite savage.
So I wanted it to be more like that.
This is supposed to be the class system,
really, summed up in a cake.
Funnily enough, we actually had a meeting with
Steve Bell, the political cartoonist, who,
we showed him the original storyboard because it was really,
really big and he saw straight away that there was too much in it.
He told us, just keep it simple.
You know, just keep it one idea.
So we just ended up with the idea of the bulldog representing Britain.
And then just taking over the world.
And then ending up a sort of lap dog at the end.
Mm. Walkies! Good boy. Come on. DOG BARKS
It went down really well, you know.
The French loved it!
Particularly.
Everybody loved it abroad. They thought it was terrific.
But in Britain, everybody was like, "Hmm."
Using animation to capture contemporary Britain...
..had a big future.
Across the Severn Bridge, the inventors of Morph had stumbled
across the technique that turned their fortunes around.
Do you like lions as well, then?
Do you like steaks and chips, with lions with it?
Not with lions, Andrew, no.
I don't like lion steak,
I prefer the ordinary steak.
It all began in a Bristol homeless shelter, back in the late 1970s.
This was the location of Down And Out, an experimental
animated film that used recordings of real conversations.
Er, Mr... Er...
..what's in charge...
Initially, when we started with Down And Out,
we had no idea
what sort of film we were making.
Our instinct was to make it, sort of, a bit wacky.
Because animation is wacky, right?
But the producer, Colin, encouraged us to be quite straight,
and because we were working with puppets - plasticine puppets -
it had a kind of reality and immediacy that was surprising.
Good. Now, I wanna go over and get a dinner.
He said you could come in...
It made you listen to conversation, and how inconsequential most
of it is.
And how, actually, verbal communication is pretty inaccurate.
Now, the other one... Mm?
Captain, he turned round and he says,
you can't get your beers here at all. I see, yeah.
We kind of discovered this idea of using little wooden beads
for eyes, so you can move the eyes.
And once we locked into that idea, suddenly, the characters came alive.
Well, don't you think you'd do a lot better,
and get better value for money, if you went over to the cafe
up the street? Cafe? Yep. I think you'd get better value for money.
Well, that's not very much help, is it? No...
When a new broadcaster, Channel 4, saw the film,
the Aard-men were suddenly making a series.
No, east. West. East. West.
And, and, er....
But how to deal with characters who were based on actual people?
There was a kind of an instinct not to be too sympathetic
with the real people.
And we made the film, which was done for laughs,
at a listings magazine.
Could cut this part, here. This whole lot.
We thought we'd really taken the piss out of these people.
Better planning, where's the planning? It does fit on one page, it does.
Yeah, with a picture.
Yeah.
Doesn't it?
I bet you that fills a whole page, that, almost.
Does not.
I'll show it to you.
Smartarse.
But they were delighted with it, absolutely delighted.
They weren't insulted at all.
They showed it at the Christmas party with great pride.
Just tilt it down a little bit.
Conversation Pieces marked a turning point for Aardman.
The adverts, Creature Comforts -
which won Nick Park his first Oscar -
all followed on from this breakthrough.
As they cemented their reputation
with a certain cheese-loving duo, Aardman knew they'd eventually
have to face British animation's age-old challenge -
the feature film.
It was obvious to us that a feature film is a semi-industrial process.
And ours is a very artisan, small-scale process.
So, we had to build up.
We had to build up and learn that you could do that without
losing the warmth and the humanity.
Once we found that out - then we dared to do it.
Chicken Run, Aardman's first cinema blockbuster, wasn't released
until the year 2000.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
You've been a wonderful audience.
LOUD METALLIC CLANG
It's made nearly a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office,
and that sort of money talks.
I suppose what the Aardman feature films have done is they've created
a feature industry in the UK now. Mm.
And that, in some regards, it is a little bit of a shame,
because they all come at once.
LAUGHTER You get the Aardman film, you get a Tim Burton film
and you get a Wes Anderson film -
all stop-motion, all at the same time.
And this new stop-motion feature film industry
isn't just the poodle of American directors and dollars.
THEY PANT
Get out of here, and don't come back.
For the last few years, a British independent film
has been under way in an old speaker factory in Bridgend.
If you think that sounds strange, just wait until you meet
Chuck Steel.
Asshole police.
You're busted.
Uh?
Ohhhh.
Hurgh!
HE WHIMPERS
Urghh.
I suppose, on the surface, Chuck Steel is a very American film.
Just give me till midnight. Cut the crap, Steel.
When are you gonna realise it's not 1985 any more?
It's 1986!
But I don't think it's a film and that could be made in America.
It's got a very British sense of humour,
and there's moments within it that are straight
from the pages of Viz.
It's Americana as viewed through the lens of a dude from Wales.
You know? Yeah.
Do you want a shot of the... fiddling with the bollocks? Yeah.
This one's got a special X-rated bit where he's got his
bollocks moving around.
There, so....
Which does make perfect sense when you watch the film.
It's not just a weird thing that I've put on this for no reason.
Mike Mort had a rather specific vision.
HE GROWLS
He wanted to make a schlocky action horror film
in stop-motion animation.
A massive task, which he made a little easier by setting
it in the 1980s.
I wanted to make the film feel as though it was a live action film
from that era - which had limitations back then.
Come on!
They didn't have CGI, so they didn't do so many crazy,
all-in-one shots, where the camera's
just flying around and you're seeing everything all in one go.
It was more about editing and through interesting camera angles,
and sequences, really.
The limitations of '80s cinema kept costs down.
Short shots means simpler set-ups.
Come on!
Hurgh!
PUNCHING AND BOINGING SOUND EFFECTS
Hurgh!
CHAINSAW REVS
Amid the hundreds of animators and model-makers,
there was some classic British upcycling going on.
Our lenses wouldn't work, you know, sourced from various places -
a lot of them was eBay.
They're just your standard camera lenses
that you'd use for still photography.
This was something from a commercial years ago that I've reused,
so it's kind of... Came in handy that I kept it.
The car chase was a hard thing to get done because it took
the entire length of the shoot just to shoot that scene
on one unit.
Which is three years, probably for five minutes of film.
Argh!
I'm a maverick. Renegade. Loose cannon.
Lone wolf. Look out!
Cop on the edge, who doesn't play by the rules!
Waaaaaarghhh!
Ha-ha!
There's no major studio behind Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires.
Just independent backers, headed by entrepreneur Randhir Singh Heer.
It CAN be done, you know.
You don't have to be a big Hollywood studio,
or you don't have to be backed by a billion-dollar company.
LAUGHTER
And you can do it in Bridgend, in a studio with 150 people
and $20 million,
rather than, you know, $100 million,
that a lot of the studios throw at projects.
HORN BLARES
British animation has always been hard to pigeonhole.
Yeah!
But now, it is many things.
World-beating kids' TV...
..blockbuster visual effects...
..but it's handmade heart
hasn't disappeared.
You just have to know where to look.
You still don't need a lot of space for an animation studio,
just somewhere big enough for your camera.
And your ideas.
Take Emma Calder and her studio in Brixton.
You step into Emma's, kind of, studio-home,
and you're walking into a world of...just creativity.
There's pieces from all kinds of projects
just littered around the place.
You're having a conversation with her and you notice there's
a lacy glove dangling in the background with a doll's face
staring at you.
Emma's shed - oh, sorry - studio...is an animation laboratory,
where experiments are constantly on the go.
Playing around here gives her inspiration.
What do you do when you have to make a film about Boudica?
Look among the bric-a-brac!
I just noticed I had this, like, little bit of broken china,
that I'd found when I was mudlarking at Vauxhall,
with a face drawn on it.
And I thought, oh, my God, that is really great, and,
maybe I can do another one that looks more like Boudica.
WOLF HOWLS
HORSES' HOOVES APPROACH
HORDE SHOUTS
ARROWS WHISTLE
SHOUTING INCREASES
WARRIOR WHIMPERS
Even when Emma's not working, she's still her studio -
messing around with a character she calls Random Person.
TV BEEPS
WHIMPERING VOICE: I want a new body!
SHE SIGHS DRAMATICALLY
Here you go.
They're a kind of excuse for me to just play
around with new ideas, techniques...
TV BEEPS
Like, today, I came in here and I thought, oh,
I've found some nice leaves, and
because it's going to be autumn soon, I thought,
well, maybe I'll make an autumn Random Person,
so that's what I'm actually doing right now.
Dead leaves...
# It's that time of year... #
I see your lips, but they are shrunken.
The window's shut.
# Life's passed us by-y-y-y-y... #
CUP CLATTERS ON FLOOR
Creative play isn't always fun, I think.
You're playing but you might not be having a good time.
You might actually be having a bad time.
In fact, some of the best work I've done,
I've been really miserable.
Which brings us to our last secret -
one that you've probably already picked up on by now.
Because in your town,
maybe in your street, is a home animation studio,
and inside it is an animator,
quietly losing their mind. SHE VOCALISES SOUND EFFECTS
If you're into animation and that's what you want to do,
then you're already slightly peculiar.
I think... And your peculiarities show in a very specific way.
"What do you want to do when you grow up?"
And I said, "I want to go to prison so that I can just be alone
"in a room and draw."
So I think what I was really trying to say was,
"I want to be an animator."
Because it is like that.
INAUDIBLE
Maybe from an outsider's point of view, it looks insane
because you're moving a puppet a frame at a time and taking
a photograph for three years.
You look at the careers of some animation directors,
and by the time their career's over, they've made four films.
And it's... You think, it's your life going by.
But Britain's animators have never just made films.
Almost by accident, they've also built something else -
an industry, of sorts.
Going to do the ATS girls, then?
Eccentric...
..charming...
MORPH AND CHAS CHATTER ..entertaining -
it's an industry that continues to defy common sense.
But magically, it works.
A bit like animation itself.
I think there's always a little bit of madness in having to make a film
one frame at a time, when you can pick up a camera
and you can film at 24 frames a second.
120 frames a second, 1,000 frames a second!
Why would you want to film one frame at a time?
I think that's incredibly insane, but, boy, is it fantastic
when you see these frames come together.
And something that shouldn't come to life comes to life.
That is magical, and that is why animators make films.
SHE SIGHS