jim le fevre

ARCHIVE of BRITISH ANIMATION COLLECTIONS

I went to an extremely interesting talk at BAFTA Piccadily on Wednesday about the setting up of the Archive of British Animation Collections which I will hopefully update upon as it progresses but essentially it is at a very early and semi-theoretical stage in its life, so much so it may even end up not being called that but it’s a start for now.

It is organised by a number of people and groups of people including Paul Wells, academic and animation historian, Paul Goodman, from the National Media Museum, BAFTA and the BFI, the Animation Research Centre at the University of Creative Arts in Farnham and many more and it is hoping to address the fact that there is an awful lot of un-catalogued and disparate resources (from films to production artefacts through to documentation stratching back to the start of the last century!) that are close to being lost but also to act as an umbrella to bring the British Animation Community together by reminding people of the history and celelbration of what has been acheived in the last one hundred or so years.

It will hopefully also be a bridge to the existing archiving systems from the BFI through to regional initiatives and consequentally hopefully become the most incredible resource for future generations.

It may not be apparent but I am extremely excited and inspired by the idea so expect some kind of updates!

WHEN THE WIND BLOWS

Following on from that I hot-footed it up to Glasgow to see the opening night of Stephen Skrynka and Vicky Featherstone’s wonderful “Wall of Death – A Way of Life” which will have its own post in a few days.

On the train up I managed to re-watch Raymond Brigg’s/Jimmy Murakami’s When the Wind Blows and it struck me at how pertinent the ABAC is and what it could possibly do.

The film, based on Raymond Brigg’s wonderful book, is both a desperately harrowing yet also tenderly humerous story of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, a simple and charming middle aged couple, and the onset of a nuclear war. It was made in 1986 and harks back to the previous decade’s brinkmanship of a Nuclear Threat but through the eyes of two very naive people whose only experience of war was that of World War II.

Regardless of what an exceptional story it is and of the voice acting of the late great Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, the film itself it such a technical and aesthetic joy that I would urge you to re-visit it.

Not only is the drawn animation of such a down-played, tender and well observed quality but the approach to physically building their charming little cottage as a proper 3-dimensional set and to hang the drawn 2-dimensional animation onto this is just beautiful and I do feel quite worthy of its own investigation.

One of my fellow directors at Nexus, Celyn Brazier, got me onto the very early 1930’s films of Popeye by the Fleischer Brothers (of which there is a rather beautiful set of boxed sets here) and specifically the physical sets in Popeye Meets Ali Baba and The Forty Theives (of which there is a crappy version here and but I heartily recommend getting the better quality dvd) which you can see a great example of around 10:50 in where Popeye rides out of the town on a camel.

In When the Wind Blows however the sets are present throughout rather in key shots but they are  crafted so tenderly, and framed so beautifully and subtly behind the animation, that it’s easy to forget or even not to realise the technique is in  play. It is only when there are camera moves that they burst into a deeper level of sophistication and it is interesting to compare them to the early line-tests which you can see in the dvd extras where the backgrounds were traditionally illustrated and how different and how much more depth (both physically and emotionally) the sets bring.

Below are come wonderful shots taken from an early sequence of Jim and Hilda after Jim returns from the local library. As still images these are rather quaint and naive however set into the film they are extremely powerful.