BBC Four’s new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness of some of the great animation pioneers who have worked in Britain – trailblazing talents such as Len Lye, John Halas and Joy Batchelor, Joanna Quinn,...
The story of married animators, John Halas and Joy Batchelor. A Jewish emigre from Hungary and a working class woman from Watford, England, John and Joy fell in love, created cartoons that helped the allies to win the war, and produced the first feature-length animation in British cinema history,...
A film commissioned and conceived by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi using drawings and photocopies provided by him. A non-narrative film focusing on Paolozzi's themes about modern man.
A pair of Siamese Twins live and work as part of a travelling fair. One dreams of being a rock and roll star, while the other dreams of scoring the winning goal for England in the 1966 World Cup final.
A film about the pressure which society puts upon people to project different images, particularly the image of success. Through the medium of potato printing the film shows how Madame Potatoe struggles to cope within the world in which she is placed. She retreats into the earth leaving her image...
The parody of the famous agent thriller is a production of The Japanese American Toy Theatre of London. The cast was recruited solely from a toy depot. 0017 James Bonk, for instance, is played by a small plastic Godzilla, his colleague 0016, who is murdered by being painted black, by a wind-up...
An itinerant drummer boy is visited in his sleep by a beautiful princess. She requests his help in escaping from an evil witch who has entrapped her on the glass mountain. He sets out to find the mountain and is helped on his way by a rather pathetic old giant and a magic butterfly who lends him a...
Inspired by Leos Janacek's Sinfonietta, The Queen's Monastery is about a woman whose lover, a former acrobat, has returned to her from war a changed man. Using a highly individual watercolour technique the narrative explores themes of love, escapist fantasy, obsession and guilt.
Using powerful imagery, black humour, and a liberal helping of appalling bad taste, the directors set out to draw people's attention to the state of British beaches.
An animated theatre of dismembered people, beasts and ghosts, dance, tumble, make love and tear themselves apart, a nightmarish subconscious world, in black and white.
A range of drawing techniques are used to explore themes of domestic alienation and romantic fantasy about housewives, hoovering, bingo halls and a cat. The film's idiosyncratic humour increases the impact of a film 'ultimately... about coming to terms with obsession, desperation and personal fear'.
Animated paper cut-outs. An amusing interpretation of the traditional Yorkshire circular song. A man goes courting on Ilkla Moor without his hat, catches his death of cold, dies, is buried, gets eaten by worms, the worms are eaten by ducks, and the ducks are, finally, eaten by the man's friends.
Despite a gap of nearly two thousand years, Boudica remains at the forefront of the public imagination. Her story has been passed down the generations from the original writings of the Romans and she has been continually reinvented to serve as a woman of our age. Set against beautiful watercolours...
A woman with extreme anxiety is devoured by four major preoccupations - the man she met by chance on a train, her dying father, her daughter's safety, and the murder she dreams she has committed.
