An animator, on animation

At Hollow Earth, Matthew Ingram has a lovely recollection of favorite British animation from his childhood.

 This is prefaced by a run-through of some of his own work as animator (most of which I was completely unaware of, with the major exception of his Vitamin C film - an early symptom of the interest in nutrition and health that led to his book The Garden and blog Sick Veg).   

Of the things that turned his young mind onto the idea of animation....

There's fascinating stuff about the raw techniques used by Bob Godfrey for Roobarb and Custard. 

Surprised by his abreactive feelings about Bagpuss: Smallfilms's Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate are celebrated instead for Ivor the Engine. 

Because of our age difference, I only have vague recollections of some of the other ones Matthew rates, like Paddington. 

Matt closes with some good thoughts about how this relatively crude analogue-era animation leads to  outcomes far more magical than the slick seamlessness afforded by digital technology:

"What unites all the British animation of this period and my own scruffy work could be summarised as: everyday settings, whole films made by a few people (in my case one person), handmade models or hand-drawn imagery, animation breathing life into the inanimate, and fundamentally a demand being placed on the viewer's imagination. Needless to say this couldn't be more different to animation production in 2026. Furthermore, it's light years away from what a contemporary audience expects of animation.

"In the BBC4 documentary Firmin says somewhat mournfully, "I was supposed to be a real artist". Postgate replies blithely, "I was not supposed to be a real anything – so that was alright!" But I'm certain that both were united in a love for the practice itself; the gratification of labouring on something, and through that labour literally bringing things to life." 

Dreams, built by hand... 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

On this subject...  John Coulthart at { feuilleton } has a nice post about some hard-to-find later works by an animator who is central - even inaugural / instigative  - to this blog: Piotr Kamler 

John has a whole archive within his blog of Experimental Animation / Visual Music posts, what he calls "Abstract Cinema". A little trove of commentary and links. 

PIOTR KAMLER, L'Araignéléphant / The spiderelephant / Slonoiga (1968)

  

"One of the Polish greats, Kamler made most of his classic animations in France, where he forged working relationships with musique concrete composers like Luc Ferrari,  Francois Bayle, and Bernard Parmegiani. The latter soundtracks “The spiderelephant” (1968) with wondrous avant-whimsy.  The film itself takes us into a glowing otherworld inhabited by the eight-legged pachyderm of the title.  Don’t worry about the narration in French, just relax into this exquisitely rendered tone-and-texture poem of crinkly iridescent lines and mottled patches of pink, violet, and grey. Every shot is like a Rothko if his career had been diverted into children’s storybook illustration. 

"If you enjoy “The spiderelephant”, try out Kamler’s similar  “La planète verte” – or the quite  different atmosphere / look of “Delicious Catastrophe.” Between 1977 and 1982, Kamler devoted five years of his life to creating a  full-length animated science fiction movie called Chronopolis – then, possibly completely shagged out, he returned to Poland and switched artistic lanes to  sculpture." 

- SR

"Kamler began studying as an artist in his native Poland in the 1950s – an era that saw an extraordinary flowering of creativity in the realm of experimental animation in Eastern Europe – but soon relocated to Paris. There he became involved with the Service de la Recherche at ORTF, France’s national agency for radio and television at the time. Among the entities working within the Service de la Recherche was the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), which remains legendary within the history of avant-garde music as an epicenter for composers, musicians, and technicians experimenting with electronic composition, musique concrète, and other forms of acoustical research. Among those working under the umbrella of GRM were such luminaries as Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, Beatriz Ferreyra, Bernard Parmegiani, Ivo Malec, and François Bayle, all of whom would collaborate with Kamler to provide soundtracks for his films.

"Kamler’s early films are predominantly abstract, emphasizing color, shape, and motion to create a counterpoint between image and sound. He moved increasingly, however, towards representational imagery, favoring surreal, haunting figures and fantastic environments whose symbolic suggestiveness and existential starkness are highly reminiscent of the work of other Polish animators like Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica, Daniel Szczechura, Stefan Schabenbeck, and others. Using a wide range of techniques – from ink to pinscreen to rotoscoping to clay – Kamler created numerous short films from 1959-75, before devoting himself for the second half of the 1970s to the painstaking creation of his magnum opus, the feature-length CHRONOPOLIS, a dizzyingly inventive sci-fi allegory concerning the nature of time." -  Anthology Film Archives 

                                               

"Piotr Kamler’s SF film Chronopolis (1982) is a hypnotic exercise in sinister science whose imagery is lifted from an archaic stone vault. Against an unsettling patina of musique concrète composed by Luc Ferrari, we are plunged into a far future existence where immortal beings ensconced in a celestial city perform apathetic conjurations of matter. An external force, explorers climbing the pillars (?) that hold up the city, presage a deliverance from the languor that afflicts all.

"... In Chronopolis the hieratic denizens perform science as a ritual to hold off inexistence. The science itself appears primal, a knowledge forever know, but abstracted as mesmeric movement...

"The city, formed as if from astronomical telescopes and astrolabes, takes on the appearance of an ancient mausoleum wall, the figures chiseled yet animate, accessible though a causeways of gates. Kamler deliberately evokes the feel of Egyptian hieroglyphics without direct references. Or the pressing of a Phoenician seal into wet clay. The effect is timeless. The city has always been. The incantations that fill the sacred space continue. The musique concrète, the manipulation of found sounds, further enhances its timeless qualities.

"Like an animate Remedios Varo painting, this is an immersive experience with only fragments of plot."

- Joachim Boaz, SF Film Ruminations