The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

The Snow Queen
, 
adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen tale in 1959 by Lev 
Atamanov. It can be downloaded free here: 
http://www.archive.org/details/the_snow_queen_1959_animation
Norman McLaren’s 
Neighbours (1952)
, stands out as a landmark 
fi lm from the same era, exploring pixilation techniques to unfold its 
Cold War allegory. Watch it here: 
http://nfb.ca/fi lm/neighbours_voisins/
By the 1960s, though, the animated feature and short fi lm in its full, 
classically animated sense began to give way to cheaper animation 
for television and for many what was considered the Golden Age 
had come to an end.
The late 1960s and through the 1970s were testing times, though of 
course shorter, more experimental work that was not dependent on 
armies of artists and animators continued. Consider, for example the 
abstract work of Oskar Fischinger and Robert Breer.
See an excerpt from Early Abstractions by Fischinger here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrZxw1Jb9vA
Watch ‘70’ by Robert Breer here: http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=fcD3PS4Ckbwhttp://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fcD3PS4Ckbw
For the great Russian animator Yuri Norstein, animation is the place 
where allegory, entertainment and political comment enmesh. 
A timeless classic, typical of his style is Hedgehog in the Fog from 
1975. Watch it with English sub-titles here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smDlBmeeWck
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw brave and largely successful (if 
commercially failed) animated features occasionally being produced, 
notably 
Watership Down
(Martin Rosen, 1977) based on the novel 

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16
The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
by English author Richard Adams. Watch the trailer here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZcHLpjiEdw
The 1980s also saw the emergence of computer animation, 
notably in the fi lm 
Tron
(Steven Lisberger, 1982) that is considered 
something of a cult piece. Watch the trailer here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3efV2wqEjE
In Canada, the National Film Board of Canada encouraged 
innovative approaches to animation and this has yielded a treasury 
of intriguing animation such as 
The Street
(Caroline Leaf, 1976) an 
adaptation of a Mordecai Richler story in which a boy watches his 
sick grandma eventually die. Watch it here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54dm0Z99VOY
The extraordinary animation work of fellow Canadian, Ishu Patel, 
can be studied here: http://ishupatel.com/animation/index.html
Well worth a look is the beautiful work of Frederic Back. 
The Man 
Who Planted Trees
(1987) tells the story of one shepherd’s long and 
successful singlehanded effort to re-forest a desolate valley in the 
foothills of the Alps near Provence throughout the fi rst half of the 
twentieth century. It can be viewed here: 
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Ms_Valerie/videos/240/
Two of the most engrossing examples of animation in the 1990s 
were directed by Henry Selick: 
The Nightmare Before Christmas
and 
James and the Giant Peach
. His preferred medium of stop-motion 
animation was given a very high-profi le platform and the audience 
for it was there, ready and waiting.
Watch the trailer for Nightmare Before Christmas here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr5VuWeXGvQ
Watch the trailer for James and the Giant Peach here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSbSC_k9rLg
Sometimes, animation in the short form especially has a liberty to 
explore and express thoughts and issues that larger fi lm production-
based material would struggle to. Take for example the Channel 
Four commission 
A is for Autism
(1992 by Tim Webb) which is 
narrated by people with autism while images and sequences they 
have drawn illustrate the kinds of issues autism presents. A visual 

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Getting Started
17
form makes a very complex psychology somehow understandable 
in its essentials. Watch it here: 
http://uk.video.yahoo.com/watch/2190791/6934786
In 1992 a collection of animated fi lms was released through the 
British Film Institute called 
Wayward Girls and Wicked Women
, a 
collection of animated shorts by female directors. It included fi lms 
such as 
The Stain
(Marjut Rimminen and Christine Roche, 1991) 
and 
Daddy’s Little Bit of Dresden China
(Karen Watson, 1988), fi lms 
that both explored incest and abuse. For Jeanette Winterson, writing 
about this compilation, animation in its broadest application 
‘is 
closer to dance in its human delineation. It offers emotion freed from 
individual association, and yet is not abstract’
.
Order it here on VHS:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wayward-Girls-Wicked-Women-Vol/dp/
B00004CMOO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1289491932&sr=1–3
Commercials and music videos have fuelled an appreciation of 
animation and often their handsome budgets have resourced 
very vivid pieces of work of which the music promo for the Peter 
Gabriel track 
Sledgehammer
is often held up as an enduring 
example. Directed by Steve R. Johnstone, the video placed 
Gabriel in a range of fantastic scenarios that were created by 
different teams of animators. There was Aardman Animation 
(Peter Lord and David Sproxton), Richard Colesowski and the 
Brothers Quay, who were responsible for the sequence of Gabriel 
surrounded by fruit and vegetables for the 
Fruit Cake
sequence. 
Aardman handled the stop motion of Gabriel hitting himself with 
hammers. The promo also included the pixilation technique, so 
that Gabriel had to strike a range of poses round which furniture 
was moved incrementally. Watch it here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_E0bvOPTRg
This pixilation approach has also been used to eerie effect in Dave 
Borthwick’s fi lm 
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb
(1993). 
Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3YKBOkfmbU
For further examples, organized according to style and genre, see