“Max Beeza and the City in the Sky” - an amazingly original British animation
“Max Beeza and the City in the Sky” – an amazingly original British animation
A long time ago, in a lifetime far, far away, I saw an amazingly original British animation and decided to chat to its two young directors. The animation was made in 1977. Below is the resultant article, exactly as it appeared in the March 1979 edition of Starburst magazine. Yup: 41 years ago…
For two years a film made by two National Film School students has been surfacing in some of the most…
BBC Bristol, 1975-78, UK (6-short series)
Created by Colin Thomas and Bill Mather
The Animated Conversations series was the brainchild of BBC producer Colin Thomas and his next-door neighbour Bill Mather. Having seen American animators John and Faith Hubley's film Windy Days, which was set to a recording of the couple's children talking to each other, Thomas and Mather hit on the idea of producing a series of shorts with a similar premise for the BBC.
Mather made a recording of his son auditioning as a choirboy and used it in a pilot film, Audition. Five more shorts were made; Mather directed one, Hangover, but the rest were handled by other directors. Most have sunken into obscurity - even The Audition was, for years, thought to be lost - but two are notable in that they were directed by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, founders of Aardman Animations. Today, when the series is mentioned at all, it is generally thought of as consisting only of these two shorts.
Selected Short: Down and Out
1977, 5 minutes, directed by Peter Lord and David Sproxton
Down and Out, one of the two Animated Conversations shorts directed by Aardman founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, is an odd piece of work. Like the other shorts in the series it uses a candid recording of a real-life conversation as its soundtrack; here, the recording is of a homeless man trying to get a meal at a Salvation Army hostel.
Lord and Sproxton's other short for the series, Confessions of a Foyer Girl, took a more obvious approach by setting up a humorous contrast between the animation and the soundtrack: while two women working at a cinema foyer discuss their everyday lives, clips from glamorous Hollywood movies are shown (well, that was the original plan, but due to budget restrictions the directors had to settle on BBC stock footage; still, the general effect is the same). But Down and Out is a different matter. There is no attempt to be funny, or to use any tricks that only animation can pull off; the entire short is simply a reconstruction of what the real event might have looked like.
Down and Out raises some interesting questions about animation as a whole. Its basic premise flies in the face of the "purist ethos" that animation should only be used for what cannot be portrayed in live action; here we have a real event being transformed into animation that does its best to be realistic. There's very little "cartoony" about the short: Lord and Sproxton lovingly gave their characters all the twitches, sideglances and posture shuffling they needed to be brought to life.
