The Best of the British Animation Awards

We’re delighted to add some very unusual DVDs we've added to the FPI website: The Best of the British Animation Awards (BAA – hence the sheep logo), which now consists of five DVDs with the sixth volume imminent. You may remember a little while ago I blogged on the latest British Animation Awards to be held – well now you have a chance to actually see what I was talking about! I will, in a spirit of honesty, declare my complete bias here before we get into it: I am a serious animation fan and a follower of the Seventh Day Cartoonist Cult (we believe in watching a cartoon or animation every day of the week and make regular offerings to the shrines of Fred Quimby and Winsor McCay).

The DVD collections act as a showcase for the finest entries to the BAA; getting a short animated film made is hard enough, but getting it seen is another struggle again (authors who struggled to write their book then struggled even more to get it published will sympathise). The BBC and Channel 4 have both run animation seasons over the years and film festivals normally run showings of collected works as well, but it is probably fair to say that a lot of potential viewers just don’t get to see these works, not because they aren’t interested but because they simply are not aware of them.

That’s why it is important that new talent is supported, nurtured and displayed through the Awards themselves and the DVDs showcasing the works. I was fortunate enough to get an advance preview of the new sixth volume recently and it was terrific, with an incredibly rich and diverse range of work and subject matter, from the (deceptively) simple outline characters against a plain background in Matthew Abbis’ Bus Stop (looks so simple but worked brilliantly) to the use of models and CGI (Matthew Walker’s Astronauts). The work comes from individuals, collectives, art school students (including some from the Edinburgh College of Art close to where I am writing) and commercial works produced for adverts or music videos (in fact the public vote chose the winner for the favourite music video animation category this year, with Gorillaz winning and again for the favourite commercial being the Observer’s advert for music coverage which I thought was marvellous).

The sixth volume, due towards the end of this month, also contains some examples of a project called Minema Cinema. This grew out of a project by theatre group Scene & Heard which worked with school children in London, teaching them the essentials of script writing, plot and character development and so on with the finished work being produced with professional actors (but the student’s writing not corrected or altered by the adults). Tim Hope and Kai Simmons has the bright idea that this model could be used for the medium of animation – what better vehicle for a young (or even older for that matter) imagination?

The three Minema Cinema films are introduced by the kids themselves (a very nice touch) and when you watch them you will feel pangs of jealousy – why is it a 13-year old can make something so darned good!?!? They were all exceptionally good – Love Then First Fight told of a crowbar who is a former crook trying to go straight and a shirt who is a nylon-silk mix rather than pure material who receives racist-style attacks daubed on her door because of this. These two outsiders meet, fall in love and then have their first big argument all within a few minutes of young Tim Hope’s lovely animation.

Rabbit by Run Wrake, which won Best Short Film and Film at the Cutting Edge this year, cleverly uses an illustration style taken from old children’s books. Ian Gouldstone’s Guy 101 by contrast tells of an online friendship a browser has with a gay man, told mostly using web graphics and sound effects as chat windows and pop-up appear to illustrate the narration. Guy 101 seemed like a very stylish and amusing piece for the web generation, Boing Boing-hip reader, then suddenly it took a much different turn which I really didn’t see coming.

Also included on the various DVDs are trailers and clips for more mainstream works, such as offerings from Aardman Animation (home of Wallace and Gromit of course) and animation used for campaigns, adverts and even TV channel logos such as the animated ‘2’ from BBC2, which, as well as being enjoyable in themselves serve to remind us just how much animation in a variety of forms permeates our culture (and how we often don’t even think about it until it is pointed out). The running time varies but most volumes come in around the 93 minute mark – if you want my advice I found it best to watch a few at a time over different evenings, so I could enjoy them then let those cunning images and ideas digest before eagerly watching more (and then watching them again, I admit it, I am a shameless cartoonoholic).

So this is something a little different to recommend to anyone who enjoys animation. Some of it is made by kids but it is not kid’s stuff (some themes are aimed at slightly older ears). Some are the simplest line drawings, some softly painted Anime-style, and still others use the new tools of CGI to express their creator’s vision. Some are funny, some are sad, some are both. What they have in common is that they are all visually remarkable and they all use the genre of animation to do what it does best – express the human imagination. While they may not always appeal to the mainstream crowd I know that those who actively look for the unusual (you folks who buy our Fantagraphics titles for example, I’m looking at you here!) will love these DVDs. As an added bonus you know that you are not only getting some fine British animation to enjoy again and again you are supporting fresh, new talent as well. Who knows – perhaps one day you will see one of these names on a major Aardman or Pixar film and nod, smiling as you remark “I remember when I first saw her work on the Best of British Animation Awards.”