The Art Of Smallfilms

Working from a barn in Kent, Postgate and Firmin produced some of the best-loved children's television of the 1960s and 1970s, including Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor The Engine and Noggin The Nog. This book presents the Smallfilms archive - the puppets and cut-outs from these series, along with insights into how they were made. It's a book full of pipe cleaners, cotton wool, wire and ping-pong balls, and celebrates the imagination and ingenuity of two artists who shaped the childhoods of a generation. Introduction by Jonny Trunk, Foreword by Stewart Lee: 'Jonny Trunk has taken the astonishingly thorough archive of Smallfilms... and presented it as one would a collection of artefacts in an exhibition detailing some much-admired 20th century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada. The Smallfilms' partnership's sacred relics repay his trust, and our repeated viewings.' Stewart Lee.

Hand-Made Television explores the ongoing enchantment of many of the much-loved stop-frame children's television programmes of 1960s and 1970s Britain. The first academic work to analyse programmes such as Pogles' Wood (1966), Clangers (1969), Bagpuss (1974) (Smallfilms) and Gordon Murray's Camberwick Green (1966), Trumpton (1967) and Chigley (1969), the book connects these series to their social and historical contexts while providing in-depth analyses of their themes and hand-made aesthetics. Hand-Made Television shows that the appeal of these programmes is rooted not only in their participatory address and evocation of a pastoral English past, but also in the connection of their stop-frame aesthetics to the actions of childhood play. This book makes a significant contribution to both Animation Studies and Television Studies; combining scholarly rigour with an accessible style, it is suitable for scholars as well as fans of these iconic British children's programmes.

Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, Pingwings, Pogles Wood, Clangers, and Bagpuss - the iconic animations produced by the Canterbury-based Smallfilms studio between 1958 and 1984 - constitute a significant thread of British cultural history. The lasting appeal of the imagined worlds created by Smallfilms is evident in the highly-successful BBC reboot of Clangers (2015-present), which has introduced a whole new audience to the pink moon mice. As well as the shows likely to be famiilar to readers, this history expands the Smallfilms story to include those less well-known animated shows that nonetheless played an important part in the studio's history. Through extensive studio access, interviews with many key Smallfilms collaborators, press and audience analysis, Chris Pallant provides a comprehensive and definitive historical record of the studio's work. Beyond Bagpuss is illustrated with 100 images from the Smallfilms archive, including those that have not previously been published.

The Bristol-based animation company Aardman is best known for its most famous creations Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. But despite the quintessentially British aesthetic and tone of its movies, this very British studio continues to enjoy international box office success with movies such as Shaun the Sheep Movie, Flushed Away and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Aardman has always been closely linked with one of its key animators, Nick Park, and its stop motion, Plasticine-modelled family films, but it has more recently begun to experiment with modern digital filmmaking effects that either emulate 'Claymation' methods or form a hybrid animation style. This unique volume brings together leading film and animation scholars with children's media/animation professionals to explore the production practices behind Aardman's creativity, its history from its early shorts to contemporary hits, how its films fit within traditions of British animation, social realism and fantasy cinema, the key personalities who have formed its ethos, its representations of 'British-ness' on screen and the implications of traditional animation methods in a digital era.

An indispensable resource, this book provides wide coverage on aliens in fiction and popular culture. The wide impact that the imagined alien has had upon Western culture has not been surveyed before; in many cases the essays in Aliens in Popular Culture are the first written on the topic. The book is a compendium of short entries on notable uses of aliens in popular culture across different media and platforms by almost 90 researchers in the field. It covers science fiction from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century, including books, films, television, comics, games, and even advertisements. Individual essays point to the ways in which the imagined alien can be seen as a reflection of different fears and tensions within society, above all in the Anglo-American world. The book additionally provides an overview for context and suggestions for further reading. All varieties of readers will find it to be a comprehensive reference about the extra-terrestrial in popular culture.

Oliver Postgate is widely regarded as the greatest children's storyteller of the modern era. His work, which included The Clangers, Ivor the Engine, The Pogles, Noggin the Nog and, most famously, Bagpuss, is beloved by generations. In this delicious memoir Oliver Postgate describes how he came to create his stories and characters, developing innovative techniques of animation and puppetry alongside his friend and co-producer Peter Firmin. Amazingly, almost all of Oliver's films were made in a cowshed in Kent on a budget of next to nothing. The story of Oliver Postgate's extraordinary and adventurous life, and the wonderful characters who populated it - both real and imagined - is witty, charming, beautifully remembered and exquisitely told.

Modern screen acting in English is dominated by two key figures: Method acting guru Lee Strasberg—who taught the “the art of experiencing” over “the art of representing”—and English theater titan Laurence Olivier, who once said of the Method’s immersive approach, “try acting, it’s so much easier.” This book explores in detail the work of such method actors as Al Pacino, Ellen Burstyn, Jack Nicholson and Jane Fonda, and charts the shift away from the more internally focused Strasberg-based acting of the 1970s, and towards the more “external” way of working, exemplified by the career of Meryl Streep in the 1980s.

Tottie is a loving little wooden doll who lives with her family in a shoebox. The doll family is owned by two sisters, Emily and Charlotte, and they are very happy, except for one thing: they long for a proper home. To their delight, their wish comes true when Emily and Charlotte fix up a Victorian dolls' house - just for them. It's perfect. But then a new arrival starts to wreak havoc in the dolls' house. For Marchpane might be a wonderfully beautiful doll, but she is also terribly cruel. And she always gets her own way . . . First published in 1947, Rumer Godden's classic The Dolls' House has been delighting children for years, and this beautiful edition, illustrated by Jane Ray, will delight future generations for years to come.