Dear all -
I've just heard about the death of Oliver Postgate, at the age of 83. For those
who don't know about him, he became famous as a children's animator, mostly
working with his lifelong friend and colleague Peter Firmin (who is still
alive, as far as I know), and creating (throughout the sixties and seventies)
some of the best-loved animated series ever shown on British television -
Pingwings, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Pogles, Pogle's Wood, Bagpuss
and The Clangers. Some of these were made "flat", with cut-out drawings on
painted backgrounds, some in 3D, with models moving around in miniature "sets".
What makes these programmes of particular interest to the YouTube generation is
the extent to which they were home-made and cobbled together out of found
materials. Postgate invented his own method of stop-frame animation, made his
own animation-table in a disused barn, wrote his own scripts, edited his own
films and did many of the voices for his animations. The home-made ethic is
perhaps most obvious in Pingwings, which features a small family of knitted
penguins living on a farm. Peter Firmin's wife Joan knitted the Pingwings,
Postgate made them stand up by fitting jointed metal skeletons inside them, and
the series was filmed in and around the farm where the Firmin family were
living. In many ways Postgate and Firmin were nothing more or less than two
gifted individuals experimenting and having fun making up animated stories, and
that spirit of experimentation and fun is what comes across from their work.
There are odd parallels between Postgate and Firmin's work and the work of the
great Russian animator Yuri Norstein. In some ways the visual style is similar:
the slightly quaint, oldfashioned look; the pen-and-ink-and-water-colour style;
the rural settings; and the use of hinged cut-outs to convey movement. Postgate
and Firmin found themselves out of favour with the television companies in the
1980s when their programmes began to seem out of date, while Norstein found
himself somewhat stranded at about the same period, due to the restructuring
and near-collapse of the Russian animation industry. In recent years the work
of all three men has been rediscovered by new generations, who have come across
it via the Web and bought it on DVD.
Ultimately nothing from Postgate and Firmin comes close to Norstein's
extraordinary "Tale of Tales" - but they have a special place in the hearts of
the British public. The unpretentious and unshowy intimacy of their work has
sunk deep into the memories and affections of children for decades on end. It
has a value which goes beyond questions of artistic merit. I recently obtained
a copy of Pingwings on DVD, never having seen it before. When I sat down to
watch the first episode, however, I suddenly realised that I knew it from when
I was a child. There was a funny knitted penguin, in a black-and-white world,
looking at me from a barn door at the top of a ramp made out of planks - and
suddenly I was five years old again. You can't put a price on that.
- Edward Picot
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