Episode 58 - Roobarb (and Custard) (Grange Calveley, 1974) (with Birgitta Hosea)

Roobarb (Grange Calveley, 1974).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The anarchy and artistry of British television animation provides the springboard for Episode 58 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which welcomes London-based media artist, animator and curator Professor Birgitta Hosea (who is also the Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts) to talk about Roobarb (Grange Calveley, 1974) directed by English animator Bob Godfrey. Godfrey’s particular connections to the UCA (he established the Animation course at the university back in 1969) were the subject of the recent Cartoon Animation - Satire and Subversion event earlier this year that examined the animated medium’s more radical histories through Godfrey’s surrealistic and pointed creations. For this episode, listen as Chris and Alex join with Birgitta to identify Godfrey’s particular relationship to political cartoons in Britain, notwithstanding his marginal and underrated status within animation history. Other topics include the honesty and transformative energy of cel-animation embodied in the programme’s streaky, “boiling” aesthetic; the importance of white cartoon space within the visual style of Roobarb, and how this connects to traditions of overdetermining/underdetermining with fantasy storytelling; questions of imperfection in relation to the very technology of drawing; the power of Richard Briers’ voiceover and anthropomorphic characterisation; and what Calveley’s cartoon tells us about the way self-reflexivity can - and does - operate in the animated fantasy.

***To donate to The Bob Godfrey Collection, please click here***

Suggested Readings

• Amid Amidi, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006)

• Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

• Hilda R. Ellis Davidson, “Scandinavian Folklore in Britain,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 7, no. 2/3 [Special Issue: The Anglo-American Folklore Conference] (1970): 177-186.

• Birgitta Hosea, “Drawing Animation,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5, no. 3 (2010): 353–367.

• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).

• Rachel Moseley, Hand-Made Television: Stop-Frame Animation for Children in Britain, 1961-1974 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

• Van Norris, British Television Animation 1997-2010: Drawing Comic Tradition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

• Dan Torre, “Boiling Lines and Lightning Sketches: Process and the Animated Drawing,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10, no. 2 (2015): 141-153, available here.

• Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London: Wallflower Press, 2002).

• D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953): 89-97.