Morph in "Re-cycle" (1993)

Today is Saturday 19th March, aka the date of Earth Hour 2016, so do remember to turn your lights off for no less than one hour at 20:30 local time.  In order to mark the occasion, I'm going to spotlight another environmental short, this time from Connoisseur Video's 1993 VHS release EcoToons, the sequel to the previous year's Green Animation.

EcoToons follows a similar format to its predecessor, only with less emphasis upon student films and more upon Italian imports, including multiple shorts from Italian animators Guido Manuli and Bruno Bozzetto, and Japanese animator Fusako Yusaki, who worked extensively in Italy.  As a result, the films in this collection are generally more polished and professional than the ones featured in Green Animation, with Yusaki's work being particularly luscious (we'll talk about her at a later date).  Tony Robinson once again shows up to provide commentary upon the shorts, and while Peter Lord doesn't share presenting duties with him this time, he does show up elsewhere on the cassette, as part of a featurette which forms the centrepiece of this release.

Unlike Green Animations, EcoToons has the luxury of being able to boast an appearance from one of the all-time stars of the UK animation industry - that cheeky little plasticine chappie Morph, who at the time was still the most famous of Aardman's creations (although not for much longer - it was 1993, and The Wrong Trousers was all poised to come out later that year and elevate Wallace and Gromit to a super-stardom that Morph could only dream of).  Morph stars here in a short film called Re-cycle, which was actually the end-product of a competition hosted by the BBC Saturday morning children's programme Going Live in January 1993.  Viewers were invited to submit a six panel storyboard for an environmentally-themed Morph adventure, with the promise that the winner would have the thrill of seeing their idea brought to life in an official Aardman production.  That winning storyboard was submitted by 12 year-old Ruth Dancer from Gloucestershire, who came up with a pro-recycling scenario in which Morph is one-upped by his cream-coloured companion Chas for failing to see the hidden potential of the clutter in his life.  Included in this featurette is coverage of the competition with Going Live presenters Sarah Greene and Phillip Schofield, and footage of Ruth's visit to the Aardman Animation studio in Bristol, where she got to meet Peter Lord and some of the team assigned to working on her short.

Being a Morph short, and thus containing no dialogue that the audience can discern, the plot of Re-cycle is naturally entirely straightforward.  Morph realises that he has too much apparently useless junk stored inside his wooden box living quarters and resolves to trash it, only for Chas to request that it be passed onto him.  Morph enjoys a laugh at Chas's expense because he thinks that he's crazy, but Chas promptly rides by on a swanky tricycle assembled from Morph's discarded items (a bicycle in Ruth's original storyboard, but Lord admits that he changed it to a tricycle in order to make the animation process easier), much to the chagrin of Morph, who realises that he could be riding said vehicle right now if he had only been more inventive and resourceful.  As with any Morph short, the humour derives from the characters' quirky, high-pitched gibberish, the simple expressiveness of their movements and mannerisms, and their witty, ingenuous interaction with the most banal of desktop items.  In the surrounding featurette, Lord explains that he favoured Ruth's idea because of the triple punchline, which offered ample comic potential - the appearance of Chas's bike, Morph's reaction to the bike, and finally the titular "re-cycle" pun.  He also admits that the production process for Morph is a prime example of recycling, since he regularly slices off Morph's eyes, squishes him down into a blob and builds him up again from scratch whenever the models get too worn out or dirty.

Admittedly, the environmental aspect is rather subdued in Re-cycle, which doesn't really illustrate why recycling is so important (beyond the possibility of you missing out on a swanky homemade tricycle) or the potential negative impact of discarded waste, but whatever.  It provides a delightful opportunity for some characteristic mischief from Morph and Chas, and that titular pun is undeniably darling.

Side-note: as a kid I was totally square and had ballroom dancing lessons on a Saturday morning, so I very seldom watched Going Live.  Kind of peeved with hindsight as I would have really loved to have taken a crack at this competition.  I doubt that I would have been much of a threat to Ruth Dancer but still, given that I now don't remember a single one of those dancing moves it couldn't have been any less constructive a use of my time.