Bob's Birthday (aka In Ourselves Are Triumph and Defeat)

Even at a relatively brief 12 minutes, Bob's Birthday, the 1993 animation from British-Canadian husband and wife team Alison Snowden and David Fine, is a slow burn. The short, a co-production from Channel 4 and the National Film Board of Canada, centres on Bob Fish (Andy Hamilton), a neurotic dentist turning 40, and the efforts of his forbearing wife Margaret (Snowden) to throw him a surprise party, under the pretence that they'll be dining out at an Indian restaurant come the evening. Bob, though, isn't feeling the occasion and is in the midst of a mid-life crisis. The narrative highlight is when, having arrived at the house with no inkling of Margaret's actual intentions, he proceeds to strut into the living room with his genitalia on full display, and to fire off a string of damning remarks about the friends and associates who, unbeknownst to him, are hiding behind the furniture. But that doesn't occur until seven minutes in. Before then, we get an extensive build-up in which Margaret's innocent party preparations are contrasted, uneasily, with Bob's drab day at the dental surgery, and his wandering eye for his young and oblivious secretary, Penny. Bob is not a particularly sympathetic character. Much of his malaise about the onset of middle age seems to revolve around his cold dissatisfaction with his life with Margaret, all while we're seeing the evidence of Margaret's sweetness and devotion to Bob in plain sight. There is, though, something achingly human about his prosaic predicament. Snowden and Fine's short was to resonate with audiences, winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1995, and later inspiring a spin-off series, Bob and Margaret,  which rain from 1998 to 2001.

Bob's Birthday is a poignant, particularly sour-toned trouble in paradise tale with a sprinkling of strange and grotesque touches - right from the very first scene, in which a severed foot visible upon the kitchen floor is quickly revealed to be a squeaky dog toy. Bob, who has dedicated his career to the preservation of oral hygiene, lives in a world that is markedly unhygienic, with all kinds of uncomfortable realities simmering below its proverbial gum-line. The aphid infestation that is slowly devouring the plants in the dental surgery is a visual indicator of the emotional ugliness of which Bob, until his climactic blow-up, prefers not to talk, as is the ornamental doll gifted to him by a patient, revealed to be a kitschy toilet roll holder, and the criminal activity happening both on the street outside Bob and Margaret's abode (Margaret doesn't seem to notice the thief who casually breaks a car window and makes off with its radio) and within their living room (one of their guests pockets the spare change she fishes out from behind the sofa cushion). The surgery's aphid problem also juxtaposes comically with the script's various allusions to gardens as symbols of vitality. Bob listens to a radio announcer (voiced by Harry Enfield, and sounding distinctly like a more sedate Dave Nice), who introduces a discussion on middle age with a clunky metaphor about seasons in the gardening calendar. The greenery with which Bob has surrounded himself (the reflections of his own metaphorical garden), is ailing, potted and confined to a coldly clinical environment in which they have little hope of thriving. In his longing for Penny, Bob recites Thomas Campion's Renaissance love song, "There is a Garden In Her Face", while Penny is shown tending to one of the infested plants; the plant's continued degradation in her care (by the final shot in the dental surgery, we see that it only has one leaf remaining) a sure sign that his yearning is unlikely to heal his inner turmoil. His work offers him no solace. One patient merely feeds his existential fears, by citing an American study claiming that dentists have a particularly high rate of suicide. Another, despite her tasteless choice of birthday present, seems more benevolent in her musings. Her suggestion that 40 should be seen as a new beginning, with one having had ample opportunity to learn from the foolishness of their youth, is swiftly undermined by Bob's immediate instinct, on arriving home, to engage in a whole new bout of foolishness, behind what he naively believes to be closed doors.

Bob's Birthday offers a humorous look at the existential despairs associated with ageing (Snowden and Fine were themselves closer to 30 when they made the film, and apparently already feeling the pinch of their impending middle age), but its sharpest insights are in the moments which create a broader portrait of loneliness, accentuating the mutual solitude of both Bob and Margaret, and the obvious disconnect that has crept into their marriage. The futility of Margaret's party preparations is echoed in the adjacent tussle between the couple's two dogs (whom, it later appears to occur to Bob, were taken in as substitutes for having children) for a football, which leaves both parties locked in a stalemate for the duration of the short. Bob's professed desire to have children with Margaret seems at odds with his interest in an extra-marital affair, reading less like an attempt to reaffirm their union than a further, desperate expression of his fear of ending up alone. Bob is so overwhelmed by the prospect of oblivion in his future that he's unable to recognise the care he is evidently receiving from Margaret in the present, and his own failure to return it. His disparagement of his wife, and his unwitting sabotage of the party she'd planned, amount to a cruel rejection of that care, pushing Margaret into a more subdued existential crisis, in which she contemplates her own ageing, vulnerable form and the lack of love in her life (can she count on Bob to take care of her?). Her predisposition to always nurture the pathetic Bob nevertheless seems to transcend the emotional bruising she endures; she eventually returns downstairs and tenderly hands him a pair of trousers, which Bob obligingly receives.

Bob's journey can be seen as following the familiar trajectory of the five stages of grief. The earlier scenes in the dental surgery are all about denial. His silent desiring of Penny, who's never hinted to reciprocate his interests, amounts to a hollow attempt at escapism from his middle-aged discontent, while his sterile interactions with his patients offer him little recourse for an emotional outlet. When Bob gets home, his anger suddenly becomes manifest in the gruesome outburst in which, in an act of overcompensation for his own roving fancies, he coldly advises Margaret to find herself a new partner. He denounces all of their friends as boring, before sinking into a mournful rumination about how the only people they ever cared for, Ted and Elaine, have since deserted them for Australia (his evident attraction to Elaine indicates that Penny wasn't the first occasion in which he's contemplated infidelity to Margaret). He reaches his bargaining stage when he searches for an answer to his problem. Should he and Margaret have children? Would he be more attractive if he exercised more or went on a diet? Finally, he embraces Margaret and appears to have achieved acceptance. Suddenly he seems very upbeat and optimistic about the restaurant dinner he believes is awaiting them, insisting that he's been looking forward to it all day, despite his earlier reservations that curry was too spicy for his palate.

This takes us into the short's ambivalent ending, in which Bob goes out to start the car, and Margaret takes the birthday cake she'd prepared earlier and follows him, abandoning the thwarted party and leaving her friends in the darkness. Meanwhile, Bob proclaims his newfound acceptance of middle age by reciting the final lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Poets" ("Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves are triumph and defeat"), and is seen to unlock the car door for Margaret, freeing the way for her to join him in wherever life will take him next. We might question why Margaret chooses to ignore the party guests at the end. Is she too embarrassed to face them? Is this some futile attempt to sweep those pervasive uncomfortable realities back under the rug, by pretending they were never there? Or does it represent her own rejection of the social connections that, as per Bob's accusations, Margaret despises as much as he does? (The rather emphatic slamming of the door might imply the latter). Either way, it is obviously a bit fanciful to suppose that they won't have to face the music sooner or later. They're going to have to come back home eventually (for one thing, their dogs are there) and, whether or not the guests will be waiting or will have found their own way out, this is the world they'll still have to live in. Perhaps we feel a mite bad for the guests, with whom we don't really spend enough time to assess if they are as bad as Bob claims. For the most part their transgressions seem to be quite low-key. We've got the penny-pincher who pockets coins from behind the sofa, and another who spills a drink on the carpet despite Margaret's request that they leave it unstained. Bob repeats some rumor he's heard about one guest, Barbara, who is a "wild card" behind the back of her husband Brian. Otherwise, their biggest sin, according to Bob, is simply being dull. He could be right - as we first enter the party, some of the guests are having a rather vapid conversation about basil and mozzarella. All the same, we're not given enough information to see their friends as the real problem. Bob is plainly his own worst enemy (something his citation of Wadsworth Longfellow appears to acknowledge), but by embracing Margaret (physically and emotionally) he seems to find his way toward redemption. Margaret, meanwhile, throws her lot in with Bob, concession that, in the end, all they fundamentally have is one another.

There is, though, another problem. Bob remarks how prudent it was that they booked their restaurant table in advance, as being a Friday night, they can expect it to be busy. But of course Margaret hasn't. She never intended to go to the restaurant, which was just a decoy to disguise her actual intentions. They're going to have to take their chances. Maybe they'll get lucky and get a table anyway, maybe they'll have to drive around all night looking for a place that can take them (in which case Margaret is going to have to admit to Bob that she lied about making the booking). What lies behind them is a lot of awkwardness and angst that's bound to rear its head again somewhere down the line. What lies ahead of them, tonight and on every night to follow, is uncertain. By the end, Bob and Margaret have each resigned themselves to that particular fate.

Never Say Pink Furry Die (aka Save It Till The Morning After)

Some Aardman productions are so obscure that they didn't even see the light of day in celebrations of the studio's obscurities.

The 2000 home media release Aardman Classics gave a comprehensive overview of the Bristol-based animation house's output pre-Chicken Run, but by no means a complete one. The DVD edition came with a booklet, Insideaard, offering a handy breakdown of the studio's filmography, and if you studied it extensively, you were going to pick up on a few glaring gaps here and there. The lack of Morph or Wallace and Gromit was self-explanatory, since this was intended as a showcase for the studio's assorted one-offs and oddities, with the Creature Comforts pieces as its obvious selling point. Other notable omissions included the preliminary Rex The Runt shorts (assuming you weren't counting Ident), the preliminary Angry Kid shorts, and any of the studio's advertising work outside of Creature Comforts. Also predominantly overlooked was the studio's music video credits, the only featured example being the quirky visual accompaniment created for Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" in 1987. From a representational standpoint, the absence of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (easily the most esteemed of Aardman's music video collaborations) seems hard to justify, but maybe there was an issue with licencing. The most mysterious of the snubbed items was a 1989 piece entitled Liftin' The Blues, credited to David Sproxton; to this day, the film continues to elude me, but I have gathered that it was an aviation documentary, which sounds intriguingly out of Aardman's wheelhouse. I fear that its hefty 52 minutes running time might have immediately precluded it from making this compilation, however. A more head-scratching omission would be the 1992 short, Never Say Pink Furry Die, which running at just shy of 11 minutes you'd think they might have squeezed into the mix. I wonder what the story was there? Was the implied sex scene considered a notch too ribald for the family audiences? It's not as though Aardman Classics was an overwhelmingly kid-friendly release anyway, what with the psychological horrors of Stage Fright and the apocalyptic visions of Babylon.

Never Say Pink Furry Die came about during the era when Aardman was regularly allowing its younger talent to create their own projects for Channel 4 - it's how Nick Park, Barry Purves and Richard Starzak were able to get their names into the limelight. This film's creator, Louise Spraggon, doesn't seem to have stuck with Aardman in the aftermath, which is a shame - partly because it is nice to see an Aardman project fronted by a female talent, but also because, while bedevilled with all the roughness of a first effort, it has promise, and I would have been interested to have seen how Spraggon's craft might have developed from here. The claymation visuals look considerably less refined than much of its contemporaries, but I quite like the homespun qualities, particularly the crudely-sketched, predominantly plain environments, which seem warmly nostalgic for the stop motion Paddington series from 1976.

The first thing to be said about the set-up of Never Say Pink Furry Die is how reminiscent the central dynamic is of Wallace and Gromit. Once again we have a master/pet relationship in which the pet is visibly the brains of the operation, although in this scenario both characters are equally non-verbal. The plot follows a young woman who wakes up with the mother of all hangovers, on a Friday the 13th that, most inconveniently, happens to be the day she's scheduled to get married. She's supported through her morning preparations by her far more organised feline companion, who clearly has a greater determination to get her to that alter on time...I don't know about you, but I don't think that exactly bodes well for her future union with her unseen groom. The matter gets thornier still - nestled within the woman's cleavage is a most peculiar item, the titular pink furry die, stoking hazy memories about possible misspent passions that unfolded the night before. We get flashbacks depicting her on what I presume to be her hen night, only there doesn't seem to be anybody out celebrating with her; either her friends have all ditched her at the bar, or she's henning it up by her lonesome. There is, in fact, only one other character in the full short besides the central duo, and they don't show up until the climax. Such is the paradox of Never Say Pink Furry Die; at times it seems so very busy and stuffed with details (the array of food packages, shrivelling Venus fly traps and half-eaten fry-ups on the kitchen unit, the records and magazines strewn across the bedroom floor), whilst being pervaded by so much dead and strangely empty space. Which takes us into its obvious shortcoming - the pacing of the short is listless to a baffling degree. There doesn't seem to be much urgency in how the narrative progresses, which isn't exactly ideal given that our antagonist is a ticking clock. What plot there is could have been told in less than half the run time, but there are long stretches focussed on giving a slice of life glimpse into the daily living routine of this woman and her cat, with the ostensibly pressing matter of the wedding rising to the surface only intermittently, whenever the cat glances at his wristwatch and a ceremonial leitmotif obligingly sounds. Otherwise, it's almost comical just how lightly the wedding seems to weigh on the narrative, never developing into anything other than a vague motivation for the characters to (just about) keep moving. We don't get much indication that this woman's heart is really in it - to the extent that she might just as well be going to a friend's birthday party, not the supposed happiest day of her life. Or is her terminal indifference all part of the joke?

For as long as it takes for the narrative to get to the point, the ending comes oddly abruptly, and this is where the tone of the pieces shifts into something flagrantly more sinister. We never get to the wedding, and by the credits it's honestly hard to say if the characters are even headed there at all. Given the groom's total lack of corporeality, the betrayal that's ultimately felt comes not so much at the closing revelation that it was the vicar with whom our protagonist knocked boots the night before (presumably the same vicar who's going to oversee her wedding ceremony, though it's not made explicitly clear) than at the fade-out, for abandoning us at this point in the story, and in the company of such a skin-crawling individual. When the vicar enters the picture, to assist the main duo with their broken-down vehicle, he is an immediately unsettling figure, with his eyes obscured behind his glasses, although deceptively, his initial function is to dispense quirky sight gags, with his car boot-ready alter, cross that doubles as a spanner, and unintentional substitution of petrol with holy water. Once the woman and cat have joined him in his van, and the furry die has been slotted back into its proper place, along with the last remaining fragments of clarity as to what went on that fateful night, it comes together less like a wacky comedy reveal than a moment of genuine squeamish horror. The general emptiness that's pervaded the film up until now - the seeming lack of anyone in this world besides the protagonist, her cat and this mysterious third party - suddenly feels treacherous, as though the predatory vicar has been closing in on this woman the entire time and she has unwittingly been all alone in his presence. The final arrangement, which finds the duo stranded in the vicar's ever-accelerating van, suggests a situation hurtling ever more critically out of control. The closing image codes them as having entered into a twisted symbolic marriage, bound by their mutually scandalous secret, with the license plate of the towed vehicle trailing behind in the style of "Just married" signage, while Peter Brandt's hazy background score feels evocative of a nightmare unravelling. I don't know if I'd go so far as to conclude that the vicar has literally kidnapped this young bride and her cat, but it does seem evident that their tribulation is just beginning - that, despite the increased speed, they aren't getting anywhere fast, except ever deeper into the whirlwind of chaos.

Humdrum (aka Fear of A Midday Shadow)

If you owned a copy of the 2000 home media release Aardman Classics, you might recall just how flat-out unsettling the compilation got the deeper you delved into its centre. For those who only knew the Bristol-based animation studio for the Morph skits and the creations of Nick Park, I'd imagine this would have been one heck of a bucket of ice water. Things got off to a deceptively genial start, with the original Creature Comforts short and the first of the spin-off ads for electric heaters featuring Frank the tortoise. Then Pib and Pog appeared, in all of their mean-minded, psuedo-educational glory, and things were thrown just a little off of balance. The Creature Comforts gang resurfaced, and for a fleeting moment we felt like we were safe again...right before were slap-dab in the middle of an incredibly fucked-up computer animated bit about a minotaur murdering a duck with the help of a severed hand. Sandwiching Minotaur and Little Nerkin in between the two ads about the dishwasher-loving pandas had the effect of making the pandas seem utterly false; going back to their smiling faces immediately after witnessing the horrors inflicted on that duck was like to having to resume your place at a dinner party after being privy to some enormously disturbing gossip about your host. There was some agreeable content ahead - War Story, Wat's Pig, a music video where a claymation cat with the vocals of Nina Simone performs "My Baby Just Cares For Me" - but "Heat Electric - Penguins 3 and Pablo" would be the last stop before a very disconcerting stretch throughout the middle, where we were basically leaping from one bite-sized nightmare to the next. Stage Fright, Pop, Ident, Loves Me, Loves Me Not - it was a non-stop parade of sleep-robbing freakiness. Obviously nothing else among them was as dark and sobering as the apocalyptic drama Babylon, but twisted psyches with full creative freedom clearly were endemic to the studio. The end of the compilation took us back into calmer territory, with the grimy realism of the Conversation Pieces and Animated Conversations, but even then they had to stick on one final scare to send us home with, in the form of Boris Kossmehl's Not Without My Handbag. In 2006 Aardman released another compilation, Aardman's Darkside, touted as a glimpse into the studio's nastier, more adult-orientated underbelly, but I personally saw very little difference between the films therein and at least half the line-up of Aardman Classics. Family-friendly was definitely not their default setting in the days before Chicken Run.

Lurking amid that sinister middle stretch was the 1998 film Humdrum - a short that, based on the opening credits, I had seriously expected to be a lot darker than it was. Everything about the title sequence - the deeply ominous musical notes, the black backdrop, the abrasive, jagged lettering -  suggests something truly terrifying is in store. Which may well be part of the joke; we enter into Humdrum prepped for a more dramatic affair than actually transpires. Instead, the key characters, two shadowy entities voiced by Scottish comedians Jack Docherty and Moray Hunter, are navigating a nightmare of a whole other nature, one that has less in common with the overt horrors of Stage Fright and Not Without My Handbag than the plight expressed by the verbose zoo animals in Creature Comforts. Stuck indoors and fed up of staring at the same four walls all day, the shadows spend the entirety of the six and a half minute runtime in search of alleviation from the stifling monotony. Their names are never disclosed, but I've taken the liberty of applying my own for the purposes of this review - Pawn, the thoroughly morose one (Docherty), and Rook, the intermittently exuberant one (Hunter), based on the chess pieces their heads resemble. This design choice strikes me as entirely deliberate, since the game of chess comes up explicitly in the dialogue, with Pawn recounting what happened on a previous and (we presume) equally boring occasion, when Rook made him eat all of the white pieces after losing a bet. He indicates that most of the pieces have yet to work their way through his digestive system (though he thought he saw a couple of pawns yesterday), a gleefully scatological gag that takes on added resonance if we view it as a mirror to the characters' own predicament, engulfed by a smothering monotony and desperately looking for an exit that never appears. The idea that the characters themselves are chess pieces also calls attention to their positioning for most of the film, perched at opposite ends of a table, suggesting that they are, whether knowingly or not, opponents and not allies in their ongoing entrapment. In the absence of any other distractions, they have nothing to gaze into except the dark abyss of one another, their every move a bid to keep not only the monotony from gnawing away them, but their companion's eccentricities too. Pawn is, unsurprisingly, the underdog in this equation, with Rook appearing to outmanoeuvre him at virtually every turn, and we sympathise with Pawn all the better for it.

Humdrum was directed by Peter Peake, the particular twisted psyche behind the aforementioned Pib and Pog, with a script doctoring credit for Rex the Runt creator Richard Starzak (then known as Richard Goleszowski). The film takes a unique visual approach - like your archetypal Aardman production, it uses stop motion figures, with the twist that the camera in this case is interested not in the figures themselves but in the shadows they cast. Seemingly detached from any corporeal bodies, Pawn and Rook exist only as murky, one-dimensional entities who nevertheless manage to be entirely fluid and expressive with the limited features they have. They seem at once alive and stranded in a ghostly state of only half-existence, distorted imitations of a full-bodied world that seems eerily unrealised. Meanwhile, the blistered backdrops onto which the shadows are projected take on a low-key life of their own, reflections of the protagonists' barren mental states that intermittently shift to signify the nascent traces of evanescent preoccupations. When the game of chess is mentioned, the wall assumes the checkered pattern of a chess board. When a cow is cited, the blotchy markings of a bovine's hide can be seen. The uncanniness of the visuals is buffered by the distinctly human warmth of the characters' banter, the dialogue between Pawn and Rook being both hilarious and natural. If you were watching it on the Aardman Classics compilation, then that warmth, coupled with the relative simplicity of the piece, came as a great relief following after the busyness and mean-spiritedness of the preceding Stage Fright. Starzak's playful touch seems particularly evident in the film's bluntly self-aware script, incorporating multiple barbs at its own nicheness. The possibility of turning to the television for escapism is dismissed early on, when we're told all that's on is "some weird animation thing". The major development that dominates the latter stages of the film - Rook's proposal that they entertain themselves by creating shadow puppets with their own hands - is met with weary disdain from Pawn: "I can't think of anything more boring that staring at some stupid shadows, for god's sake! Is this what happens when you don't have any friends?!" Elsewhere, Humdrum looks to be making some broader comment on our relationship with popular entertainment and the extent to which it alleviates or reinforces our monotony. The radio proves as futile a means of diversion as the television, bearing out Pawn's gloomy assessment that music "is all the same rubbish these days", with every station the characters tune into broadcasting some variation on "La Cucaracha".

The real purpose of the shadow world is to allow for a series of clever twists regarding the nature of perception. In the first half of the short, a momentary distraction arises in the form of a dog (or, more accurately, the shadow of a dog) barking at the protagonists' doorstep, which Pawn indignantly attempts to send packing. We think we understand what's going on, until Rook shows up and identifies the dog as a double-glazing salesman, who has apparently pestered the shadows on previous occasions. Our natural assumption would be that Rook is simply in cloud cuckoo land, until the door is closed and the dog, suddenly speaking in plain English, confirms his perception. It becomes even funnier when you rewatch the sequence with the knowledge that Pawn is always addressing the caller as a double-glazing salesman and not a dog; it makes me wonder, likewise, if the dog is actually barking from the protagonists' perspective, or if it's all just a comical means of conveying a particularly incessant sales pitch?

The interlude with the dog seems initially to be nothing more than a random sprinkling of absurdity, but later transpires to have laid the ground for the punchline of the short, once the game of shadow puppets has unfolded and become increasingly heated. As noted, the viewer's sympathies are invariably with Pawn, since he is the character with whom our perspectives are more firmly aligned. Odds are that we too would not recognise Rook's ridiculous attempt at contorting his digits into the shape of a cow, before he supplies the giveaway mooing (Pawn quite accurately observes that it looks more like he has his hands caught in a sandwich toaster). By contrast, Pawn's wizardry in creating an astonishingly fluid rabbit shadow is always painfully conspicuous to us, even when Rook insists that it looks more like an otter with two sausages tied to its head. It all climaxes with a deliciously cathartic moment where Pawn finally loses it with the hopelessly obtuse Rook: "I'm stuck indoors playing Guess The Misshapen Beast with someone who clearly wouldn't recognise a rabbit if it came to his house for tea, said "What's up, Doc?" and started burrowing into his head! There are blind people with no fingers who are better at shadow puppets than you! No wonder I'm a tad miffed!" All thoroughly just criticisms...except it's all tipped on its head in the closing moments, when a second caller appears at the door, a mooing shadow that perfectly matches Rook's prior attempt at creating a cow. Something even more shockingly unexpected then occurs - for the first time, we see a smile form across Pawn's face. "Not today, thank you," he says politely, before closing the door, seemingly unfazed by the irony of the situation. While it's certainly gratifying to see things end on a more buoyant note for the beleaguered Pawn, it's here that we also part ways with the character, seeing how our perspective no longer lines up with his. Suddenly, he seems at totally peace with the absurdity of his surroundings, and what's obviously normal to him has us scratching our heads with regard to what we're actually looking at. Is this hideously misshapen beast an accurate representation after all of how bovines look in this world? Is it another door to door salesperson flogging their unwanted wares? A grand cosmic joke at the expense of Pawn? A meta joke at the expense of the animators? All of those things at once? Has Pawn potentially been the daffy one all along, while Rook has a firmer grasp on the realities of the shadow world? After all, we never get any objective insight into how a rabbit even looks in this universe, outside of Pawn's projection - for all we know, his efforts really do look more like an otter with sausages protruding from its head. Or is Pawn simply calmly rejecting the film's final efforts to make a fool of him? All that matters is that Pawn is now in on something that we aren't, and it seems significant that he closes the door while facing the viewer, effectively ejecting them from the premises and leaving them out in the cold. The music heard during the end credits, yet another variation on "La Cucaracha", offers a striking contrast to the music featured during the title sequence and seems almost mocking of the viewer's confusion.

Humdrum was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, but lost to Aleksandr Petrov's take on The Old Man and The Sea - a film to which there was seriously no shame in losing. I'm just happy that it got some recognition, since like a lot of the studio's projects that weren't helmed by Nick Park, it remains something of a hidden oddity. It's disconcerting as hell, yet basically genial enough that it helped the psychological scarring from elsewhere on the Aardman Classics release to go down more easily, which speaks volumes to Aardman's character at the time.

Papa and Nicole: Interesting (1991)

I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that the greatest television finale of all time was not born of some beloved sitcom or riveting slice of prestige drama, but an eight-part comedy-drama designed to sell you dinky French motors and, as a project on the side, experiment in the numerous different ways you could reconceptualise a familiar Robert Palmer track. I speak of course of the hugely successful "Papa and Nicole" campaign of the 1990s, which not only convinced the UK public that the Renault Clio was a fun and desirable vehicle, but also put "Nicole" in vogue as an elegant moniker for a generation of newborn girls (a phenomenon Renault Clio were able to use to their advantage just last year, with a legacy advert celebrating the coming of age of the generation of young Nicoles whose identifies they helped fashion).

The campaign followed the adventures of Nicole (Estelle Skornik), a free-spirited young Frenchwoman living the swanky Provençal lifestyle with her well-to-do Papa (Max Douchin), neither of whom were doing much to challenge the quintessential stereotype of the French being a particularly amorous crowd. Nicole and her Papa were each perpetually in search of romantic gratification, with the Renault Clio being their mutual go-to method of travelling from one passion-filled interlude to the next. The names Papa and Nicole were themselves an in-joke, a nod to the 1966 heist picture How To Steal A Million, in which Audrey Hepburn plays a character named Nicole who is close to her Papa (Hugh Griffith), and somewhere toward the end the two engage in a verbal exchange that directly anticipates the pivotal dynamic of the Renault campaign. Dialogue within the "Papa and Nicole" ads was extremely minimal, outside of the voice-over narration - the characters uttered only a scant handful of words in total, most of them proper nouns (presumably to cover for the fact that they would have been speaking French). The majority never extended beyond the campaign's signature duologue, in which the father and daughter would address one another by name ("Papa!" "Nicole!"), in a new context and with slightly altered intonation every time, and always conveying as much and as little as ever needed to be expressed between the two. The mix of continental chic, non-verbal storytelling and sun-soaked salacity charmed many, with "Papa and Nicole" being voted the 12th most popular TV campaign of the bygone century in Channel 4's 2000 poll - although it drew its share of detractors, among them the late Fay Weldon, who went on record saying, "I hated those people, for some reason. They seemed so self-obsessed - and French, I suppose....it just seemed inappropriate that anyone would make a romantic getaway in a Renault Clio. Too small!" 

Appropriate or not, Nicole's saga was destined to culminate in the romantic getaway to end all romantic getaways, with the diminutive Clio providing the inevitable means to a life anew. When the campaign debuted, on 1st April 1991, one of its most popular contemporaries was Nescafe's "Love Over Gold", which managed to spin a full-blown soap opera from the scenario of Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan flubbing chance after chance to profess their love for one another, settling instead for making vague advances through their mutual palate for instant coffee (the campaign was parodied in this Harp ad starring Randy the Yorkshire terrier). While not as rigidly narrative-driven as "Love Over Gold",  Papa and Nicole had a story of its own going - one that, to begin with, played more like a bite-sized situational comedy than a soap opera, with various hi-jinks ensuing from Nicole and Papa's respective efforts to get themselves laid while the other wasn't looking. In the later stages of the campaign, a plot thread that became increasingly apparent had to do with Nicole's desire to fly the nest. Her sixth adventure offered a startling new development to that end, but the the truly explosive material was saved for the eighth and final installment, which coincided with the launch of the second generation Renault Clio, and was heralded by an extensive media blitz promising that things would be bowing out on an absolute bombshell - Nicole was getting married! But to whom? The identity of the groom was a subject of much speculation, with a press release noting that "spokesmen for Hugh Grant, James Major and Gary Barlow have refused to comment" (spoiler: it was none of those people). To be among the first to know, you'd need to tune in around the middle of Coronation Street on 29th May and see who was waiting for Nicole at the end of the aisle. An estimated 23 million viewers did exactly that. It seemed logical to assume that they couldn't possibly live up to such overwrought hype, but they delivered and then some. Call me sentimental, but I even get a little emotional at the final iteration of that iconic exchange between Nicole and Papa, just knowing that it will be the last.

For now, let's start at the campaign's humble beginnings, with the original Papa and Nicole spot, "Interesting", in which Nicole sneaks out from under the nose of her dozing Papa for an afternoon's romantic liaison, unaware that Papa has similar plans up his sleeve. Mark Robinson's 100 Greatest TV Ads, the official tie-in book for the aforementioned Channel 4 poll, specifies that the ad debuted on April Fool's Day 1991, as if there was a kind of hidden subversiveness to the arrangement, and Papa and Nicole's particular brand of foreign, Clio-powered glamour was always intended as a taunt at the expense of the viewer. The basic ingredients are deftly cemented - picturesque Provençal scenery set to an instrumental interpretation of Robert Palmer's "Johnny and Mary". Renault had been using this track as their signature leitmotif for some years prior to enlisting Papa and Nicole, but the more lulling, continental arrangements felt intrinsically tied to the serenely indulgent lifestyle of the Provençal pair. It was like something out of an idle afternoon's daydream, in between the ingestion of a sultry paperback fantasy. It was likewise a distinctively British conceptualisation of what their overseas neighbours must be up to right now, the foreignness of the characters being precisely what made them so alluring. In spite of what Robinson identifies as England's "historical anti-Frenchness",  the campaign fed into the UK's underlying fascination with France as a kind of parallel world, seeming as it does at once so close to home and so far-removed.

 

 

France, then, is construed here as Britain's reverie, and from the start, the ads linked the Renault Clio to a desire for escapism, even if, in this instance, it's a fairly low-stakes excursion from the unspoken expectation on both parties to stay perfectly still when they'd rather be off exercising their libidos. All that is spoken is the campaign's signature exchange, at the end of the ad, when Nicole and Papa resume their respective opening positions and greet one another with a tone that suggests both self-satisfaction and a vague wariness of how much the other potentially knows. Earlier, we'd seen Papa drive past Nicole's rendezvous without so much as turning his head, but I'm not convinced this conveys cluelessness as it does disinterest; nestled beneath the faux innocence of their ostensibly skimpy conversation is the understanding that neither will pry into the other's dealings so long as their own covert indulgences go uncontested.

I'll give a special shout-out to Papa and Nicole's chauffeur, Bernard (his name was never brought up in the ads themselves, but was included in the campaign's press materials) who would reappear in subsequent installments, and is here such a good sport to them both (he's possibly relieved to them out away from the château for a couple of hours). And if you're wondering there was ever a Maman involved, I could say something, but it might be considered a spoiler.

The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (aka There Are Backwater Places All Hidden From View)

Jeff Grant's 1973 film Lonely Water is as perfectly crafted a horror experience as you're likely to find in just 90 seconds. It has everything - atmospheric chills, an unforgettable villain, a couple of gut-wrenching character demises, even a sequel hook. That it was created for the purpose of educating children about the dangers of straying too close to the water's edge should not surprise us, given that there is a certain level of thematic intersection between the horror and the public information film - both deal in nasty surprises and morbid fascinations, with the intended outcome of maybe costing their audience a sleepless night or two. All the same, Grant's film leans more conspicuously on horror iconography than most others of its ilk, by envisioning the aquatic threat as a new kind of boogeyman, one who wears a hooded robe and hangs around bodies of water, anticipating the various ways in which reckless or unwary children will obligingly drag themselves to their liquid graves. "No one expects to find me here", muses the self-professed Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, as he lingers behind a group of children attempting to to retrieve a football from a muddy bog, and one of their party, identified as a "show-off", one of three victim archetypes with which the Spirit is accustomed to working, treads too far down the slope and loses his footing. "It seems too ordinary." An ominous splash, as we are reminded of the fine line that all-too frequently hangs between the ordinary and the catastrophic. That the Spirit boasts such an instantly recognisable voice - Donald Pleasence, on ghoulishly good form - does little to dispel his unearthly aura. Lonely Water was also unmistakably the product of the UK of the 1970s, a time when public information films were not only a prolific component of the children's television landscape, but were of the philosophy that a little psychological scarring at teatime was a sure-fire way to get results (Lonely Water, for all of its unabashed creepiness, might be considered positively soothing next to the drama of poor Jimmy and his frisbee). Things had definitely changed by my day. The water safety video I remember being shown in school (circa 1991) was comparatively lighter - it was narrated by a talking dog, and the only casualty was an inflatable bed that got abandoned by its teenaged owners and lost to the current.

Lonely Water was part of a spate of PIFs from the early 1970s aimed at reducing the number of deaths by drowning among the young. Charley the cat got in on the campaign, with the animated short Charley Says: Falling In The Water, also released in 1973, to which Robbie Edmonstone, writing for the BFI release The COI Collection Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!, describes Lonely Water as an "infinitely more disturbing alternative". That may be so, although I would counter that Falling In The Water is still the most harrowing of all the Charley shorts, because it is the one in which danger is most immediately felt - the sequence where Charley is shown struggling underwater, before Dad's resourcefulness as an angler saves the day, plays like a miniature nightmare in its own right. In typical Charley fashion, the expressed moral is specifically about not straying far from the watchful eye of adult authority - the mistake Charley concludes that he made was not in failing to look before he leapt, but in not adhering to Dad's command that he remain by his side. Teach Them To Swim with Rolf Harris adopted an altogether gentler approach; directed at the aforementioned adult authority, it urged them to book swimming lessons for their children in order to broaden their survival artillery. Of the three, it has aged the least elegantly, although not just for the reasons you're inevitably thinking. I would not disagree that swimming is a valuable skill for anyone to acquire (not least because it is fun and good exercise), but the assumptions at the heart of Harris's monologue seem profoundly wrong-headed - that you should teach your children to be confident and competent swimmers in a heated swimming pool with trained lifeguards on duty, so that if they fall into a river with freezing temperatures and raging currents, you can be sure they'll be able to handle it. Lonely Water, however heavy-handed its tactics, seems to have the better idea, in encouraging children not to take chances with the water to begin with. There was also Teenagers Learn To Swim from 1972, which accords with the Harris film in insisting that an education in swimming could save your life, although the preoccupations of the accompanying narrative have more to do with genetic survival - Dave the non-swimmer is dumped by his unnamed girlfriend for Mike (who swims like a fish) because aquaphobia just isn't an attractive quality in a mate. If so, it would have surely been bad news for the reproductive prospects of the generation reared on Lonely Water - at least, according to Edmonstone, who muses that the film's approach was enough to ensure that its target viewership "will never so much as get into a bath for the rest of their lives."

The key to the Spirit's unsettling energy, besides Pleasence's baleful vocals, is his seemingly passive approach to ensnaring his prey - he never has to lift a finger to lure any of these children to their doom, preferring instead to loiter in the backdrop, a horrifying presence to whom his young quarries remain as perpetually oblivious as they do the risk of submergence. The Spirit's modus operandi appears to be based purely on anticipation, and in knowing all too well how each of these scenarios will play out - the show-off will venture too far into the mud, the unwary will fail to take account of whether the branch on which he's leaning can take his weight, the fool will ignore the literal warning signs. There is a sense of chilling inevitability about their respective fates, as if the children were compelled by something deep within their callow natures; their playful curiosity, along with their failure to comprehend their surroundings and their own limitations, prompts them to waltz directly into the deathtraps before them, while all the Spirit has to do is to wait and claim his prize. There are times when the ease of the catching seems to get too much even for our narrator - when the unwary takes his predicted plunge, the Spirit immediately turns away, as if even he can't stomach to watch the outcome, leaving the horror of the incident to be articulated by the local ducks, who react noisily to the disturbance. Meanwhile, the landscape scarred by various discarded, rusting vehicles and appliances tells its own horror story, revealing how the children's longevity is threatened not only by their fundamental human weaknesses against the elements, but also the wastefulness of their adult caregivers, whose own careless habits risk transforming their playground into a hazard-filled wasteland. The power on which the Spirit thrives appears to be a melting pot of various forces working all at once - the deadliness of the water, the obliviousness of the children, the indifference of nature, and the unspoken complicity of adults.

Despite his astuteness in assessing human folly, we see at the end of the film that things don't always run according to the Spirit's plans. His conquest of the fool is thwarted by the arrival of the one thing the Spirit dreads - not adult authority, which does a grand job of staying out of the picture for the full 90 seconds, but rather "Sensible children...I have no power over them." A couple of children wise to the dangers appear and manage to save the fool from drowning, after which they obligingly take the place of the absent authority, by berating him for his poor judgement: "Mate, that was a stupid place to swim." It's through the sensible children that we get our only instance of direct interaction between the Spirit and the children over whom he presides - one of them, looking for something in which to wrap the shivering fool, finds the Spirit's delated robe upon the ground (having trampled over it earlier), but some deep-rooted sense of revulsion causes her to reject the item and to toss it into the waters, where it sinks beneath the surface. The final message of the film is one of empowerment to its young viewers - they have the power to vanquish the Spirit, provided they refrain from putting themselves at risk. Yet like any great horror villain, the Spirit refuses to be overcome that easily. He gets the last say on the matter, submerging out of sight to the foreboding cackle of "I'll be back!"

The sequelisation threatened in the Spirit's closing words never materialised - Lonely Water was the only PIF featuring the Spirit ever produced, but the staying power of the film proved so immense that this needn't matter. True to his word, the Spirit WAS back, in multiple ways - the film continued to make the rounds on children's television into the 1980s, meaning that you risked bumping into him in every next commercial break you watched for the better part of a decade. Vanishing from the airwaves didn't quell the Spirit either; his memory continues to haunt those raised on his teachings, with the childhood nightmares he inspired proving so enduring that in 2003 that Lonely Water landed a place in Channel 4's list of the 100 Greatest Scary Moments (if you can put stock in such things). The film's subsequent notoriety, and its reputation as one of the finest public information films ever made, has ensured that successive generations (among them, yours truly), who might have otherwise lived in blissful ignorance, have had the chance to get acquainted with the Spirit's charms. On a significantly grimmer note, there's also the extent to which the threat that the Spirit symbolises has remained as persistent and as deadly as ever. Katy McGahan, covering the film for the BFI, notes that: "Although statistics have shown a downward turn since the 1970s, drowning remains the third most common cause of accidental death among the under 16s." The essence of the Spirit's warnings are still relevant, even if his phobia-inducing tactics are from another world entirely.

Father Christmas (aka What If Claus Was One Of Us? Just A Slob Like One of Us?)

In some respects it's all too easy for me to take the 1982 animated masterpiece The Snowman for granted, because as far as I'm concerned, it's always been there. I was born into a world in which the short was still fairly young, but already there was a firmly-entrenched cultural worship of it, and growing up it was an inescapable part of my Christmases, as intrinsic to the season as holly, ivy and the Wizzard cash register. But this is not the case for the short that could be described as its first real successor. Despite the positive reaction to The Snowman in 1982, and how much of a lucrative merchandising property it remained in ensuing years, it took the better part of a decade for anybody to attempt any kind of subsequent festive animation based on the works of Raymond Briggs (I think we can all agree that When The Wind Blows from 1986 was aiming for a very different demographic). I'm old enough to personally remember when it was announced that The Snowman was finally getting a follow-up, a spin-off focusing on a character who made a small but all-important cameo in the 1982 film. The Snowman was a completely dialogue-free experience (save for that bemusing prologue in certain broadcasts where David Bowie appears and introduces it as something that happened to him), but here our protagonist was to be given a voice, courtesy of comedian Mel Smith. Father Christmas was directed by Dave Unwin and debuted on Channel 4 on 24th December 1991; I was watching, and I've never forgotten the gleeful anticipation I felt seeing it fresh and new, forever cementing the film as a nostalgic favourite of mine.

By Briggs' standards this is a rather jolly old special. No death and no heartbreak of any variety, just a comedic 25-minute window into the private life of Santa and what he does on the 364 nights of the year when his uncanny talents for flight and infiltration aren't in hot demand. Turns out, Father Christmas (Briggs' version of the legendary gift-bearer is a Brit, and it's established at one point that this is the moniker he prefers) gets as worn down by the daily grind as the next person, and requires a vacation every now and then. As an added bonus, he doesn't have to worry about the cost of travelling - all he needs to do is convert his trademark sleigh into a caravan and fly to whatever destination takes his fancy. Still, FC is a fickle tourist and it doesn't take many inconveniences to convince him he'd be better off elsewhere. The first half of the special follows FC as he travels from locale to locale, hopping around from a campsite in France, to a coastal town in Scotland and finally a glitzy hotel in the USA - Las Vegas, Nevada, more specifically (yes, Santa has a thing for showgirls and gambling, although he isn't particularly good at the latter) - before returning home at the end of the summer to find a stack of letters from children already piling up in his doorway. From then on, he doesn't have time to even think about anything else other than preparing for the busy night ahead of him.

The special was an amalgamation of two separate Briggs books, Father Christmas (1973) and Father Christmas Goes On Holiday (1975). The story has also been expanded ever-so-slightly so as to function as a loose sequel to The Snowman - at one point, FC takes a short break from his annual rounds to drop in on his enchanted snowmen friends at their Christmas bash, where the young David Bowie (yes, I know that "officially" his name is James, but I'm not calling him that) and a familiar frozen cohort are also in attendance. Upon seeing them, FC quips, "Glad you could make it again...the party, I mean, not your Snowman!" Given how much childhood trauma and emotional devastation was unleashed by the Snowman's untimely demise at the end of the aforementioned film, that really seems a bit flippant to me, but the very implication that he was reincarnated on subsequent Christmases and reunited with Bowie certainly helped take the sting off. This isn't the only point in the special where the story intersects with another of Raymond Briggs' properties - there's another, much subtler nod elsewhere in FC's adventures, with potentially darker ramifications, but we'll hold off on that for now.

Briggs' story offers a fairly unique take on the Santa mythos, in that his Saint Nicholas is depicted as a more humanised figure than we're accustomed to seeing in our seasonal media. For one thing, he's not much of a Saint - indeed, he has one or two filthy habits that might even rub some modern sensibilities the wrong way (see below). This Santa is human like the rest of us, meaning that he shits and pisses like the rest of us (and, in his case, his intestines are seriously ill-equipped for an over-indulgence of gourmet French cuisine - I'm not 100% certain, but I think this may be the only animated family special in which Santa suffers from a bout of explosive diarrhoea). He's also a bit of a grump and is constantly muttering under his breath about everything and anything that gets under his skin ("Blooming" being his favourite adjective). The pivotal humor, though, is in the extremely wry manner in which Briggs' Father Christmas is shown functioning within the mundane realities of every day life. This Santa doesn't live in the far-off regions of the North Pole; instead, Briggs proposes that there is something every bit as magical in the notion that, for the other 364 days of the year, Santa could be just your typical bloke next door (albeit easily recognisable to his legions of young beneficiaries through his portly figure and fluffy white beard). He lives in a nondescript English neighbourhood with nary an elf in sight, and if Mrs Claus was ever involved then she either died or packed up long ago (there is a portrait of a woman on his wall, widely speculated to be the departed Mrs Claus, which I guess tells its own sad unspoken story, but this is never confirmed). Magical flying reindeer are an indispensable part of the Santa lore even in Briggs' (relatively) down-to-earth vision, so FC does have a couple of those hanging out in a shed in his backyard. Otherwise, his sole companions are the nameless black cat and Jack Russell terrier who wait devotedly on the sidelines for FC to return from his numerous adventures; FC treats them with a genuine affection, demonstrating that, for all his gruffness, he's a softie deep down inside. Although perhaps that much is already evident in what he's willing to do for the world's entire young populace by flying out every night before Christmas and leaving them all presents, a profession that's here regarded as as matter-of-fact as anything else about his daily existence. It's not at all clear what higher power, if any, tasks FC with completing such a gargantuan endeavor year after year - for all we know, he's compelled to do this simply because he's that much of a philanthropist and delights in bringing the children of Earth a bit of seasonal magic and joy, even if it comes at a conspicuous cost to himself. It only happens once a year, but it is, nevertheless, an obligation that dominates his life throughout the remaining 364 days. And as much as FC might persistently grumble about that fact, in the end we sense that he wouldn't have it any other way. 

Although Father Christmas is by and far the most gentle of the Raymond Briggs animations, there is an understated sadness in the subtle implications that FC's devotion to his singular profession prevents him from leading the kind of ordinary life with which he intermittently flirts. I suspect that this is why there's no room for Mrs Claus in Briggs' version of the mythos - this Santa is a decidedly lonely individual who isn't able to get close to and form relationships with other people, in part because his job places such heavy demands on his time, but also because he has a secret identity to keep under wraps. This is a major factor in why he's unable to settle for long in any of his chosen vacationing spots; remaining an anonymous tourist isn't an easy task when you've got one of the most recognisable mugs on the planet. The dilemma is particularly salient during his time in Scotland, where he visits a pub and does a pretty good job of integrating with the locals, only to be reminded almost immediately of how badly he risks letting his guard down when he's identified by a passing bairn. This isn't exactly The Last Temptation of Santa, but the closing sequence, which shows the exhausted and solitary FC retiring to his prosaic bedroom while the world around him wakes up excitedly to a brand new Christmas morn, is a surprisingly poignant means of rounding off such a light-hearted narrative. He does monumental work and is loved and admired the world over, but strictly from a distance; the man himself exists purely on the sidelines, a total unknown. And that's fine - one gets the impression that he's perfectly happy with just his dog and his cat and his bottle of brandy from Uncle Bob. All the same, the number of parties and celebrations happening in the world that FC brushes up against but can never be a part of gives you an idea of how much he's sacrificed in order to make this work. Even his stopover at the snowmen's shindig is cut short by an urgent last minute delivery to Buckingham Palace.

Briggs' take on the legend is charming and refreshing, but it does leave a few lingering questions about how this FC operates that probably won't bother the special's target audience, yet inevitably plague my less credulous adult brain. For one thing, it's never established how he makes a living in this universe. True, you could query how any version of Santa manages to be financially viable, but this one has a penchant for some seriously splashy indulgences, and I'm wanting to know how he finances his expensive French lunches and luxury hotel stays in Vegas. Moreover, with the elves and the big fancy workshop taken out of the equation it's not explained where the sleigh-load of toys he delivers every year even comes from; he simply has them ready on the night in question, and that's that. If the implication is that he buys them himself then that's an even bigger drain on his seemingly endless pocket. And who puts up his reindeer during his tenure in Vegas? Is nobody bothered by the fact that he's bypassed customs to bring two unquarantined animals onto French and American soil (again, Santa does that every year anyway, but here he's meant to be passing himself off as a regular tourist)? Some of these absurdities are weaved quite knowingly into the story - for example, the fact that numerous letters addressed only to "Santa Claus, The North Pole" are able to inexplicably find their way to this seemingly ordinary urban household. Clearly, there are greater forces at work here that we're not let in on, even if it is just some arrangement he has in place with the world's postal services - it's noteworthy that adults in this universe seem hilariously nonchalant about FC's existence; he shares an amiable exchange with a passing milkman after finishing his delivery, and at one point accidentally walks in on an adult party and is casually directed to the correct room (although the attendees do share a snicker over his cliched get-up).

Like The Snowman, the special went on to become a long-running fixture of Channel 4's seasonal line-up (it's certainly better-remembered than subsequent Briggs specials, like The Bear and Ivor The Invisible, which in spite of their merits seem to have fallen between the cracks; they still keep trying to push that sodding Snowdog, but we'll see how much he longer lasts). I do, however, know at least one person who showed the special to their children in recent years and felt that it had aged poorly, with its depiction of an "everyday" Santa who's into smoking, boozing, gambling and lusting after women (I assume that nobody has a problem with the diarrhoea, though?*). The "lusting after women" charge was a mite exaggerated in my view - there's a brief moment where FC is seen dancing with a chorus line of girls at a Vegas stage show and giggling inanely, and he later dreams about lying on a lilo and being surrounded by female admirers, but that's as far as it goes - but I'll concede that if this special was made today then FC's penchant for cigar-puffing would certainly be excised. The alcohol? Possibly - although, unlike in the US where children traditionally leave out milk and cookies for Santa, in the UK it is customary to leave him a glass of sherry, so there is an argument to be made that a boozing FC is all part of the mythos there anyway. The idea is that he's supposed to be a flawed Santa (though not a bad one), and giving him a handful of muted vices is one way to show that, but I suppose I can respect why some parents with young children might feel uncomfortable with seeing such behaviours modelled by a bastion of childhood innocence. Then again, between this and the Father Christmas we meet in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, who dispenses weapons to children and comes out with explicitly sexist spiel, I know which incarnation I prefer. Personally, I only have one real issue with how Briggs' Father Christmas is characterised, and it's much the same problem I had as a child back in 1991 - there's a scene where he goes to a dry cleaners to collect his iconic Cola Cola-endorsed reds and is unduly brusque to the woman who serves him. She's doing nothing more egregious than attempting to make pleasant conversation, and is visibly shocked by his reaction. This moment has never sat well with me - I get that the whole idea is that FC doesn't have much of a social life and therefore isn't always great in situations that require him to deal with people, but this is the only point in the special where he comes off as an unpleasant old geezer as opposed to a lovably gruff one. Seriously, FC, this a tough season for those working in customer service too; maybe show a little solidarity?

Although Father Christmas is in many respects a very different kind of seasonal special to The Snowman, it takes an obvious cue from its predecessor in one regard, in climaxing with a musical sequence as our protagonist takes to the skies and embarks on an epic overseas journey; here, we get a montage showing FC transporting presents to numerous households around the world, all while expressing his thoughts on the process in song. The song itself, "Another Blooming Christmas", is upbeat in tone and blatantly not looking for comparison with the haunting and sombre "Walking In The Air", but it is infectiously catchy. And the animation, in which FC and his reindeer are seen swooping across various snow-covered buildings and landscapes, while not as starkly immersive as that of its counterpart, genuinely does make me gasp in places.

Oh yes, and that slightly darker nod to another Raymond Briggs property I mentioned - when FC goes into the pub in Scotland, who else would be wetting their whistles in the backdrop but Jim and Hilda from Gentleman Jim and When The Freaking Wind Blows? Now, I'm perfectly fine and dandy with this special taking place within the same narrative universe as The Snowman, but for the sake of FC and his pets, and for young David Bowie and his snowman friend, let's hope that this is an alternate timeline where they didn't drop the bomb. The last thing we need to think of is Santa perishing in the nuclear winter.

* I say that, but actually, the upload of the special that can be found on YouTube right now has been carefully edited to remove the part where we actually see him on the john.

Ident (aka Maybe I'm A-mazed...)

There can be few talents at Aardman more under-championed than Richard Starzak.The Bristol-based studio is so synonymous in popular consciousness with the work of Nick Park that it would be quite accurate to describe just about any of its non-Park talent as under-championed - not least studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton - but Starzak has always struck me as a particularly fascinating example, in part because he can be readily posited as a freakier, more sour-tasting counterpart to Park, epitomising the weirder body of work taking place at Aardman as Wallace and Gromit were winning the public's hearts. Back in 1989, when Park was preparing his breakout short Creature Comforts, Starzak (or Goleszowski as he was known at the time) was another rising claymation whiz getting the chance to flex his idiosyncratic muscles. Both had earned their stripes by working as animators on Aardman's most ambitious project to date, the apocalyptic Babylon, and each was given the opportunity to create their own five minute piece for the upcoming Channel 4 series Lip Synch, an anthology of five shorts designed to showcase the studio's individual talent. From the start, Starzak established himself as a darker, more surreal voice than any of his peers - his contribution, Ident, was by far the strangest of the five, an absurdist fantasy charting a day in the life of a beleaguered everyman as he navigates the walls of a maze and the dystopian society housed within, modifying his identity in an effort to blend in with the various social pockets he encounters, before his dog finally shows him that there may be a better way (maybe...).

Naturally, Ident didn't receive half the attention that Creature Comforts did, which is not say that it made no impact whatsoever. Like Creature Comforts, it did eventually lead to its own spin-off series...of sorts. Ident boasts the very first appearance of Rex the Runt, the two-dimensional plasticine hound who would go onto become Starzak's signature character throughout the 1990s, here featured as the pet of our chameleonic protagonist. It was followed by a trilogy of shorts exploring the further adventures of Rex, once he'd slipped the maze and learned to talk and walk upright - How Dinosaurs Became Extinct (1991), Dreams (1991) and North By North Pole (1996). Rex finally received his own full-fledged TV series in 1998, which the BBC bizarrely attempted to market as a kind of fill-in Wallace & Gromit, airing it in various lunchtime and early evening slots across the Xmas/New Year period. Brilliant though it was, Rex was never destined for the same kind of mass appeal as Wallace & Gromit - again, I fear that Starzak's humor was always too random, unsettling and off-the-wall compared to the altogether warmer eccentricities of Park's creation. This was 3 AM student insomniac television, awkwardly shoehorned into the niche of festive family entertainment; I'm not sure what stuffing-addled viewers made of it in the dying embers of 1998, but whenever Rex was repeated the BBC typically tended to squirrel it away in the late late hours.

Before he teamed up with Wendy, Bob and Vince, Rex led a humbler but stranger existence as the loyal companion of a phallic plasticine being living inside a labyrinthine dystopia. Compared to subsequent incarnations, this Rex is less anthropomorphic and largely behaves like an ordinary dog. He does not possess the gift of the gab, although in that regard he's at no more of a disadvantage than any of the maze's "human" inhabitants. Lord has stated that Aardman never settled on a unifying theme for Lip Synch, although the title suggests that dialogue and communication are of significance to all five shorts, and Ident is unique among them for containing no discernable dialogue (Barry Purves' contribution, Next, is an almost completely dialogue-free experience, but not quite). The characters all speak gibberish, although the nature of the gibberish changes according to the speaker. One character, who may be the protagonist's girlfriend, communicates by reciting letters of the alphabet in sequential order (although she skips the letter "g" for some reason). Another, presumably his boss, haughtily regurgitates the word "blah" over and over. The climax of the short has the protagonist head to the nearest watering hole, where he engages in drunken blather with its patrons (albeit before he's even touched a drop himself). Clearly, nothing of substance is communicated in their garbled murmurings, but the characters engage in rituals designed to give off the appearance of interchange, all the while revealing the fundamental disconnect between the participants. The failure of the protagonist and his girlfriend to see eye to eye results in both parties coming out worse for wear (and the possible breakdown of their relationship). The protagonist's display of over familiarity with his boss results in reproach. Masks are a recurring feature of interaction in the maze; the protagonist both annoys his girlfriend and appeases his boss by donning a mask and obscuring his true face. The backdrop his work environment consists of an assembly line of identical masks, suggesting that the protagonist is either involved in their manufacture, or (more likely) signifying the erosion of individual identity amid the capitalist grind.

In creating Ident, I strongly suspect that Starzak was influenced by Jan Švankmajer's 1983 film Dimensions of Dialogue, a collection of grotesque visual metaphors on the damages dealt by the inadequacies of human communication, particularly the manner in which the speakers aggressively distort one another's appearances as part of their pseudo-conversations. In Švankmajer's film, a succession of humanoid figures constructed from various household objects (vegetables, cooking utensils, office stationary) devour and regurgitate one another, grinding each other's basic components down until all differences are completely eradicated. The characters in Starzak's film endure a more comical but no less devastating evisceration, the emotional toll of all this assimilation being reflected the various scars accumulated by the protagonist throughout the course of the day. The discord with his girlfriend causes his face to be smeared with clown make-up (literally making a fool of him), while the mask he puts on for his boss appears to be altering the basic shape of his face, as his identity becomes conflated with the outward guise he is forced to assume for his daily survival. The characters do not literally consume one another, as in Švankmajer's film, but there is nevertheless a sense of them preying on one another's vulnerabilities in order to assert their own supremacy, with characters physically shrinking after enduring a particularly withering personal blow. Our protagonist is not an innocent in this process - in addition to the damage he unintentionally inflicts on his girlfriend by failing to understand her, he takes out his anger on a maze denizen significantly smaller than he; a denizen who approaches him to ask a question (he holds up a card with a question mark, which seems an appropriate reaction to the general situation), bringing an opportunity for connection and the sharing of knowledge, but whom the protagonist would sooner antagonise than attempt to understand. The inhabitants are a motley collection of figurative Minotaurs, brutally goring one another at evert turning, the grey, oppressive walls of the labyrinth signifying that they are all prisoners of their own conformity (entrapment and isolation are also central themes to at least three of the five shorts in Lip Synch).

As a counterpoint to the gloomy conventions of life within the labyrinth is the character of Rex, who does not exactly accompany the protagonist on his journey throughout the day, but the two of them have a tendency to keep running into one another. Rex is a faithful friend (although there are limits to his loyalty, as we see at the very end of the film), constantly seeking out his master and appearing to speak to some kind of latent urge that is contrary to the will of the maze. It could be because Rex is a dog, and therefore entirely lacking in human pretension. I suspect, though, that Rex is a largely symbolic character, a manifestation of the independent self our protagonist is repeatedly required to suppress in order to blend in inside the labyrinth. Rex signifies the protagonist at his purest and most honest toward himself. Significantly, the dog's appearances are usually heralded by the protagonist taking the time to examine himself in the mirror, reinforcing the idea that Rex "speaks" on behalf of his master's reflection. At the start of the short, Rex objects to the protagonist's (relatively low-key) efforts to smoothen out his wrinkles; he later barks aggressively when his master returns from his dispute with his girlfriend in full clown make-up, signifying the disparity between his inner and outward identities - he has become unrecognisable to himself. Although the dog and protagonist frequently appear to be at odds with one another, there is a surprising display of tenderness between the two when the latter is inebriated. He induces inebriation as purely a defence mechanism, to emulate the rituals of his peers, but just for a moment he lets his guard down and shows a smidgen of affinity for his overlooked friend.

It is ultimately through a mirror, and the guidance of Rex, that our protagonist is able to exit the labyrinth altogether. Rex demonstrates to him that the mirror is actually a portal to another world, if he can muster the gumption to cross through it. There is a strange duality to the very concept of a mirror providing the means of escape - the function of a mirror, after all, is to reinforce the concreteness of whatever environment is juxtaposed with it, the ubiquitousness of mirrors around the maze suggesting that they, like the masks, are tools of oppression, reflecting only the greyness of the walls and the inhabitants' inevitable slide into debasement. Rex's demonstration of what lies beyond the mirror is naturally a call to look past surface appearance, but also evokes the importance of self-empowerment and of taking charge of one's own destiny. Earlier in the film, we saw the protagonist pass a window revealing only the unending passages inside the maze, and obscure it with a picture of an altogether different world, a sunlit one with greenery and open spaces; a perfunctory and seemingly futile gesture of escapism, yet in the end he discovers that such a world was lying in wait for him the entire time. All that was keeping him boxed in were the limitations of his own mind. His earlier action constitutes a rejection of the maze, but in the most superficial way possible; the potential for ingenuity is in him, but at first fulfils no greater function than the masks, as a defensive means of covering up what is undesirable while leaving it fundamentally unaltered. At the end of the film, he finds a way out by acknowledging and fully embracing his potential as an individual, not simply as a means of escapism, but of empowerment to go against convention and change his circumstances.

Unfortunately, the basic limitations that have dogged him all the while are not so easily overcome. For all the beauty of that final revelation, Ident reaches a humorously - and disturbingly - pessimistic conclusion. The protagonist leaves the maze behind him and sets out in a new direction, only for the same cycle of hectoring and alienation to continue beyond its walls. He meets another figure who his double in almost every way, an encounter that at first appears to bring both parties joy, before they suddenly turn on one another. Given that the protagonist has seemingly escaped into his own psyche, this lashing out against his own doppelganger can be interpreted as an expression of self-loathing, a sign that he will never be contented with any reflection that he sees, and effectively always banging his head against the walls of a maze, whether literal or metaphorical. In the background we see the silhouette of Rex watching the entire sorry exchange play out, before he finally decides that his master is a hopeless case and goes his own way. Unlike Park's signature canine, Rex doesn't have the infinite amount of patience required to play guardian angel to an obtuse human (or whatever our protagonist is) and would sooner go and seek out his own pack.

As an endnote, when Creature Comforts received a spin-off television series in 2003, it was ironically Starzak, and not Park, who was the main driving force behind the project. While for the most part Starzak was able to keep his more acidic sensibilities to the sidelines, it seems that he had been interested in taking the concept in a darker direction; apparently, he wanted to do an episode based around animals in a vivisectionist lab, but the higher-ups talked him out of it.

Logo Case Study: Aardman, Meet Pandaman (aka Mommy, What's Wrong With That Man's Face?)

Aardman aren't typically renowned for being the kind of animation studio to propagate childhood nightmares (whether rightly or wrongly), but they made a solid (if largely unsung) contribution to the pantheon of disturbing production logos just around the point that their time in the sun was getting underway. This is what served as the company's logo during its breakout era, between the smashing success of Creature Comforts in 1989 and their initial efforts to ride the shoulders of the Hollywood giants at the dawn of the new millennium. This was the era that gave us the early Wallace & Gromit shorts, Adam, the Creature Comforts electricity campaign and a variety of strange and demented animated pieces from the increasing multitude of individual talent at the studio, and Aardman certainly weren't averse to scaring the wits out of their ever-expanding legions of fans. If you stuck around to the very end of The Wrong Trousers (as I made the mistake of doing), your reward was to be greeted with a smirking claymation face, about which there was something distinctly, unsettling, immediately wrong. I call this one "unsung" because I rarely see it featured in lists of scary production logos, but it passed the test as far as I was concerned.

The face in question had a large dotted bow-tie, a toothy, lopsided smile, and no discernable eyeballs, features that combined to make it look unspeakably uncanny. My initial assumption was that this mysterious figure was intended to be the "Aard Man" referenced in the studio's moniker (in actuality, the eponymous Aardman was an accident-prone superhero created by studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton for a skit they made for Vision On). For a while, I was in the habit of calling him "Pandaman", simply because the dark patches on either side of his nose reminded me of the eye patches on a giant panda, and from a distance I presumed that those curious features were supposed to be his eyes. All the same, I never really settled on how to make sense of this face, and it perturbed me so. Something about the smile struck me as downright unwholesome; the apparent lack of eyes gave the form a distinctly inhuman edge, as if some monstrous being had attempted to mimic human form and not quite managed to master the eyes. Instinctively, I always knew that Pandaman wanted to devour me whole; that an encounter with him would invariably result in winding up on the wrong side of those horrifying gnashers. In other words, he was right at home among the studio's output for the era, which was all about giving a beating heart to the weird and the eerie - check out the 2000 VHS/DVD release Aardman Classics to see what a diabolical little chocolate box it was.

Emphasis upon that beating heart, because as with many of Aardman's freakier pieces, its freakiness goes a long way in bolstering its charm. The fact remains that this is a deeply charming logo, although its charms are more apparent in the full animated version than in the still version that tended to bite the ankles of most productions. In the animated logo, we see the landscape from which Pandaman emerges coming together, and it's a green and vibrant land, brimming with all of the hand-crafted warmth one would expect from the claymation legends. As we encircle the plasticine grass, various cranes and pillars in the backdrop end up forming the frame around Pandaman and the Aardman lettering, when viewed from the pivotal angle, while Pandaman's uncanny mug and various two-dimensional clouds on wires drop down from above to complete the image. In a particularly endearing touch, that garish bow-tie transpires to be a butterfly that flutters gracefully toward his shirt. The accompanying music is a tad ominous, but also stirring, as if something wondrous is taking place. A particularly neat variant is featured at the beginning of the 1991 VHS release Aardman Animations Vol 1, which includes time-lapse photography of an animator putting the numerous components into place, before we zoom in and Pandaman gets to work his typically unearthly magic.

So far as I can tell, the Pandaman logo originated from the titles used for Aardman's series Lip Synch, a collection of five short pieces commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989 (in addition to Nick Park's Creature Comforts, by far the most famous and influential of the five, there was also Ident by Richard Starzak, Going Equipped and War Story, a couple of animated monologues by Peter Lord, and Next by Barry Purves, who at the time was working as a freelance animator on various Aardman projects). Each short was preceded by the unnerving image of a mouth appearing in a small beige frame and growling the words "Lip Synch", while one of the red spots from his conspicuous polka dot bow-tie rolled out and created the corresponding lettering. Many of Pandaman's characteristics were carried over from this face, including the bow-tie and the shadowy blotches around the jaws. Given the title of the series, the focus on the mouth makes total sense, although here the frame is so tightly boxed around the feature in question that his uncanny lack of eyes goes unrevealed. Which is not to say that the Lip Synch titles are any less unnerving than the Pandaman logo; the snarling, disembodied mouth is still pretty freaking monstrous, its enormous teeth no less carnivorous, the guttural manner in which it spits out the title appropriately inhuman.

By the late 1990s, Aardman were seeking a new look, and what's interesting is that they did initially appear interested in retaining Pandaman as a long-term emblem and incorporating his terrible form into future branding. The closing titles for the 1998 series Rex The Runt feature a different, two-dimensional logo, in which Pandaman is depicted shouting through a megaphone (although the logo is rendered in such a way as to downplay his monstrous features, so that he just looks like any regular human with a bow-tie). This was not to be, however. Pandaman disappeared shortly after and was long out of the picture by the time Chicken Run, Aardman's first theatrical feature film, debuted in 2000. Aardman presumably wanted their signature image to herald the bold new era they were currently entering, and subjecting mainstream family audiences to the delights of Pandaman in a theatrical setting was possibly deemed a step too far. Instead, he was replaced by a completely new concoction, in which various two-dimensional figures are shown rotating around the gears in a great machine, only to come to an immediate halt when a hand reached in and presses the central figure, a small black box with limbs and a head, and on its torso, a bright red star which was to serve as the company's new trademark going forward. There are few forms less objectionable than that of a star, but also few more generic, and the demented character of Pandaman is very much missed. Not that the gears logo (which itself appears to have fallen by the wayside) doesn't have a likeable ingenuity all of its own - it is, after all, more benign than Pandaman only so long as you don't focus on the tortured faces of the various forms trapped within those rotating cogs. There's a childhood nightmare to be derived from that, I'm sure.