The Persistence of Animation

Vision On to Stay Tooned: Animated Pedagogy in British Children’s Broadcasting 1966-1996

Abstract: This paper will look at the ways animation was promoted and “taught” in a range of British children’s television programmes, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. While Britain has a rich tradition of animated TV series, principally made for children, from the emergence of television in the 1950s through to the present day, it was series like Vision On, Clapperboard, Rolf’s Cartoon Time and Stay Tooned which offered a practical, critical and progressive discourse about the effectiveness of animation as an art, educating children (and adults) about the meaning and affect of cartoons, influencing many later practitioners and critics.

Biographical Statement: I am an established animation studies scholar, seeking to extend my work as a cultural historian, theorist and screenwriter/director, by establishing new areas of enquiry to research and promote. This paper emerges from research in two related areas — firstly, the continuing work in recovering and writing about various aspects of British animation, and secondly, engaging with the importance of archives and archival materials as part of a development to create a national animation archive in Britain. This paper will form parts of two forthcoming publications, and informs an on-going government enquiry about animation education and visual literacy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 4:28 pm and is filed under British animation, Educational animation, Television animation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.