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.

“Telling it like it is?” Considering British Television Animation and Contemporary Satire

Abstract: One of the primary modes of comic address within mainstream UK TV animation is an adherence to the tradition of satire. However much of this is processed through the trangressive space afforded to post-South Park TV animation and when considering the ambiguous and open-ended approach that typifies this contemporary register it is readily apparent that, whilst directly confronting ongoing cultural dialogues of apathy, expediency and nihilism, many post-2000 UK TV animated texts reveal as much about the failings, as well as the successes, of this contemporary satirical narrative.

Biographical Statement: Van Norris is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media, School of Creative Arts, Film and Media at the University of Portsmouth. His research areas and post and undergraduate teaching includes British and American film and television animation forms and issues of representation, American graphic novels and narratives, British and American television and film comedy modes, forms and performance. He is currently completing his PhD thesis: Drawing on the British Tradition – The Mapping of Cultural Attitudes and Identity and their intersection with Comedy Modes employed within British Television Animation.

Among his published works in the field of animation studies include articles in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (November 2008) and Animation Studies,; he also contributed to The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism and Cinema, edited by Graeme Harper and Rob Stone (Wallflower, 2006).