Elsewhere in the world, stop-motion features continued to make appearances and impacts on the medium. The first full-length puppet feature to come out of Israel was Joseph the Dreamer (Figure 1.12) in 1961, based on the biblical story from Genesis about Joseph and his brothers. The film was directed by Yoram Gross, who began making experimental films based on Joseph’s dream sequences, and the results inspired him to make a feature version. He issued a press release announcing his intentions for the project, which drew the attention of puppet-maker John Byle and illustrator John Burningham. They agreed to collaborate and fashioned stylized puppets out of rubber with wire armatures. Actors from Israel’s Habima National Theatre provided the voices, and the film was primarily photographed and animated by Gross and his wife Alina, working mostly during the cooler nighttime hours over a period of 2 years. Joseph the Dreamer was scored by Eddie Halperin and the Kol Radio Orchestra, and its premiere was opened by Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. It went on to screen at Cannes and won several international film prizes. Today, Yoram Gross still produces animated entertainment and has released Joseph the Dreamer on DVD for new generations to enjoy (http://www.yoramgrossfilms.com.au).

 

The Magic Roundabout was a French TV series by Serge Danot that gained great popularity in the late ’60s, even more so in the U.K. In 1970 a feature based on the series was released in France called Pollux et le Chat Bleu (with the English version, Dougal and the Blue Cat, released in the U.K. in 1972). Written and directed by Eric Johnson, the film tells about an evil blue cat named Buxton, who enters the ruins of an old treacle factory, crowns himself king, and unleashes an epidemic of blueness upon the land. It becomes up to Dougal and his friends from the Magic Garden to defeat Buxton’s plans and restore color to their world. The Magic Roundabout and its subsequent feature version had long since gained a reputation for its rumored underlying subtexts related to political, societal, and drug-related references. The epidemic of blueness was read as a metaphor for conservatism by some, and many people have mulled over the meaning behind scenes involving magic mushrooms and other hallucinatory images. Whether or not this was all intentional, Dougal and the Blue Cat is certainly a product of its time and is still enjoyable for its strangeness, surrealism, quirky animation, and appealing designs.