Dolly Pond from Pond Life.

Animation moves around the globe finding the right conditions of production and digging in for the duration. At various times, and for various reasons, the best work has to come out of America, Canada, Eastern Europe...wherever the climate permitted.

Sometime in the eighties it landed in Britain, where animators began to produce increasingly confident work resulting in the recent run of international prizes. At the recent Pre-Selection Committee for the Zagreb World Festival of Animated Film, now thankfully back on form after a rocky war-torn patch, there were 450 entries to the competition section, of which 133 were from Britain--by far the largest number for any one country.

The standard of this work was high and the range of subject matter, techniques and individual styles stretched across the board. There were robust showings of experimental, political, personal and narrative work commissioned or produced by a host of national and local funding bodies.

It's an interesting time for any filmmaker to be at work in the UK. In the past decade and a half, along with other Western democracies, we have, according to the pundits, entered a new post-modern era. In Britain, this era was ushered in by Thatcherism in 1979, where the population is still held in the moral grip of its right-wing politics of conviction--despite the succession of scandals, resignations, sackings, by-election losses and a distinct change in the political atmosphere.

Crapston Villas.

But not all of the social change of the last decade has been for the worse. The trickle down effect of the 1974 Sexual Discrimination Act began to speed up as the eighties-style ideologies promoted individualism wherever it came from--post-feminism arrived as part of the post-modern package.

Deregulation of the public service sector--a Thatcherite imperative and definitive of the pattern of social change in the UK over the past decade--started in a small way when Channel 4 began transmitting on November 2, 1982; it was a daring move, which increased the number of television channels available in the UK from three to four!

Animation for Adults
The channel's mandate to deliver innovative work to specialized audiences was interpreted generously and, as part of a wider scheduling experiment, animation for adults was given its own commissioning department. It's impossible not to link this development with the growth of animation in the UK; indeed, Channel 4's role in the benign circle of funding and stimulation of talent has been recognized at all levels.