Monday, September 7, 2009...5:23 pm
Um – who created Bob the Builder?
Just to demonstrate how little the mainstream media world knows, or probably cares, about puppet animation, London free newspaper Metro featured an article about Bob the Builder‘s 10th birthday that seemed to get its creator wrong.
The article quoted Keith Chapman – the writer who came up with the concept – as the character’s designer. He is quoted as saying:
“I knew when I first drew Bob the Builder, I had created a very special character”
Hmm. Then why is it that Curtis Jobling is the man who is really credited with the character and production design? Curtis seemed pretty sure he was the one who gave Bob his distinctive look when he did a talk at Animated Exeter in 2008 – and many web sources back that up.
OK, so Keith Chapman may well have sketched out an idea of how the character looked – but it’s not the character that ended up on the TV screen, and the article doesn’t make this clear.
It’s irritating – and it’s not uncommon. I’m tired of seeing story after story about Aardman Animations claiming Nick Park is the founder. He didn’t come on board for nearly 10 years!
Just for once I’d like a newspaper article on stop-motion animation to be written by someone with at least an interest in the subject – and preferably some knowledge…
2 Comments
September 15th, 2009at 5:47 pm
That reminds me of how people call everything stop motion “claymation” and think that all puppets have strings attached!
Thanks for shedding some light (pun not intended) on the subject of film festivals. I am shooting a 7 minute short that should be done sometime next year, which is a clay-animated film. So, a puppet film, but even more rare- it’s clay. When was the last time you saw a clay-animated short in the United States? Well, probably never, if you haven’t visited or lived here, but I can tell you that clay is very, very marginalized around these parts. Even so, it’s my favorite genre of stop motion, and the shapes you can create in it are virtually unlimited.
September 20th, 2009at 8:06 am
I have visited the US on a few occasions and you’re right – I haven’t seen any puppet or clay animation on TV – although the new Fantastic Mr Fox is an interesting new direction for feature animation.
There has been some interesting stopframe animation out of the US – George Pal’s Puppetoons used replacement wooden puppets to create their effects. But of course he was originally Hungarian, so came from that tradition.
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