ANIMUS PRODUCTIONS ~ A 20-YEAR SUCCESS STORY!

Extracts from my ANIMATION ME book chapter, concerning the London studio I set up after winning a BAFTA and leaving the Richard Williams Studio.

The logo we used to launch the Animus Productions studio initially.

With the exciting news that the Kindle edition of "ANIMATION ME’ is currently ranked number 2 in the ‘Biographies of Educators’ category in the US (so PLEASE do buy it if you haven’t done so already, so we can make it to ‘Number 1’ before the $2.99 launch discount price ends on Sunday night!) I thought I’d share some extracts from the chapter in the book that talks about the successful, award-winning animation studio I established in London, ‘ANIMUS PRODUCTIONS’. I ran the studio for 20 years in the end - together with my old Richard Williams studio colleague, friend and ultimately business partner, Richard Burdett. It was only closed when I moved to the USA in 1998, with the sole objective or making my own animated movies there.

In ANIMATION ME, the chapter on ‘Animus Productions’ immediately follows the chapter I devoted to my time and memories of working at the Richard Williams Studio in London - part of which embraced us winning an Oscar for Dick’s version of the Charles Dickens classic, ‘A Christmas Carol’. (Check it out on YouTube if you haven’t seen it yet.) Historically, ‘Animus’ was actually set-up on the back of me winning a British Academy Award (BAFTA) for my short biopic, ‘HOKUSAI ~ An Animated Sketchbook’ - inspired by the life and work of the greatest Japanese Ukiyo-e print artist ever, Katsushika Hokusai. (Again, viewable on YouTube if you haven’t seen that one yet either.) Needless to say this was a very exciting time in my unfolding career indeed!

The full chapter about ‘Animus Productions’ - as well as all the other chapters in the book - is exclusively shared with my ‘Paid Subscribers’ on Substack - as will be all my future books, films and published art. However, I hope these brief extracts below will give you a flavor of what the chapter on Animus Productions all about…

The studio logo we used at the end of our existence.

‘As I have said, I had mixed feelings about setting up my own studio. I was still somewhat strangely grieving for having left the Richard Williams studio, but at the same time I was both excited and more than a little nervous about venturing out on my own. I am very much an introvert in nature, preferring to work alone for most of the time. So now I had no safety net, or anyone else to blame if anything had gone wrong. I was riding on the success of my Hokusai film for sure and I definitely had a huge amount of experience by now in directing and animating TV commercials, which were still the number one client source for animation at the time. However, I was still smart enough to know that I could not do it all on my own. So, I approached a respected live action, TV commercials, production studio, James Garrett & Partners, to see if they would be interested in forming an alliance with me as I planned my new animation studio, Animus Productions. They were. So that gave me some confidence, as a number of their clients would be recommended on to me if they needed animation work. And that’s how it all began. To be honest, I wasn’t overwhelmed by projects at first, compared to my days at the Richard Williams Studio. But I did get enough advertising work to keep the wolf away from the door, at least - and please my investment partners in the early days.

On an emotional level I was feeling very proud of myself. Not only was I the first person in my family (to my knowledge) who had actually gone to college, but I seemed to have broken the curse that my parents had when they tried to set up their own businesses. My mother was trained as a milliner by trade in her earlier and healthier days, and she proved herself good enough to work for major London fashion houses to create one-off model hats for the runway, even when she was sick. However, she could never get her own millinery business off the ground, as you needed a license to buy sufficient amounts of wholesale materials for big orders. Yet paradoxically, you could not get a license unless you had big orders! So, it was effectively a closed shop at the time - meaning that only the big companies with masses of cash-in-hand could run the scene. My father on the other hand wanted to break away from the Fords factory work he was doing, to set up his own window-cleaning business. In fact, he had landed a big contract to clean the windows for hundreds of new-built houses in a development that wasn’t too far away from where we lived. I have strong memories of some rare days going to work with him and playing in the new houses where he worked. The houses were still empty at the time, so there was no problem for me to play in the buildings as my dad cleaned the windows before the houses were viewed and sold. However, his business ambitions were blighted by both the poor health of my mother and the fact that his mother had just been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer and so he, as the only son, had to be there for her more and more as her condition worsened. Consequently, he had to cancel his lucrative window cleaning contract and pass it on to a friend. With such hard luck hanging around the necks of both my parents, I had significant trepidation about stepping out on my own business path, too. But somehow, despite any knowledge of business or money management and the like, I fortunately had gotten off to a positive start.

Possibly the most frustrating wealth or riches kind of thing happened just a week or so after I started my journey with the James Garrett company. Lord David Puttnam, the British independent movie producer, was a huge hero of mine. He was responsible for such wonderful movies as Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, The Killing Fields, The Mission and The Duellists. He was intelligent, charming and a breath of fresh air in the British film industry as far as I was concerned. I had no expectation of ever meeting him, so I just admired him from afar. However, imagine my surprise one day in my new studio when I got a call from David Puttnam’s secretary to say that David wanted to meet with me! It seems he had seen my ‘Hokusai’ film at the prestigious Curzon Cinema in London and enjoyed it so much that he wanted to meet me.

Somewhat nervously I went over to his prestigious Kensington offices shortly after that and met the great man. He was wonderfully warm, sensitive and respectful when we talked. He said he loved Hokusai because it was so adult, informative and different from the usual cartoon films. He added that he’d always wanted to establish a quality animation studio of his own in the UK and he wanted to meet and talk about doing that with me! He said that he was considering purchasing the very prestigious building next to his, with the sole purpose of setting up a dedicated animation studio there. It seems his films had made him very bankable in Hollywood at that time and he said that he was about to go on another trip there and thought he would drop in on the Disney studio - to see if they had an interest in working on projects that he would like to make. He mentioned films of a more reflective nature – Buddhist tales, to be precise – and thought that I, with my Hokusai style, would be the perfect director/animator for that. He also mentioned a very poetic First World War project concept that he had in mind for a British TV special too. Above all else, he simply wanted to partner with me and take animation to places it had never gone before. I was of course floating on cloud nine when he mentioned all this. It seemed to me that it was a dream come true for me – and a marriage made in heaven for him. We were so much on the same wavelength with regards to where we wanted to see animation go. But then it all came crashing down in my mind. I had to tell him that just a week or two before I’d signed a contract with the James Garrett & Partners organization to work exclusively with them and I doubted if they would release me from it. He seemed disappointed. However, I promised I would speak to James Garrett to see if he would release me. Sadly, he wouldn’t. So, the incredible potential of working with David Puttnam was doomed before it even began. I was heartbroken, yet it was the first of the ‘so close, so far’ experiences that I was due to encounter in my studio career.

Another came a few years later in the early 1980s. I got a call from a lady in London who said she was collecting showreels for an anonymous film client. She wondered if I could send her one of mine. I was intrigued about the mystery client and asked who it was. She said she couldn’t tell me. However, as I was very interested in widening my production scope beyond commercials, I agreed to send a showreel off to her. I never got an immediate response, and I wondered if she was just some crazy lady who wanted one of our reels. In fact, I soon forgot all about the whole thing. But then many months later a call came through to my studio. I was traveling in the USA on commercials business at the time, but the message was forwarded on to me. I learned that a person named Tom Wilhite, who was the Head of Animation at the Walt Disney Studio in Burbank, CA wanted to talk with me. Needless to say, you don’t ignore these kinds of invitations. So, I called his office and booked an appointment there and then. I was due to fly back to London at the time, but I changed my flight plans and headed off to Los Angeles. On my arrival there, I rented a car and drove straight to the Burbank studio. I’d never actually been to LA before and had no idea where anything was. There were no interactive phone maps in those days, either. Indeed, there weren’t even mobile phones at this time. So, I bought a map and planned my route from the airport to Disney. It was a baking hot day, and the air-conditioned car was not actually that cool. With a combination of sweating and nervousness I hastily drove along the maze of freeways that is LA, towards the legendary Disney studio that was once staffed by giants and legends.

However, so good was I at solo navigation that I managed to find myself at the opposite end of the city, in a strange and unknown location and already very late for my appointment! I desperately pulled off the freeway, found a local pay phone and called Tom’s office. I apologized profusely when I was put through to him. But rather than being angry or hostile, he laughed loudly and told me that even he got lost in LA sometimes. Then he got his secretary to give me clear instructions on how to get to his office and was happy to wait around until I got there. And 45 minutes later, I breathlessly met with the head of Disney animation somewhat the worse for wear!

I found Tom nothing like the hard-driving, all-business, Disney executives I’d heard about. Instead, he was a sensitive, warm person indeed, and very comforting to meet. I felt immediately very at ease in his company. Formalities over, he showed me a script he was planning to make. It was a film called ‘Young Einstein’ and it was to star the young Richard Dreyfuss, who I was told was exclusively contracted to Disney in those days. I learned that the film was centered around the 10 days that Albert Einstein conceived of the theory of relativity. All of this seemed interesting to me. But I wondered where I – and specifically animation – came into this picture? He explained that although the film would be entirely shot in live action, there would be sequences of Fantasia-like animation that would depict with music the visions in Einstein’s imagination coming alive visually. He said he didn’t want the traditional Disney cartoon style animation approach and in looking at all the showreels from around the world that he’d received, mine was the one most closely resembling what he had in mind for the animation. This immediately reminded me of the showreel request by the strange and anonymous woman all those months before. Tom further explained that in all my body of work, two pieces struck him as being a perfect direction for the animation he had in mind. One of these was ‘Hokusai’ and the other was a one-minute cinema commercial I’d created for The Guardian newspaper, using the music of Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Tom said that they had countless animators who could do the Disney style. But he didn’t know of any who could do what I could. He said that he would love to have me on board with the project, so he could have a stab at changing the face of Disney animation – well, for this one movie at least. Of course, this was all totally in my wheelhouse and in perfect step with my own desire to take animation in new and uncharted directions. Yet, I could never believe that Disney, with its rigid design and family subject code, could ever consider making a film in this style. And I could never, ever dream that I could possibly be the person to make it all happen for them. I told Tom that I would totally love to work on his project, which seemed to delight him very much. I left our meeting that day with a script of the movie in my hand, and a clear confirmation that I would have a signed contract faxed to my studio within 10 days. Needless to say, I left the Disney studio complex floating on air that day – who needed a plane to get home!

I immediately returned to the UK and continued to work on a commercials project we had already contracted. However, 10 days went by, and no contract arrived from Tom. Eleven days, still no contract. I was beginning to feel uneasy. So, on the twelfth day I decided to call Tom’s office. The receptionist there answered, and I asked to speak to Tom. She paused for a minute and then said, “Oh! You haven’t heard?” I said no. “Well, Tom’s not here anymore.” She said, almost embarrassed. “You see, Disney has just been bought out and the new shareholders have dismissed him and cancelled all of his projects! I’m sorry! We should have told you.” I was devastated. In my mind I had already been at the ‘Young Einstein’ premiere, with flashbulbs going off around me and the press raving at the new Disney-style animation. But now, in the blink of an eye, it had all gone - and with not even a hope of reprieve. For the second time in my young Animus studio career, it was a case of ‘so close, so far’. There would be more!…’

‘…On the commercials front the studio was growing in leaps and bounds. This had an impact on my own strength and resolve, as the bulk of our advertising projects were abroad, mainly in the USA. Richard didn’t like to fly, so I happily did so at the time. We had a great rep working for us in New York, Rich Durkin of Ice Tea Productions, and he was very successful in getting us a steady flow of work. The actual animating was never a problem for me. However, the constant flying from London to NY for production meetings, and then back again, was wearing me out. At one point a live action/animation cereal TV commercial for Honey Nut Cheerios popped up from an ad agency in Mexico City, while we were already making a commercial for a client in New York. Fortunately, the NY clients had agreed to fly to London to see and approve the work we were doing, so I agreed to a quick trip to Mexico for a weekend production meeting there. All was fine until I got to Mexico City and found I couldn’t fall asleep in the hotel as I was repeatedly having difficulty in breathing every time I was about to drift off to sleep. I’d never had difficulties like Sleep Apnea before, but for some reason the high altitude of Mexico City seemed to have triggered it on this occasion. In the loneliness of a hotel bedroom, in the middle of the night, not knowing anyone and not speaking the language were real problems. And the breathing difficulty continued for every night I was there. As a result, I got no sleep in the entire time I was there.

Then, when I arrived back from Mexico late on Monday night, I found out that the Wednesday meeting scheduled with our NY clients had been changed. The NY clients couldn’t make the trip, so they wanted me to go there to present our work. I immediately faxed them to say that I was just back from a tough Mexico trip, and could we delay the meeting in NY a little, so I could rest. But they said no, as they had urgent screening schedules to meet. I faxed them back to say that the only way I could do it for Wednesday was if they put me on the earliest Concorde flight that morning. That way I could fly out to NY for a meeting in a JFK business center at the airport, then could catch the last Concorde on that day. It would be a very tough day for me, but it would at least mean I could do the whole thing in one day - not the usual two to three days that regular flights would require. They immediately agreed and booked both of my Concorde flights for me. Even though this was good news, it still meant that I had to drag myself out of bed in the very early hours of Wednesday morning and get myself across the city to the airport from one side to the other while everyone was still sleeping in their beds. It was the only way for me to catch the 8am Concorde flight out of Heathrow airport.

This I somehow managed to do, and I soon found myself winging across the Atlantic at the speed of a bullet. However, when I arrived at JFK, I had a new message to say that the clients couldn’t get to the airport for the midday meeting, so I had to get myself into NY city, to have a meeting at the adverting agency there! Needless to say, I was somewhat piqued, and totally brain dead, by the time I got to the meeting in the city. But all went well when it finally happened, with the client approving everything. Unfortunately, though, the meeting had gone on for so long that I’d missed the last Concorde flight out for that day. So, they rescheduled me in a first-class seat on the last red-eye to London from New York that night. Unfortunately, however, I never sleep on planes. So, I found myself staggering around on Thursday morning at the studio, barely awake, but reporting back to everyone before I headed home to crash out for the night. But I couldn’t even enjoy a significant break then. Rich had rustled up a new job in NY while I was still catching up – meaning that I had to fly out to NY again the following Monday! It was a mark of our success as a studio, I guess. But it was clearly something that I couldn’t keep up indefinitely, as much as I loved it on some levels. Unlike most of our competitors, we were making high quality commercials but it an infinite variety of original styles and approaches – and it was really paying off….’

‘…Advertising-wise, Animus maintained its presence in the London and New York industries among others, and we continued to run a very successful presence in the animation world for most of the 20 years the studio existed. Our reputation was always high, and we received many accolades for our work. I even found myself lecturing in parts of Europe and beyond. However, despite all this we were never, ever able to attract the production money in order to make any of the feature films we had invested in the development of. I ultimately learned that, as painful as it was, tthe film industry in the UK tended to look down its noses on animation and so hardly any of their production budgets were invested that way. They always saw animation as ‘cartoon films’ and that always seemed to be rated beneath them. True, there was investment money for spin-off merchandizing and TV series for characters that featured strongly in toys. But for anyone like us who was seeking to further the horizons of animation as original entertainment and as art form, with higher expectations than the predictable norm – there seemed no willingness whatsoever for the film establishment to support what we were trying to do – not even from the much valued ‘lottery fund’ for the film industry that emerged in later years. It was totally frustrating – especially as they wouldn’t even look at a classical, British icon project, inspired by the incredible work of the British iconic artist and humorist, William Heath Robinson.

Heath Robinson was still a household name back in those days and well deserving of being celebrated by a film that was inspired by both his life and his incredibly imaginative and humorous fantasy art. Yet even armed with a great studio reputation, a BAFTA award to my name, and an amazing script under my arm, and the endorsement of the entire Heath Robinson family, I couldn’t even get scant interest from the BBC, who had very successfully employed WHR at the peak of his career way back. Unbelievably, the British film establishment had not the slightest interest in the project either! One respected producer from the indie side of the British film industry, did give us huge support, however. Simon Channing Williams was the legendary producer of Mike Leigh’s films in the UK and he alone was excited by what we were trying to do. In fact, he loved it so much that he even put up some of his own development money, matching that of Animus, to produce a promotional pilot film for the project. Simon had top-level connections everywhere on the production side. He pulled on all his best contacts to ensure we would make a really impressive pilot film for the project. He even got the young and up-and-coming (for the time) British actor, David Thewlis, to appear in our trailer, playing the role of William Heath Robinson.

Simon also convinced the Oscar winning director of photography, Dick Pope, to shoot the live action for us. Animus in turn created some really well-crafted and authentic (in the Heath Robinson style) animation to match with the live-action material I had directed with Simon as producer - creating quite an impactful, yet charming, promotional piece. Even Howard Blake, composer extraordinaire (who scored the music for my The Pink Panther Strikes Again titles, and who wrote the hit song ‘Walking in the Air’ for the animated Christmas special, ‘Snowman’) agreed to score a beautiful piano track for the pilot. I even heard from Simon that the great Mike Leigh had been very impressed by what we’d created and had told Simon that if we didn’t ever get the project off the ground, he would like to do a Heath Robinson instead. So needless to say, with all these things going for us, we genuinely felt in a very good place to raise the money for the project…’

‘…I’ve often been asked how I arrived at the original Animus name and logo we used on letterheads, invoices and showreel labels from day one. According to the dictionary.com website, the word ‘Animus’ is a psychological word in the Carl Jung mold, meaning ‘the masculine principle, especially as present in women’. In my more reflective moments (which readers of my Astrological Me memoir will know I embrace enormously) the entire creative, imaginative and artistic world is broadly feminine in these terms of reference. Advertising, the commercial world and business in general was more of a masculine pursuit. So, the name I chose was quite apposite in the masculine/feminine world of animation, film and advertising. In terms of the symbol, I studied many old mythological books of symbols and came across a medieval woodblock engraving that shows the Sun emerging from an elliptical Zodiac. This absolutely said ‘masculine in feminine’ to me. So, I had the image blown up large enough to re-draw it in the way it ended up. I simply replaced the elliptical Zodiac signs with the name ‘Animus Productions’ but kept the Sun as it was. I felt that this image represented a ‘shining a new light illuminating the industry’ – although I probably over-thought that one. Anyway, we may not have brought our own animated feature film to the world in the 20 years that Animus existed, but we certainly were doing innovative things with our advertising world. In fact, anyone who knew us well at the time recognized the fact that we never replicated the same style twice - unless it was an advertising campaign ‘series’, which required many commercials being made with the same character or brand ID. The logo was very much liked by many clients, although I doubt many had even the remotest idea of its original style or significance…’