BRITISH ANIMATED PRODUCTIONS LTD

(1945-1953)

Thanks to an archive of letters and documents relating to the company, we can paint a fairly detailed picture of the struggles of British Animated Productions Ltd, George Moreno Jr’s attempt to set up a British studio producing cartoon shorts.

Background

George was the younger brother of Mexican American animator Manuel Moreno. In 1934 Manuel got George a job in Universal's animation studio, which was run by Walter Lantz, making the Oswald the Rabbit shorts. George worked for Lantz until 1938 when he joined the Fleischer studio in Miami, animating on the feature Gulliver's Travels. When the USA entered WWII, in 1941, George was drafted into the army.

George’s elder brother Manuel moved to Mexico in 1943 to start his own animation studio, Caricolor, and this may have influenced George to try something similar. According to Maurice Horn’s World Encyclopaedia of Cartoons, when George was in France serving as a G.I. during WWII he met up with British soldier Richard A. Smith. In civvie street Smith was a solicitor, and company secretary for Hawker Manufacturing, Hawker Exports and Rudway Products, companies run by businessmen L. E. Moring, H. C. W. Moring and R. G. Lawrence (belt and buckle manufacturers, according to animation researcher Ken Clarke). On demob Smith suggested to them that they diversify by financing a British cartoon studio, to be run by George Moreno.

Animated Productions

Animated Productions Ltd (without the “British”) was incorporated on 4th December 1945, by Richard Albert Smith and Alfred Richard Beecham, engineer, with a Share Capital of £20,000 (equivalent to around £750,000 or $1,150,000 in 2015). Mr Beecham’s name does not occur again, either as a shareholder or a director. The registered office was Smith’s office at 306 Hoe Street, Walthamstow, London, E.I7, and the board of directors consisted of L. E. Moring (Chairman and Managing Director), H. C. W. Moring, R. G. Lawrence and Richard Alfred Smith (Secretary). George Moreno Jr is not initially listed as a director but credited separately as Producer. Shares were sold to the directors’ friends and family.

The company started trading, according to information submitted to the Tax Office, on 1st May 1946.

Bubble & Squeek

It is reasonable to assume that George had decided on the name Bubble & Squeek, and the characters of a cabbie and his cab, as the idea of forming a British studio developed. ‘Bubble and Squeak’ is a traditional English dish – a fried ‘cake’ of cabbage and potato usually made from the left-overs of Sunday lunch. In severely rationed wartime Britain it was a very common dish, and it is likely that George came across it and found the name both amusing and suggestive of a cartoon double-act. Perhaps the London taxi was the only other English icon that suggested itself to him.

It is also more likely than not that George had designed the characters and had a rough idea of the story for the first film before production began. It would appear that from the start he was planning on producing six shorts a year, and this was the proposition he would put to potential distributors. But first he needed to put his first film into production, so that he had something for the distributors to see. And for this he needed a staff of artists, as well as materials, premises and a camera.

The competition

George was not the only American attempting to make entertainment shorts in the UK. David Hand, knowing that J. Arthur Rank was looking for someone to start a Disney-style studio in Britain, had contacted Rank’s agents when he left Disney in 1944, and was now in charge of setting up Gaumont-British Animation, Rank’s studio at Cookham. I suspect that George was not especially daunted by this, being confident that he could produce shorts quicker and cheaper than Hand’s Disney-style enterprise. Hand had brought three ex-Disney men over with him - John Reed, Ralph Wright and Ray Patterson – to train up the British animators. While Reed and Wright had primarily worked at Disney’s, Patterson had spent several years working for Charles Mintz and would have known some of the animators George had worked under at Universal. It may have been a comfort to have a fellow Californian around for support and encouragement.

Staffing

George also planned to bring over a US animator to head his team, and was in communication with several of his old colleagues. Myron Waldman, the directing animator under whom George had worked on the "Stone-Age" cartoons at Fleischers in Miami, turned the offer down, but Nelson Demorest, a former Schlesinger (Warner Brothers) animator who had joined Fleischers to work on Gulliver's Travels, was interested in coming to England. But a lot of paperwork was needed before aliens could get a British work permit. Ray Patterson’s permit, for example, only allowed him to teach, not to work as an animator.

George needed trained staff immediately, and it was probably Patterson and Reed who put George in contact with the man who would be lead animator on the Bubble & Squeek films, Harold Mack. Mack was an experienced British animator who had left Halas & Batchelor in 1944 to join the newly formed Gaumont-British Animation unit, then housed in Soho Square. When Hand took over Mack joined the move to Moor Hall and underwent the required retraining in Disney-style animation under Reed and Patterson. But it seemed that he did not care for Hand’s factory-style of animation and felt undervalued. He jumped at the opportunity to join George’s smaller scale operation, and brought fellow animator Hugh Gladwish with him.

Local advertising attracted other job-seekers, some, like Alice Fenyves from Publicity Pictures, with previous experience, others just with drawing ability and enthusiasm. Roy Stedman was employed to run the 35 mm stop-frame camera.

Materials

As a financially drained Britain tried to rebuild its manufacturing base some materials were still in short supply, and while it was gradually releasing its wartime controls the Board of Trade still regulated access to some resources. A letter from Winsor & Newton’s head office stated that they were not able to send out Catalogues or Price Lists of their products.

(The local Walthamstow suppliers listed were H. Barber Ltd, 224 Hoe Street, and Vandy’s, 621 Forest Road.)

Location

SORRY, THIS PAGE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

Filmography

Links to Other Sites

George Moreno Jr's "Bubble & Squeak"[sic]: YouTube collection: the 5 shorts, plus Pathe newsreel item

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