MACDOUGALL & MACKENDRICK

(1942-1943)

MacDougall & Mackendrick was a production company set up in 1942 by cousins Roger MacDougall and Alexander Mackendrick in order to make films for the Ministry of Information. Mackendrick was working for the advertising agency J Walter Thompson (London) at the start of World War II, and the Ministry commissioned information films from the agency. Animation was recognised as a good way of getting a message across and JWT made several cartoon films storyboarded and directed by Sandy Mackendrick and Bill Larkins and animated by John Halas and Joy Batchelor, who were JWT's animation unit.

The Ministry disliked JWT's high-handed attitude (the agency was accustomed to telling its clients how best to put over its message, which did not sit well with the ministry officials) and decided they would rather work directly with the film makers. Halas and Batchelor, Larkins and Mackendrick all set up their own companies in order to take on the Ministry work.

Sandy and Roger had come to London from Glasgow in the mid 1930s, and Sandy had become an art director for JWT, storyboarding the Horlicks films animated in the Netherlands by George Pal, and Roger had established himself as a writer of screenplays and popular songs. The 'animated' films that they made for the MoI, just over a minute long, black and white, and carried by the major newsreels (Movitone, Pathe, Gaumont, Paramount & Universal) on the date of release, were primarily a sequence of sketches by Sandy accompanied by a song by Roger. Taking their cue from the success of the Baby Weems segment from Disney's The Reluctant Dragon (1941) in which Robert Benchley, as a visitor to the Disney studio, sees a proposed cartoon short as a storyboard presentation (mainly static sketches with some camera moves and some spot animation), their films use rendered cartoon sketches with camera moves, abrupt changes of pose or expression and the occasional animated effect to carry the story.

This technique was also used to make a Technicolor film for J Walter Thompson, I Like Lobsters, advertising indigestion powder, with Roger's song sung by George Evans with Geraldo's Orchestra. Evans is shown poised at the drawing board in the opening scene, with the band behind him, but it is Mackendrick's hand drawing the sketch in the following shot as the story commences.

MacDougall & Mackendrick also made live-action information shorts, such as Nero (1943)in which 'schoolboy' George Cole listens to a museum's statue of 'Nero', Alastair Sim, relating his murderous deeds and says they were nothing compared to Hitler. But when Nero tells how he fiddled while Rome burned, the boy berates him for wasting fuel – "that's what I call a real crime!" – and decks the statue with its own violin. The dialogue is in verse by Roger, who later provided rhyming scripts for various Larkins Studio cartoons. All newsreels were required to include these MoI 'Government Official' films the week of their release.

In 1943 Mackendrick, an American citizen, was assigned to the Film Division of the Army Psychological Warfare Branch, a joint military-civilian Anglo-American psychological warfare unit under the order of then General Dwight D. Eisenhower in French North Africa, and the MacDougall & Mackendrick partnership came to an end. MacDougall joined Michael Hankinson's company Merlin Films, writing scripts and occasionally directing.

Filmography

Animation

Live Action

Links to Other Sites

British Pathé Save Your Bacon Video of MOI item included in newsreels for week from 08/10/1942.

British Pathé Nero Video of live-action MOI item performed by George Cole and Alistair Sim and included in newsreels for week from 25/02/1943.

Back to top of page