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When Iain Harvey estab- lished his animation house in 1993 he thought long and hard about the right name for it. Eventually he settled on The Illuminated Film Company. “I chose it because I wanted to light up people’s imagina- tions,” he explains. “It seemed to me, particularly in animation which is so dependent upon doing just that, ideal.”
Based in West London, Harvey and his team are currently working hard to finish their most ambitious project yet, a feature length animated version of A Christmas Carol. It is a story that has been told many times and in many dif- ferent forms, notably winning Richard Williams an Oscar for Best Animation Short in 1972.
But making a full length feature is a much tougher nut to crack. Executive producer Harvey has assembled an all star cast for his film that includes Simon Callow – voicing Scrooge and playing Dickens in live action sequences that bookend the animation – as well as Nicolas Cage, Kate Winslet and Michael Gambon.
The director is Jimmy Murakami, whose most memorable animation is another festive favourite, the BAFTA winning version of The Snowman. Both men see this as an opportunity to re-tell Dickens’ much loved festive fable as the author himself would have wanted.
“The irony,” said Harvey, “is that for years I was pushing this as an animated feature that would work theatrically.
ANIMATINGDICKENS
the finished film months after doing it. They hadn’t realised just what the animators could capture with their voices, and they were over- whelmed by the result.”
A Christmas Carol is a story that also works on so many levels so to restrict it to just a younger audience would be a great shame, Harvey suggests.
“It’s a ghost story, and we’re telling it as we think Dickens would have
But I found the initial response was that it had been done, that there were plenty of versions out there already. Yet the actual research reveals that there are very few animated versions.
“The most successful one recently was The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is an absolute joy but it’s not ani- mation and it’s not really A Christmas Carol. We’re well aware that we’re deal- ing with a 21st century audience, but we’re not making our film as a modern version. For example, the London of that time is almost a character in its own right.”
To that end the production team have conducted extensive research of the period, and taken visual cues from photographs and contemporary artists, such as Daumier. The result, everyone hopes, is a film that will be watched and enjoyed for many years to come, not unlike The Snowman which Harvey also executive produced.
Originally trained as a chartered accountant, he was working in publishing when he first came across Raymond Briggs’ beguil-
ing story: “I absolutely fell in love with it,” he recalls, “but it was my fellow producer John Coates who spotted how to make it into a film. I managed to persuade the company I then worked for to back it financially.
“We then set up Snowman
Enterprises to make the film. Obviously it became a huge success without which I probably wouldn’t be here today. Every producer has to fall back on their track record in order to finance their next production.”
Of the many advantages that Raymond Briggs’ popular book offered for the budding filmmakers, the fact that it was – effectively – in storyboard form was key.
“John couldn’t understand why nobody else had picked that up,” Harvey adds. “All he had to do to con- vince me was cut up the book and put it under a rostrum camera. The other crucial thing was the ‘Walking In The Air’ theme, the other element that con- vinced us that we had a winner.”
The next animated film Harvey pro- duced was adapted from another Raymond Briggs story, the dark nuclear nightmare When The Wind Blows in 1987, and he completed a Raymond Briggs hat-trick when he
worked on Father Christmas in 1991.
But it was When The Wind Blows, in particular, which reinforced the idea that anima- tion does not have to be solely aimed at children, evidence of which came from his two leads in that film – John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft. “They were both in tears when they saw
wanted it told, which is full of drama and – hopefully – scary. I would hope it would appeal to every age group.”
Having already achieved critical suc- cess with the award winning T.R.A.N.S.I.T (1997), Illuminated have now also begun working on a short film called War Game, based on the story of the football match that took place between British and German troops during a Christmas cease-fire in World War I.
That, too, should be finished by next Christmas 2001 which will undoubtedly prove a momentous Yule for an ambi- tious young company. ■ Anwar Brett
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