THE DO-IT-YOURSELF CARTOON KIT (Biographic Cartoon Films, 1960)
Directed by Bob Godfrey
Written by Colin Pearson
UK
5 minutes.

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An early short from the one and only Bob Godfrey, rendered in cutout animation, including cutout-old-photograph animation, as was later used by Terry Gilliam in "Monty Python's Flying Circus". The opening credits are set over a background of old-timey newspaper ads (for products like "Borax dry soap" and "knockabout frocks for young girls"). When they go, the cutout host greets us:

"Biographic - if you'll excuse the word - present the world's first do-it-yourself cartoon. At last, you can make your very own cartoon film with our free do-it-yourself cartoon kit. Just send 50 guineas and three detergent packets to this address, and you'll recieve the kit for fre under a plain wrapper"

This is accompanied by a montage showing us a photo of money, a drawing of three detergent packets and an addressed envelope. The host then goes on to outline the contents of the product: five Mickey Mouses, three Tom and Jerries, six geese a-laying, ten fat old women, one Brazilian conjurer, four fugle horns, one Union Jack, seven little men in bowler hats, one Florence Nightingale, some admirals (a rear admiral, a front admiral, a red admiral and a vice admiral), two framed masterpieces painted by Van Dyke's mother-in-law, four elephants, two Chinese policemen, one photograph of Battersea Power Station, three typical British housewives, a rugby team (complete with umpire), the Norfolk Broads, three Widow Twankies, the Empire State Building, eleven performing seals, an abyssinian fire-eater, a chocolate wristwatch, a first aid kit (complete with fretso) and a jar of stick-anything adhesive glue. All of these are accompanied by images that don't necessarily match up: the photograph of Battersea power station actually shows the Eiffel Tower, for one, and only four little men in bowler hats are shown.

Next, the narrator lists the sound effects that come with the kit: p-ding, phut-phut-phut, quewweee-ing, doying-oying-oying-oying, Colonel Bogey, rasberry and crash. The last one is demonstrated with three animated sequences: a wife whacking her drunken husband with a hollow, metallic crash, a butterfly landing on a flower with a hollow, metallic crash and a couple kissing eachother with a hollow, metallic crash.

Next we see a crude animation of a woman waving a flag, as the narrator continues:

"This may look a very simple movement, but do you realise it takes eight million seperate drawings to make the lady's arm move from there to there? It took one artist the best part of six years, working day and night, to complete that particular movement. And when he'd finished it the producer decided it wasn't needed in the finished film. The artist went away and shot himself."

Next up are story situations, and the number one rule, according to the narrator, is "always have somebody chasing somebody else". If you run out of paint to animate, the host recommends using bits of coloured paper and old detergent packets.

The short is rounded off by the host telling us that he's going around the corner for a cool meat pie and a quick one. The camera pans down to the bottom of his cutout body, revealing a pair of crudely-drawn legs. He proceeds to walk into the distance, making a series of hollow, metallic crashes. Finally, to the strains of "A-Hunting we will Go", we see a Union Jack proudly emblazoned with the slogan "British Made with British Labour".

This fast-paced piece of absurdist humour is actually kind of poignant when you consider when the film came out: 1960, the tail-end of Hollywood animation's Golden Age. The Do-It-Yourself Cartoon Kit relies on the concept of animation as a finely-honed craft; at the time, economical TV animation was only beginning to surface, and the film's cutout doodles and photographs would have looked quite outrageous. As well as an epitaph to the Golden Age, The Do-It-Yourself Cartoon Kit serves as an introduction to British animation and its "stuff the Eight Principles of Animation, let's just have fun" attitude, which was already evident in Captain Pugwash.

It's also worth noting that, when a real Do-It-Yourself Cartoon Kit - Macromedia Flash - arrived, maestroes such as Neil Cicierega and Andrew Kepple made some strikingly similar-looking films. How prophetic...

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