What is the future for British animation?
You can almost count the number of British animation films on one hand: Yellow Submarine, Animal Farm, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, so it would be great if we could make a comeback. There is still a lot of talent here, but once students leave college, things are tougher now. A lot of the short animation schemes which supported emerging talent have gone. Many of our contemporaries are looking to do TV series and children’s films; short films just don’t pay. By comparison, how has Anime become so popular? The Japanese are incredibly visually literate. They are avid consumers of comics and have always had a huge animation industry. I think they realised that they had saturated their home market and wanted to expand. In order to do so, they developed storylines for their films that would work better internationally. In the UK they became known as Manga films after the name of the UK distributor. I think another reason is that it became trendy and Tarantino recognised that when he used his anime
