Ivor Wood, animator, creator of Postman Pat

[Michael Rhodes]

Ivor Wood, the children's film animator, died 13 October, 2004.

Here's a profile of the great man from the Guardian 3 years ago:-


<Portrait>

<Life post Pat>

<From the Guardian 2001>

Postman Pat has been trundling across TV screens in 50 countries for 20
years. Now Ivor Wood has sold him off - for £5m. Simon Hattenstone
meets the animator who knows the truth about the Magic Roundabout
Woodland. It sounds so dreamily bucolic. Woodland Animations is where
Ivor Wood brings the creatures of his imagination to life. You'll
probably have heard of them. There's Orinoco, Bulgaria and their
Wombling family, Paddington Bear and, most profitably, Postman Pat and
his black and white cat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,593494,00.html

Wood has just sold Postman Pat for £5m to help ease his way into
semi-retirement. Although the animator only ever made 26 15-minute
episodes, and four half-hour specials, it has been shown on television
in more than 50 countries, and Pat, an unremarkable rural postman, has
become a legend. So much so that 20 years on, all posties are called
Pat and asked if they have a black and white cat. Pat became a role
model for preschool children - kind, helpful, and optimistic, he
embodied all that was good in the human spirit. Best of all, he shut
the kids up.

Woodland doesn't seem quite big enough for Ivor Wood. He's a big man
who bends and shuffles through his mews house. On the shelf is a model
Postman Pat with brown hair. On the table is a model Postman Pat with
ginger hair, a little closer to the original. But Woodland isn't quite
as appealing as I had imagined. It could be a souvenir shop, or the
lobby of a cottage industry - which, in effect, it is. The entrance is
stacked with videos of Pat and there are loads of silver discs on the
wall celebrating Pat's sales. The back room is lined with file after
file. Nothing dreamy about Woodland's elaborate accounting system.
Wood was born in Yorkshire and is half French, half English. He speaks
in an unlikely accent - Compo meets Charles Aznavour. His mouth is soft
and liquid like a Frenchman's, while his belly has a corpulent
Englishness to it. He says that 69 years on, he feels more French than
English. "But I can't moan at the English side because dear old Pat is
English isn't he?"

Ah, perhaps he's having last-minute regrets about flogging Pat. Does he
feel proprietorial towards him? "Well I wouldn't have passed him on if
that had been the case. I would have wept and kept it."
It? I'm beginning to feel uneasy.

"But I can do other things now. Life goes on. OK, that's been one
stage, it's done very well. I'm not disowning him, but... "
Pat is standing on the table as we talk. It doesn't seem right. What if
he's listening? "Ehohohoho-ehahaha," Wood chuckles in his
Compo-Aznavour voice. "He knows all about it." What, he had a word with
Pat, before the sale, to make sure he was OK with it? "No, we don't go
that far. Nonononono. We don't have Harvey the Rabbit."

Wood started out as a painter. What kind of artist was he? "Lousy I
suppose, Ehohohoho-ehahahah!! I never sold anything."
He painted anything and everything, but to no avail. He worked in a
factory as a lift operator to subsidise his non-income. After nine
months, and by now in his mid-20s, he went to work as an animator for a
commercials company. "I thought, my God, I am back to art school. They
really were a bunch of idiots. Great guys. They were all crazy. Had a
marvellous time there."



--

Michael Rhodes

[Hyfler/Rosner]

Times of London obit:


Ivor Wood, animator, was born on May 4, 1932, and died on
October 13, 2004, aged 72

Animator who brought The Magic Roundabout, The Wombles and
Postman Pat to children's TV

The animator Ivor Wood specialised in stop-frame animation
and during a career dating back to the Sixties was
fundamental in the development of some of children's
television's most memorable characters, including those
appearing in The Magic Roundabout, The Herbs, The Wombles
and, most recently, Postman Pat.

Ivor Wood was born in Leeds in 1932. His father was British
and his mother French.

After the war he moved with his family to a small village
near Lyon. He spent the next 22 years in France, and after
completing his schooling he studied Fine Arts at the Ecole
des Beaux Arts in Paris.

Wood set out to become an artist but when he failed to sell
his paintings he worked in a factory to earn a living.
Within a year, he was introduced to the French advertising
production company, La Comete, where he began to develop his
talent as an animator.

While there, he met a fellow animator, Serge Danot, who
devised Le Manege Enchante -which would be retitled The
Magic Roundabout when it was shown on British television.
Wood began to work with Danot in a derelict Parisian house
as the original animator on the children's series.

The programme told how Mr Rusty owned a merry-go-round
neglected by children until a magical jack-in-the-box,
Zebedee, cast a spell to bring them back.

In 1964, Danot and Wood sold several episodes to ORTF, the
French television station, and then to the BBC, which had
earlier rejected the series believing it to be too difficult
to dub into English. Joy Whitby, the producer of Play
School, was asked to assess the proposal and she suggested
Eric Thompson, a Play School presenter, who narrated the
story and created the characters' voices. The Magic
Roundabout was first shown in Britain in October 1965, just
before the evening news, and quickly attracted a cult
following.

When, in 1967, the BBC announced it was rescheduling the
show to a late afternoon slot, many adult viewers
complained. At its peak the show had eight million viewers.

Wood began working with FilmFair, a production company, and
his next big project was the company's production of The
Herbs. While its creator, Michael Bond, supplied the
stories, Wood made the puppets that lived in the secret herb
garden; he also directed the 39 15-minute films commissioned
by the BBC. From the kitchen table of his Paris flat he
painstakingly used stop-motion animation, previously adopted
for The Magic Roundabout, to make the films. The series was
first aired in 1968 under the Watch with Mother umbrella,
and as further instalments were added the show became a
mainstay in the schedules for years; such was its popularity
it even produced a spin-off, The Adventures of Parsley.

Next stop for Ivor Wood was The Wombles. When the author
Elisabeth Beresford adapted her stories, first written in
1968, for television, FilmFair produced the series, with
Wood directing and creating the puppets. First seen
patrolling Wimbledon Common in 1973, the litter-conscious
creatures appeared in 60 five-minute films.

The 1970s was a busy decade for Wood and FilmFair. Other
programmes he worked on included Simon in the Land of Chalk
Drawings in 1974 and, in 1975, Paddington.

Adapted from stories by Edward MacLachlan, Simon featured in
13 episodes, and was a rare excursion into 2-D animation for
Wood. For Paddington he used his immense talents to combine
stop-frame animation of a 3-D model (Paddington) with
animated 2-D cardboard cutouts for other characters, within
a 3-D setting.

The first batch of 30 episodes was followed, four years
later, by a further 29 instalments. Based on Michael Bond's
popular stories about a marmalade-loving bear from Peru, the
series became a worldwide hit.

In his autobiography, Bears and Forebears, Bond recalls:
"Ivor wasn't the first person to suggest making a television
series about Paddington, but he was the first and only one
who gave me the feeling of being on exactly the same
wavelength and in whom I had total trust."

After designing puppets for Hattytown Tales, a joint venture
between Hattyland Enterprises and FilmFair, which ran to 39
episodes, Wood set up his own production company, Woodland
Animations.

He invested heavily in the business and he was rewarded for
his commitment by producing one of television's most popular
children's programmes, Postman Pat.

With scripts by John Cunliffe, on whose stories the films
were based, Wood designed and directed the programme about
the antics of Pat, the exceptionally helpful postman from
Greendale, and his trusty old black-and-white cat, Jess, who
was always at his side.

After the initial tranche of 26 episodes in 1980, a further
30 films were made for transmission between 1990 and 1991.
The programme was viewed around the world and actively
merchandised.

Woodland Animations' other successes included Gran (1982),
created by Joanne and Michael Cole; Bertha (1985) and
Charlie Chalk (1987). Woodland established itself as an
internationally respected company in the creation of
children's programming and, in 2001, it was acquired for
£5.1 million by Entertainment Rights.

Wood is survived by his wife, Josiane, and his son.

[Hyfler/Rosner]

Telegraph obit:



Ivor Wood
(Filed: 22/10/2004)

Ivor Wood, the animator who has died aged 72, worked on some
of the best-loved children's television programmes of the
last four decades, including The Magic Roundabout, The
Wombles, Paddington and Postman Pat.

In 1963 Wood, who was half-French, was employed as an
animator for an advertising company in Paris. There he met
Serge Danot, who had come up with the idea for a small-scale
animated series, Le Manege Enchante (which became, for
British viewers, The Magic Roundabout).

Set in a bois joli owned by a roundabout operator, Pere
Pivoine (Mr Rusty), the distinctly Gallic cast of Le Manege
Enchante also included Zebulan (Zebedee), a strange and
hyperactive jack-in-the-box; a sensible little girl called
Margote (Florence); Ambroise (Brian), the cheerful snail;
and a lazy Spanish rabbit named Flappy (Dylan). Wood
suggested that they should be joined by Pollux (Dougal), a
sugar-addicted dog puppet with no legs, which moved around
on wheels - to save time and money on animation - that were
obscured by its long hair.

In France in the early 1960s, animated children's programmes
were regarded by television executives as a costly and
complicated undertaking.

Determined to prove them wrong, Danot, Wood (along with his
wife, Josiane) and a small film crew, worked on the first
set of episodes in a derelict house in Paris, where their
studio lights kept blowing the fuses.

Filmed initially in black-and-white, even the earliest
programmes demonstrated Wood's talent for stop-frame
animation; and in 1964, when the French television station
ORTF began broadcasting the series, Le Manege Enchante was
an instant success.

That same year it was offered to the BBC, which rejected it,
saying that it was "charming . . . but difficult to dub into
English".

But in 1965 Doreen Stephen, Head of Family Programmes at the
BBC, saw a selection of episodes of Le Manege Enchante and
decided to buy them for transmission in an early evening
pre-news slot.

In order to adapt the series for British audiences, the Play
School presenter Eric Thompson (father of the actress Emma
Thompson) was selected to provide the narration. Refusing to
work with translations of the original French storylines, he
re-named all the characters and would watch the episodes
with the soundtrack turned down, then invent new storylines
to match the on-screen action.

The Magic Roundabout, which combined Danot and Wood's
surreal animation with Thompson's witty and sophisticated
scripts, delighted adults and children alike. Two years
after it was first broadcast on British television, attempts
by the BBC to move the programme from its regular slot were
greeted with such outrage by the viewers that the
corporation was forced to rescind its plans. The French
version came to an end in 1971 but British audiences
continued to watch the series until 1977, and repeats are
still shown regularly on Channel Four.

The Magic Roundabout was translated into 28 languages and
sold to 68 countries as far afield as Iraq and Japan. At its
peak it had eight million viewers.

Wood was always dismissive of suggestions that the creators
of such a surreal series had been high on drugs when they
devised its odd characters, bizarre storylines, psychedelic
music and colourful sets. "Here we go again," he would say
wearily, whenever the subject came up. "It's a load of
rubbish."

Ivor Wood was born in Leeds on May 4 1932. The son of a
British father and French mother, after the war he moved
with his parents to a village near Lyon. He was educated
locally and went on to study Fine Art at the Ecole des Beaux
Arts in Paris.

Initially Wood had planned to be an artist, but his complete
lack of commercial success forced him to look for other
employment. After several months spent working as a lift
operator in a factory, he got a job in an advertising
company, where he met Danot.

Following the success of The Magic Roundabout, Wood began
working with a production company called Filmfair on their
children's series The Herbs, written by Michael Bond. As
well as making all of the puppets that lived in the herb
garden, Wood directed the programmes, which were first
broadcast in 1968. Such was its popularity that it produced
a spin-off, The Adventures of Parsley.

In 1973 Wood created and directed the puppets for The
Wombles, which was based on the books by Elisabeth
Beresford. He followed this up with Simon in the Land of
Chalk Drawings (1974) and Paddington (1975), which used
stop-frame animation with a three-dimensional figure
(Paddington Bear) combined with animated two-dimensional
cut-outs for other characters.

In 1980 Wood designed the puppets for Hattytown Tales, a
series about a town inhabited by a population of walking,
talking, hats with arms, legs and faces. It ran to 39
episodes, after which Wood set up his own company, Woodland
Animations.

He was a canny investor in other programmes, and became a
producer, designer and director of the hugely successful
Postman Pat. Woodland productions also included Gran (1982),
Bertha (1985) and Charlie Chalk (1987).

Wood never expressed an interest in working on adult films
and thought that his work would not translate well on to the
big screen. Nevertheless, a £14 million feature film version
of The Magic Roundabout is due to be released next year.

Ivor Wood, who died on October 13, is survived by his wife
and their son.

[t***@gmail.com]

How did he die?