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FOUR CORNERS BOOKS
The Art of Smallfilms
The Work of Oliver Postgate & Peter Firmin
Edited by Jonny Truck, Richard Embray. Introduction by Stewart Lee. Foreword by Daniel Postgate.
Postgate & Firmin produced some of the best-loved British children’s television of the 1960s and '70s, including Bagpuss, The Clangers and Ivor the Engine
Working from a cowshed on a farm in Kent, Oliver Postgate (1925–2008) and Peter Firmin (born 1928) produced some of the best-loved British children's animated television of the 1960s and 1970s. Their iconic productions include Bagpuss (originally aired in 1974), The Clangers (1969–74), Ivor The Engine (1975–77), Pogles' Wood (1966–68) and Noggin The Nog (1959–65). Postgate and Firmin worked together from 1959 through the 1980s, creating popular, beloved characters that appealed to children and their parents alike, like the whistling, mousy Clangers (knitted by Firmin's wife Joan in bright pink wool) in outer space, the saggy, baggy cloth cat Bagpuss and the mild-mannered Viking boy Prince Noggin. Firmin painted the backdrops and created the models, and Postgate wrote scripts, did the stop-motion filming and frequently recorded the kindly, avuncular narration. This book, which includes a preface by Postgate's son Daniel, presents the Smallfilms archive: the puppets and cutouts from these shows (including some of the characters who didn't quite make the cut), along with insights into how they were created. The emphatically handmade models and painstakingly drawn illustrations that came to life in the Smallfilms productions are captured here in attentive, detailed photographs. The archive is presented like "a collection of artifacts in an exhibition detailing some much-admired twentieth-century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada," as acclaimed English stand-up comedian Stewart Lee notes in his introduction. The Art of Smallfilms, full of pipe cleaners, cotton balls, wire and ping-pong balls, celebrates the imagination and ingenuity of two artists who shaped a generation's childhood.
Featured image, of The Pogles, is reproduced from The Art of Smallfilms.
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Featured image is from The Clangers, Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate's psychedelic UK animated television show of the late 60s and early 70s about "a small tribe or extended family of civil mouse-like persons living their peaceful lives on, in and around a small, undistinguished moon." It is reproduced from Four Corners Books' remarkable new archive of The Art of Smallfilms, in which English comedian, writer, director and musician Stewart Lee writes, "It's difficult, if you are of a certain age and political bent, not to talk about Smallfilms without sounding reactionary. This book makes me naively nostalgic for a world before free market doctrines and focus groups, when a publicly funded body gave two indefatigable eccentrics and, we now realize, avatars of a distinctly British folk art, license to pursue their particular, and quietly subversive, ideas, unencumbered by crass commercial expectations. Whole series of Smallfilms were green lit because someone in an ashtray-filled office somewhere saw an eight-page book of pasted up scripts and scraps of sketches and decided it was worth commissioning. This would not and could not happen now. And the social circumstances and value systems that shaped those paper and scissors, arts and crafts cowshed visionaries of another era, Firmin and Postgate, are long gone." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 10.25 x 11 in. / 304 pgs / 300 color / 20 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9781909829022 PUBLISHER: Four Corners Books AVAILABLE: 2/24/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ME
The Art of Smallfilms The Work of Oliver Postgate & Peter Firmin
Published by Four Corners Books. Edited by Jonny Truck, Richard Embray. Introduction by Stewart Lee. Foreword by Daniel Postgate.
Postgate & Firmin produced some of the best-loved British children’s television of the 1960s and '70s, including Bagpuss, The Clangers and Ivor the Engine
Working from a cowshed on a farm in Kent, Oliver Postgate (1925–2008) and Peter Firmin (born 1928) produced some of the best-loved British children's animated television of the 1960s and 1970s. Their iconic productions include Bagpuss (originally aired in 1974), The Clangers (1969–74), Ivor The Engine (1975–77), Pogles' Wood (1966–68) and Noggin The Nog (1959–65). Postgate and Firmin worked together from 1959 through the 1980s, creating popular, beloved characters that appealed to children and their parents alike, like the whistling, mousy Clangers (knitted by Firmin's wife Joan in bright pink wool) in outer space, the saggy, baggy cloth cat Bagpuss and the mild-mannered Viking boy Prince Noggin. Firmin painted the backdrops and created the models, and Postgate wrote scripts, did the stop-motion filming and frequently recorded the kindly, avuncular narration. This book, which includes a preface by Postgate's son Daniel, presents the Smallfilms archive: the puppets and cutouts from these shows (including some of the characters who didn't quite make the cut), along with insights into how they were created. The emphatically handmade models and painstakingly drawn illustrations that came to life in the Smallfilms productions are captured here in attentive, detailed photographs. The archive is presented like "a collection of artifacts in an exhibition detailing some much-admired twentieth-century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada," as acclaimed English stand-up comedian Stewart Lee notes in his introduction. The Art of Smallfilms, full of pipe cleaners, cotton balls, wire and ping-pong balls, celebrates the imagination and ingenuity of two artists who shaped a generation's childhood.
