Roland Godfrey (1921-2013)
Oscar Winner and Professor of the Royal College of Art, Bob Godfrey was the doyen of native animators. He developed his own talents through the 1950s and 1960s, during a time of experiment and change, and was greatly influenced by Peter Sachs of Larkins Animation Studio, an artist grounded in the tradition of European Modernism who remained open to Continental theory and artistic experimentation. Working as a background artist, Godfrey so resented animators 'putting squiggly things on top' that he began to make his own films at home. His first attempts coincided almost exactly with the arrival of commercial television, and he had a film show during its very first evening.
During the sixties, he began to produce commercials and animated sequences for such programmes as It’s a Square World and The Goons, and attempted to make improvised live action films. As a consequence of his contribution to four television episodes for The Beatles, he was asked by the director to inject humour into The Yellow Submarine.
By 1969, he had gained a sufficient reputation as an animator to allow him to teach the subject at various schools of art, and this enabled him to employ the pick of talented students on his own projects. He soon entered a period of great creativity, in which he instigated his series of highly imaginative shorts, centring on sexual themes, with Henry 9 till 5 (1970) and Karma Sutra Rides Again (1971). He made a particularly influential mark with two quite diverse projects, Roobarb and Custard (1974), a serial for BBC children's television, and Great (1975), the Oscar-winning divertissement based upon the life of the Victorian engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The later work for children – Noah and Nelly (1976) and the phenomenally popular Henry's Cat (from 1983) – is, fundamentally, an ever-inventive elaboration of the principles presented in Roobarb. His numerous accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Zagreb International Film Festival (1992). He died on the 21 February 2013 at the age of 91.
