Alice + shorts

Please note this event starts at 2pm NOT 3pm as advertised elsewhere.

Sunday 5th July | 2.00pm book tickets

A programme of prizewinning animation supported by Channel 4.

Since its creation in 1982, Channel 4 Television has supported some of the most original work seen on our screens, and its animation output has achieved a tremendous international reputation. Guided by a government remit to be innovative, and funded by advertising, which was especially plentiful in the 80s and early 90s, the Channel has financed work in all techniques – plus some exotic hybrids – and supported producers from all areas of the industry.

Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1987) was financed by three western partners and made in Prague, unauthorised and in tiny sections masquerading as an audiovisual display for a trade fair. The resulting, surrealist version of Lewis Carroll’s tale gave critic Philip Strick ‘the unsettling sense of watching an old and well-remembered dream in a new and disturbing state of hallucination’.

+ David Anderson’s 1990 Door, a post-holocaust fable written and narrated by Russell Hoban and Jonathan Hodgson’s 1999 The Man with the Beautiful Eyes, based on a Charles Bukowski poem.

The films will be followed by a chance to discuss the programme, and Channel 4 animation in general, with producers, directors and commissioning editors involved in these films. Clare Kitson’s recent book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor will also be available.