GRANPA (an animated film) op.360 (February 1986) Listen to this Work

GRANPA CD CBS HB1 1988

VIDEO RELEASE

Movements

• 1: Make Believe (instrumental)
  
• 2: Tiny As A Flower
  
• 3: Butterflies With Silver Wings
  
• 4: The Little Girl's Song
  
• 5: Skipping Song
  
• 6: I Remember All The Games
  
• 7: Rain
  
• 8: Sing Little One
  
• 9: Waltz
  
• 10: Going To The Seaside (Including "Spitfire")
  
• 11: The Little Girl's Song (Instrumental)
  
• 12: Whale Song
  
• 13: Bedtime Story (The Three Knights)
  
• 14: Sledging In The Winter Snow
  
• 15: Jungle
  
• 16: Sing Little One (Instrumental)
  
• 17: Make-Believe
  

Notes

Film drawn and directed by Diane Jackson, produced by John Coates - the creators of 'The Snowman', based on the book by John Burningham.

Composer's note: 'Channel 4 regarded 'The Snowman' as a great success and Clare Kitson their director of animation began discussing possible similar projects with John Coates the TVC producer of the film quite soon afterwards. Sometime in 1984 John approached Diane Jackson and myself with the idea of 'Granpa', another  children's picture book, but this time by author John Burningham. It is a story of a little girl of perhaps seven called Emily and her aging gradfather and initially Diane and I were not enthusiastic because at the end the grandfather's chair is suddenly empty- he has died.

On December 31st that year it happened that my own father was dying in Brighton General Hospital, aged 88, and my daughter Catherine who was then six came with me to visit him. She had had a very similar relationship as that described in the book, since she adored my father who was for ever telling stories and rhymes and jokes which made her laugh. The doctor told us that very sadly he could not last out the week and my daughter  said to me: 'Will he go to heaven?' I said: 'I very much hope so' and Catherine with the sublime innocence of youth said: 'Can I come and watch?'  This made me laugh despite myself and to see how as children we are able to accept all of life in a way that we find so difficult as adults. When I got home I started playing 'Auld lang Syne', partly because it was New Year's Eve and partly because I hoped that my father 'would never be forget' and by some sort of inspiration I began to weave a counter-melody over it. This was to be  the theme and the song for the film called 'Make-Believe'. What I wanted to happen in the film was that, after all the flights of the imagination that Granpa and Emily experience, we see her grown-up and still remembering him, and that during the song which ends the film these memories fleetingly return to assert that his presence and memory is still with her.That is the meaning behind the lyrics:

'Breathe no sigh for the day that is parting,

Welcome Spring and the year that is starting.

Leave worlds of make-believe,

See to eternity' 

Channel 4 were talking about another film with nothing except music, but when finally Diane and I agreed to undertake it felt that it would work better as a kind of opera, with words taking the action forward, sung by Emily and Granpa and a a children's choir, not to mention a whale, a dog and some hippos!

Reviews

Tammy la Gorce, Amazon.com, 1/1/2007

Great and overlooked achievement in British animation, 13 March 2006

Granpa, based on the children's book by John Burningham, is the second (and sadly last) animation to be directed by the late Dianne Jackson. She will be forever remembered for the legendary Christmas animation The Snowman, from the book by Raymond Briggs. But she went on to direct Granpa in 1989 and then to do the initial planning and storyboarding for Father Christmas in 1991.

Father Christmas would have been her second Raymond Briggs adaptation as director, but ill health meant that she had to hand over the director's reins to one of her protégés, Dave Unwin, who had worked with her as an animator on Granpa. She died tragically young in 1992, leaving Granpa as her final work as full director. Her concept for an animated series based on the works of Beatrix Potter, The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends, was completed by others and transmitted posthumously by BBC Television in 1993.

Granpa is a beautiful and very British half hour animation about a little girl called Emily and her kindly but ailing old grandfather. Emily's developing personality, imagination and childhood memories are being formed by her days spent listening to Granpa's stories. The stories come to life in animated images brilliantly designed to look like a child's crayoned drawings. Vivid, bright and seemingly inherently childish, the images are actually highly sophisticated animations from director Jackson and her team of artists. Remember that all of these animated frames were created lovingly by hand in 1989, before computer generated imagery came to dominate the business of animation and rendered hand drawn, beautifully detailed cartoon films like Granpa obsolete!

The tone of the film is initially warm and exhilarating, with Emily untroubled by notions of time or mortality. She lives fully within the moment, a child's viewpoint. For Granpa however, things are rather different. Aware that his days with her are numbered, he lovingly preserves her innocence and passes on to her a heritage within stories from his own distant childhood.

As the seasons pass by (symbolically from spring to winter, and then to spring once more), Granpa becomes visibly frailer until finally, during a magical story that has the pair swinging through jungle branches, he concedes that "I just can't reach those branches...the way I used to be able to." In a heartbreaking coda that echoes the famous finale of The Snowman, Emily finds herself (along with the old man's sad, loyal old dog) to be alone; her young life before her and Granpa inevitably consigned to live on only in her memories.

It's an astonishing finish, brave and sad and with an awareness of mortality and the sacredness of memory. In that sense, Granpa has much in common with all the great children's tales (Watership Down, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, The Once and Future King, The Snowman, and many others), and in its so very British way it subtly and with great understatement covers the most serious themes of life, death, time and the rites of passage between old and new.

A great piece of work, deserving of so very much more attention than it has received over the years. A neglected masterpiece that hardly ever gets screened, I recommend Granpa unreservedly. If you get the opportunity to watch this beautiful rarity, do so!

Duke-verity, Duke-verity UK, 13/3/2006

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