Arts features

Tana Fletcher in her studio

The thirteen episodes of Willoughby Drive were created in a converted garage at the bottom of Tana's garden - a painstakingly slow process.

"Who’d be an animator?" Tana said. "Well, it can be exhilarating and fun, cocooned in this world of make believe, the characters unfolding their stories before you. 

The Watherspoon family

"Depending on the number of puppets and their actions and the different camera angles, my rate of progress is laughably slow - anything from five to 20 seconds a day.

"Working roughly 45 hours a week, I took 10 months to a year to make one episode.  Willoughby Drive with all its innumerable changes, cuts and remakings took somewhere near fourteen years to complete."

A trader

The Willoughbly Street series is based on a number of stories which were published weekly in the magazine Punch in the 1920s, and were later published as two books called Simple Stories and Simple People “for grown ups and children”

The original stories were satirical sketches about diverse characters, such as a detective, a burglar, an inventor and a brigand with names such as Mr and Mrs Gumble Mump and the Watherspoon family.

Mr and Mrs Gumble Bump take to the roads

Tana's interest in animation sprang from her first love - puppeteering.

She said: "Before I started making puppet animation films we had a family puppet theatre. This ultimately led me into puppet animation."

Tana assembled a team of people, including actors, prop makers, puppet makers artists, dressmakers, an editor, a composer, a sound man and a lab. She was helped by members of her family - her son is a film editor on wildlife documentaries, and her daughter helped create the backdrops for the series.

A centaur puppet

She spent hours scouring craft-fairs for props for the various characters - even tracking down a Meissen looking-glass and a tiny leather-bound set of Shakespeare plays to furnish her characters' rooms.

Tana said: "I roamed round craft fairs talking to woodturners, metal workers, toymakers and any other craftsmen who were selling things I needed to be made in miniature.

"Those who agreed to help me worked in their own homes where I visited them with my measurements on a scale drawing."

Tana then recorded the dialogue of the characters with actors, who had to talk in a total of 66 voices and then animated her 'puppets' so that they 'lip synched' their lines.

Mr and Mrs Barraclough

With the help of her son she edited the short films, the part of the process she enjoyed the most.

"Next he put in the sound effects." she explained. "Many of these I had recorded over the years when  my husband and children obligingly shut and opened doors, clumped downstairs, walked across rooms, screamed, laughed or clapped for me."

The series has attracted interest from The Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank, which commissioned an exhibition of photographs on the history and making of the animations. Later this exhibition went to to festivals, art centres and libraries.

Tana showed the films in schools and societies  with talks and the British Council sent the six films to world wide festivals.