We are proud to present Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad: The Extraordinary Animaland of Arthur Humberstone, brought to you by The Arthur Humberstone Animation Archive & showcasing a wealth of production material and unseen ephemera from Animaland (1948), Animal Farm (1954) and Watership Down (1978)
Private View: Wednesday 12th April, 7pm - 10pm
Exhibition runs from Thursday 13th April- Friday 5th May.
Open Tuesday - Saturday 12-6pm
Booking is required for this exhibition. Suggested donation £4-£6
Arthur Humberstone (1912 – 1999) was a British animator, artist and director whose credits include Animal Farm, Yellow Submarine and The BFG. He worked with Halas & Batchelor and as a senior animator with Martin Rosen on Watership Down and The Plague Dogs.
Arthur Humberstone's influence is evident from the privately managed Arthur Humberstone Animation Archive which contains a wealth of pre-production materials spanning his 45-year career. The archive reveals both the profound influence Humberstone had over animal aesthetics whilst enhancing our understanding of animation history.
Who was Arthur Humberstone?
Born in Derby, 1912, Arthur Humberstone was an avid film buff and home projection enthusiast with an early infatuation in cameraless animation.
Humberstone trained as an animator at Moor Hall, Cookham, Berkshire where David Hand was heading up the G.B. (Gaumont British) animation studio. Whilst Moor Hall produced nine Animaland cartoons and ten more Musical Paintbox shorts, they failed to find an audience and GB-Cartoons folded (in 1950) within three short years of its launch. However, the studio's legacy was to live on through the draughtsmanship and quality of the animators it had created.
Humberstone returned to Derby, taking a job as a newspaper cartoonist producing a regular strip for the sports page, but when the Halas & Batchelor studio started recruiting for Animal Farm, one of his ex-Cookham friends recommended him to John Halas. At his interview, Halas asked Humberstone which animals interested him, to which he replied ‘horses’, prompting Halas to proclaim: ‘Good . . . Boxer and Benjamin are yours!’
After Animal Farm, Humberstone set up his own company undertaking a variety of freelance work including animated commercials for TV and cinema, shorts and TV series. This was a period of prolific output and saw Humberstone amass over 100 titles including his self-initiated pilot Noddy Goes To Toyland (1963).
During the mid-1960s, Humberstone was part of the team of national and international animators to realise the artistic vision of Yellow Submarine (1968). Alongside feature productions and commercial advertising work, Humberstone still maintained his working relationship with John Halas, contributing to a number of Halas & Batchelor productions including Dodo, the Kid from Outer Space (1964), The Jackson 5ive (1971-72), The Osmonds (1972), and The Addams Family (1973).
In 1976, Humberstone landed a job on Watership Down as Senior Animator. Once again this was initiated by his proactive nature as, purely on spec, he had sent some drawings of a fox to Martin Rosen (the Director.).
While the film was in production, Humberstone kept twenty-six rabbits in his back garden. He filmed them on Super-8mm running up and down the grass banks and then used the recording of their movements to draw, frame-by-frame, their motion onto sheets of paper. These were then Xeroxed and circulated amongst the other animators so they could be used as a source of reference.
In 1979, following the completion of Watership Down, Humberstone relocated to San Francisco in order to join the rest of Rosen’s team to make The Plague Dogs (released in 1982).
Gradually winding down his career through the 1980s, Humberstone kept his hand in working on productions such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979), SuperTed (1983-1986) and The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show (1983-1985). His final big production, as a key animator, was The BFG completed in 1989.
The exhibition archivists, Nigel & Klive Humberstone.
Nigel and Klive Humberstone are film music composers and founding members of In The Nursery, the Sheffield-based band. Parallel to their studio works, In The Nursery have developed their Optical Music Series, an ongoing repertoire of new soundtracks for silent films. They also manage the Arthur Humberstone Animation Archive which covers materials from their father’s 45 year career in animation from training at Gaumont British Animation, Moor Hall through work on Halas & Batchelor’s Animal Farm and subsequent classic animated features and TV shows including Yellow Submarine, Watership Down, The Plague Dogs and The BFG.
