A Pencil and Alick P.F. Ritchie

1915
Silent
7m

More chalk-talker than pencil-pusher, this popular artist recreates his cartoons for the screen with flashes of added animation.

Behold the wonder of the magic pencil! OK, the special effects are more Thunderbirds than Gravity, but the real delight of this film is the fluid line of an artist with a gift for the comic, caricature portrait. Yes, you can see the faint guidelines that his lightning sketches follow, and the actual animation is limited. But the detail and character achieved mainly with thick chalk is astonishing.

Alick P.F. Ritchie was a Scottish-born commercial artist and cartoonist whose work frequently appeared in Vanity Fair, as well as on posters and cigarette cards. The 'chalk-talk' was a popular music hall act and Ritchie seems a familiar performer in the form. Here he explores the potential of stop-motion animation to develop the chalk-talk, though Ritchie only seems to have dabbled in filmmaking, with a short-lived series, Alick Ritchie's Frightful Sketches, the same year.

The First World War: Drawing the Enemy

Britain's cartoonists take up their brushes to confront the Kaiser and his armies.

As the First World War raged across Europe, Britain's animators dedicated themselves to the propaganda effort. These determined artists, among them Lancelot Speed, Dudley Buxton, GW Studdy and Anson Dyer, unleashed an arsenal of tricks with one objective - making the enemy look ridiculous, and victory seem inevitable.

In cartoon after cartoon, lightning sketch after lightning sketch, the elaborately-moustached 'Kaiser Bill' was subjected to a catalogue of indignities, whether at the hands of 'Tommy', 'John Bull' and their allies, or just falling victim to his own hubris.