Roger Mainwood
Animator celebrated for his work with Raymond Briggs
ROGER MAINWOOD, who has died of cancer aged 65, was a film animator and director who was best known for his collaborations with the author Raymond Briggs.
He was an animator on television film adaptations of Briggs’s books The Snowman (1982), When the Wind Blows (1986) and Father Christmas (1991). He also directed the feature animation Ethel and Ernest (2016), based on Briggs’s 1998 graphic novel chronicling the lives of his parents.
Mainwood had begun the project in 2007 and spent the next eight years developing it, adapting the screenplay from Briggs’s novel and drawing the majority of the storyboard himself. He spent a further two years making it with producers at Lupus Films.
Briggs’s gentle tribute to his parents was a funny, bittersweet tale of an ordinary London couple, lady’s maid Ethel and milkman Ernest, following their lives from their first chance meeting in 1928, through the Depression, the birth of their son Raymond in 1934, and the Blitz, to their deaths, within months of each other, in 1971.
Briggs was initially reluctant for his intensely personal book to be adapted into a film, but once he had agreed, it became a very personal project for Mainwood, too. Determined to recreate the book as faithfully as possible, he took nothing for granted. The pictures on the walls, the plates on the table, even the light switches and the linoleum pattern, were researched using historical records, Briggs’s memory and family photographs. Briggs recalled Mainwood as having the creative energy and enthusiasm of a young man but the “fussiness” of an old maid.
A team of around 300 people in London, Cardiff and Luxembourg worked tirelessly to bring Ethel and Ernest (pictured right) to life using a combination of hand-drawn and hand-painted techniques and the very latest animation technology.
The film featured the voices of Jim Broadbent and Brenda Blethyn and was comprised of around
65,000 handdrawn animated frames. Snippets of familiar songs like Foot Tapper by the Shadows and the theme from Dixon of Dock Green reinforced the nostalgic air, while Paul Mccartney’s poignant closing track,
In the Blink of an Eye, was complemented by Carl Davis’s arrangement of Paul’s father James Mccartney’s 1920s jazz composition, Walking in the Park With Eloise.
When it was released in 2016, Briggs expressed his delight, particularly with the casting. “Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent got my parents absolutely spot on,” he said. “When their voices came over, it was like my Mum and Dad were in the room.”
Roger Mainwood was born at Whitstable, Kent, on July 31 1953. He studied at the London College of Printing, then in the film and television department of the Royal College of Art.
His first job was directing an animated video for Kraftwerk’s single Autobahn and in 1979 he joined the Halas and Bachelor animation studio. He went on to become one of Britain’s leading animators while working at the London studio TVC.
His first major directing role was on Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice and Johnny Town-mouse (1992) for the BBC. He was also animation director on the television specials The Wind in the Willows (1995) and Willows in Winter (1996). Other directing credits included episodes of the BBC comedy Stressed Eric, and he was series director of the pre-school series Meg and Mog. Mainwood is survived by his wife Valerie and their two daughters.
Roger Mainwood, born July 31 1953, died September 20 2018