Subsequent to our discussions in the group on diversity in the workplace, we asked Ravi Swami, a veteran animator and now the voice of Thatha in the new CBeebies sitcom Nikhil & Jay to reflect back on his experience. Here is what he told us.
How it all began…for me.
I feel that there’s an assumption amongst younger students of animation, that questions about diversity began to surface in the early 2000’s, a period that happened to coincide with the significant numbers of people from more diverse communities that began to make in-roads into animation in the UK, mainly due to new and expanding markets in Asia for animation and also in visual effects and the need for a skilled workforce that has resulted in many POC and people from diverse ethnic backgrounds coming to the UK to study and work.
Another driving factor has been the introduction of digital methods of creating animation, such as Shockwave “Flash” in the late 90’s that later evolved into “Flash” and allowed for a not overly costly entry point for many people interested in animation that only required a home computer, an internet connection and low cost software - on the professional software front vector-based animation systems started to appear and the skills focus gradually included software and at least some ability to use a computer alongside the traditional groundings in drawing etc and these now dominate the market for children’s TV in terms of economic production methods when compared to the “old days” of paper, cel and film.
Prior to the 2000’s 99% of animation in the U.K was hand-drawn on paper, with CGI close on its heels and that also changed the way film visual effects would be created, with stop-motion and other analogue processes making up the 1%.So where do POC fit into all this ? – I think the wider access to the means of creating animation can be seen as responsible for it not being limited to people with deep pockets in Western countries, though to be fair, film making has always been an expensive business and that aspect does tend to determine the demographic who hope to pursue sustainable careers in film and TV – this has always been the case, ie economic stability and the means to get things done, something that extends into pursuing a degree in animation, which is now quite costly, whereas I am from the generation that enjoyed free education up to BA level.
My first employer warned me off working on TV series animation since it was very poorly paid by comparison to commercial work, but this is no longer the case – if you can get on-board an animated TV series now then you can be certain of employment at some level for a year or more and then jump to the next production unless a series re-commissioned for a second series, though I believe that such content is witnessing a slump in the UK at the moment.
In terms of POC role models for animation in the UK, very little has been researched on the period between 1980 (and earlier) and up to the turn of the millennium probably because the numbers were negligible and therefore didn’t count as being significant (in some people’s eyes) or because their contribution wasn’t viewed as significant in the bigger picture of animation in the U.K.
It’s not my intention to emphasise any personal significance within the bigger picture of UK animation and more about how I entered the industry at a time when there were very few, if at all, people like me in the UK animation industry that was at that time centred exclusively in London’s square mile of Soho, and certainly no POC role models to emulate or be inspired by other than animators who were exclusively white, like Richard Williams.
I discovered these only later on after I started working, thanks to my first employer, Len Lewis, an animation director and animator who was originally from Bombay /Mumbai and of mixed Indian/Goan/Welsh heritage but could easily pass for an Indian were it not for his birth name. Len first mentioned Ram Mohan as the No.1 Indian animator of note (he is considered India’s “Walt Disney” and “The Father of Indian Animation”) but in fact India had a handful of other notable animators scattered up and down the subcontinent and I had met the Oscar winning animator Ishu Patel at a film festival who really fit the description of being an “artist animator”.
Many practicing animators in India, usually graduates from the Indian Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, split their time between feeding the relatively new medium of TV /cinema commercials, Government public information films and personal work, that is, if they could secure funding in a climate where live-action cinema dominated the home market, with animation viewed rather negatively and seen as the preserve of Disney – no one in India had the skills to match, basically.
When I graduated from a Graphic Design course at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central St Martins) in 1980 there wasn’t any particular drive to recruit from minorities in the animation industry such as it was then, which was essentially a friendly cottage industry of small boutique studios mostly serving the needs of advertising with one or two high-profile, long-standing well-financed studios like Richard Williams Studio and Halas and Batchelor that could afford to employ staff full-time – the rest had a core of full-time staff like company director/s and production staff, and drew on a mostly floating population of freelancers, of which I was one.
Wherever you were from, you were expected to go with the flow in a business where diversity would be led by ad’ agencies and depending upon a very narrow and occasional set of criteria, eg if an ad’ was about curry powder, or mango pickle for example, but this didn’t necessarily demand that crews be made up of people specifically from India, for example, even if advertising was responding to changing tastes in the population as a whole and at least some recognition of the U.K being more diverse in its make-up.
Where television is concerned, it was only the BBC that was leading the way in terms of more diverse programming, but this was confined to programmes aimed directly at a particular immigrant diaspora, and included sections like teaching English etc, and were not meant for the wider audience of the host community, and for reasons of cost, since they often had the lowest production budgets of all of BBC’s output, animation wasn’t even a consideration.That said, the BBC led the charge when it came to encouraging younger audiences to take an interest in animation, a drive I suspect designed to produce the next generation of animators to create content for the channel, thanks to the BBC series (available on YouTube) and subsequent book “Bob Godfrey’s Do It Yourself Animation Show” and I probably was very influenced in my career choice by that series, though before seeing it I had discovered animation via books in the local public library.
This changed when Channel 4 came on the scene with a more global outlook and more diverse executives drawn from various immigrant communities and with a channel remit to offer an alternative to what was seen as the stuffy, appealing to “Middle England” BBC, and resolutely populist ITV , and was paid for by advertising – again however, where animation is concerned, this remit didn’t translate across since the agenda seemed to be to encourage a notion of British animation that reflected British culture and values, for the most part ignoring how diverse British society had become by the early 80’s – but then taking into account that the majority of animators, mostly recent graduates, who won commissions for short films at Channel 4, were white, this is understandable and hardly surprising since the take-up for animation as a viable career choice amongst minorities was virtually non-existent.However, this narrow view was balanced by a range of animation programming that included content from around the world, such as from China and Japan, that was not available on the other main terrestrial channels.
For me personally, the 80’s were an exciting period in animation if you didn’t manage to join the hallowed ranks of Richard Williams Studio and learn the secrets of how to be a real animator from the masters of the craft – most of the companies I worked for were staffed by the set of young art college graduates emerging from the newly established certified animation courses – actually a course since West Surrey College in Farnham was the only college in the U.K to offer a degree animation course at the time, though both the Royal College of Art and The National Film School both offered animation on their syllabus’ - creating cutting edge experimental work that went against the grain of what was being produced by the older more established studios thanks to the freedom allowed in pop videos.
It's the main reason why I felt I’d rather stay in London rather than go to the U.S, for example – so I worked on pop videos and commercials that in turn were inspired by pop video work using animation in imaginative and experimental ways – it also offered exposure to new processes like computer graphics and this period coincided with the birth of MTV that encouraged a more “rock and roll” experimental approach when it came to commissioning animation for interstitials, and in turn coincided with the arrival of cable TV in the UK.
*Richard Williams is noted as saying at the time: “where are all these people coming from?”
But to return to the subject of diversity in the workplace besides more diverse content on TV screens, there was still a way to go and, things didn’t really change until the turn of the millennium.A couple of key factors influenced the change in the late 80’s and early 90’s in the run-up to the 2000’s, one being the commercial success of the TV series “The Real McCoy” and “Goodness Gracious Me” and the films of Gurinder Chadha and the writing and subsequent plays / film adaptations of the work of Hanif Kureishi.
Suddenly it felt like more diverse content could be pitched, for TV at least, just as the requirement for animated advertising – a mainstay of so many small studios in London all the way from the 60’s to the end of the 90’s - began to fall away for various reasons, to a trickle by the mid 2000’s and a subsequent focus shift to programming for pre-school and younger audiences, often following the U.S model of tying in programming to merchandise spin-offs to generate revenue to be ploughed back into further production, and with a much more ethical, educational approach than had been the case for animation when I was growing up, where the emphasis was on entertainment alone.
Looking back, nothing I was involved in had any particular angle on being of Indian origin, this despite the sudden post-colonial interest in India in the 80’s, thanks in large part to Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi”, David Lean’s “A Passage To India”, TV series like “A Jewel In The Crown” and possibly even Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom”, though it was trope that had begun to fizzle out by the 2000’s despite the significant commercial successes of those films – they were all essentially inward or backward looking in terms of their subject matter.Early on I was approached by one animation company, Cucumber Studios, to design an Indian shopkeeper (cliché…lol) character for a proposed TV commercial but it never got beyond the stage of a pitch, so at least some studios in London in the 80’s cultivated a broader outlook where diversity is concerned.
As I’ve mentioned, the turn of the millennium marked a significant change in the animation demographic in London, driven by the need for skilled people and the subsequent meeting of that need by the growth in certified degree level animation courses in the UK as London evolved into a hub for (mainly) Hollywood studios requiring visual effects, including the occasional animation feature, though the latter tended to be particularly vulnerable to market forces – all it takes is for one animated film to perform badly commercially for confidence in the medium to come crashing down and for the American studios to ship out, often taking valuable skilled crew with them and leaving a labour vacuum in the process.
In around 1999/2000, and in fact in the latter half of the 90’s, there were various BFI / broadcaster initiatives intended to bring together creatives from under-represented groups at venues around the country where there was the opportunity to network and meet directors, artists and film makers, so these kinds of initiatives are very useful, though animation and animators from those groups were very thin on the ground at that time. In 1999 I approached Anil Gupta at the BBC, one half of the writing/producing team responsible for “Goodness Gracious Me” with a suggestion for using animation, which he passed on but seems to have picked up the baton by commissioning “Bromwell High”, an animated series set in an Inner London school featuring a culturally diverse set of characters, though I have no data on how diverse the production team was.
In 2004 I was commissioned to work on a Channel 4 short series entitled “Blood Matters” aimed at various diverse UK communities in order to educate them on the need for blood donation, written and directed by Rajesh Thind, one of a series split between several directors of which I believe Rajesh and I actually represented the diverse British Asian communities we were addressing, as writer/director and designer/animator, respectively.Around the same time I got very close to developing a short animated film with Gurinder Chadha based on conversations between her parents and set in Southall, where both I and Gurinder grew up, hopefully to be released as a short with “Bend It Like Beckham” and our first port of call for funding was Channel 4 but they expressed doubts, partly because no one knew at the time how successful “Bend it” would be despite Gurinder’s previous track record for a commercially successful film, “Bhaji On The Beach”.
Was I champing at the bit to produce more authentic content reflecting my heritage in animation ? Not particularly, but throughout the early 80’s since graduating and up until the 2000’s, alongside my other interests in diverse pop culture in general, there was an idea or two that had a personal / Indian angle in it somewhere, but the issue, as ever, is how to get them made, and secondly, is there a market for it in the UK ?– I knew for sure that the diaspora had no interest whatsoever in animation, their attention being well catered for by “Bollywood” etc, though typically, my parents and relatives would prod me to investigate the myths, legends and folk tales familiar to many Indians as subjects for animation, without really considering the investment in time, money , relevance and the commercial prospects of such films, in the U.K at least.
This aspect is partly borne out by the shaky commercial fortunes of the Indo-Japanese “Ramayana” “Anime” animated feature film which is only just finding its feet after decades of being buried and which I have followed since the mid-80’s when I first heard about it from Ram Mohan himself.
To conclude, I think there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of getting more diverse programming out there in front of people’s eyeballs, not just in terms of subjects/styles and so on, but to be led by diverse teams while also keeping an eye on being interesting to the wider audience and driven by an authentic point of view and not just aimed at a narrow and very specific diaspora community, or confined just to content for a pre-school audience.
The technology of animation has certainly reached a point where the gatekeepers that determine funding etc can be bypassed and you no longer must wait for the “green light”, but audience reach is a different matter.
Ravi Swami
Animator and now the voice of Thatha in CBeebies preschool sitcom Nikhil & Jay
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