The list of British talent contending for Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday night is topped by some illustrious names: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Hawkins, Dunkirk director Christopher Nolan, Gary Oldman and newcomer Daniel Kaluuya. Yet a handful of other characters will not have their moment of red-carpet glory, despite having played starring roles in an Oscar-nominated British film already enjoyed by millions.
Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Prince Charming and the wolf are a few of the much-loved fictional heroes and villains of Revolting Rhymes, the acclaimed movie of Roald Dahl’s quirky selection of fairytale yarns tipped to have a strong chance of winning the best animated short film award.
“A nomination is a prize in itself,” said producer Michael Rose, speaking from West Hollywood. “It is the biggest honour in our industry, to be out here this weekend, so we are enjoying our time, staying next to Sunset Strip.” His co-founder at Magic Light is also delighted. “It really is tremendous,” said Martin Pope.
The two producers should be taking it all in their stride by now. After all, this is Magic Light’s fourth Oscar nomination, making them among the most publicly lauded members of the British film industry. The popular animations of the Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffer children’s hits The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom are also from their stable, as is Chico and Rita, a romantic full-length 2010 feature for grown-ups.
“We are never blasé about any of it,” said Rose, who began his producing career with Aardman Animations. “We take a lot of time choosing our projects and we make them very carefully. We’ve focused mainly on children’s titles, but Chico and Rita was also Oscar-nominated, so the only link really is that we want to do things at very high quality.” Magic Light’s children’s films are regularly shown on Christmas Day on BBC One and are often drawn from Donaldson and Scheffer’s work, including The Highway Rat last Christmas. “What is so lovely about the film is the way they have kept true to the story and the look of the [Room on the Broom] book,” Donaldson said in 2012.
The Gruffalo went out to a television audience of 9.8 million on Christmas Day 2009, while The Gruffalo’s Child was shown on Christmas Day 2011. In an extraordinary festive coup, all of Magic Light’s children’s films featured across the 2017 BBC One Christmas and New Year schedule, including Donaldson and Scheffer’s Stick Man and Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, pulling in a total of 19 million viewers.
The Dahl film, which features marionette-style characters instead of drawings in the style of the book’s illustrator, Quentin Blake, was watched by 10 million on its first TV outing, in December 2016, and has just launched on Netflix in North America. Made in two parts in a specially created Magic Light studio in Berlin and in Cape Town, South Africa, it stars the voices of Dominic West, Gemma Chan and David Walliams. It has already won several major awards and been bought by 37 countries. “We go where the talent that we want to work with is, but we are very much British,” said Pope.
“We set up our own studio in Berlin for this film but the essence of the project is absolutely British. Our name may not be well known and we may not be the size of a great company like Aardman, but we want to do work on a smaller scale and of the highest quality,” he added. The latest Magic Light production, destined for BBC One this Christmas, will be Donaldson’s 2010 story Zog.
