British animation producer Dick Arnall dead

Posted:
Mar 5, 2007

British producer Dick Arnall, founder and director of England's first animation festival, died February 6, Britain's animate! studio announced.

The first animation festival in the country took place in Cambridge in 1967.

Born in 1944, Arnall twice shared BAFTA Film Award nominations for best short animated film: for Tim Webb's A is for Autism (1992) and for Robert Bradbrook's Home Road Movies (2001).

A is for Autism contained an 11-minute montage of words, drawings, music and sequences contributed by people with the condition. It was named Best New British Animation at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Arnall was involved with animate! since its inception in 1990, serving as an independent production advisor. animate! tv commissions an annual slate of personal projects for television, with running times of up to six minutes, and production budgets between £5,000 and £20,000. The individual works receive their premieres on Channel 4, which sponsors the scheme with the Arts Council of England.

In June 1999, Arnall was named the #1 producer in British animation by Creation magazine.

In 2001, Arnall took a break to focus on producing films in his own right for his Finetake Productions, based in London.

Films included Jo Ann Kaplan's Anatomy of Melancholy (2006) for animate!. Finetake, Arnall's company, set up animateonline and the animate! artists award, and developed animate!'s extensive exhibition programme, taking the work to unexpecting audiences in new contexts.

His other producing credits included Ruth Lingford's Death and the Mother (1988); Lizzie Oxby's Extn. 21 (2002); Sweet Salt, Careful and Run Wrake's Rabbit (all 2005); and From Nose to Mouth, Proximity, Purple Grey and Yours Truly (all 2006).

"More than anything, he'll be remembered as the artists' staunchest champion, supporter and friend," animate! said.

He worked with such filmmakers as Jonathan Hodgson, Matt Hulse, Chris Shepherd, Ruth Lingford, Devlin Crow, Tim Hope and Andrew Kötting.

"The personal was political with him -- he loved it," Kaplan recalled.

Occasionally, Arnall wrote articles about animation.

"He was a wonderful charismatic person and a very generous mentor to me when I first became a festival director," said British animation festival Irene Kotlarz, who heads Platform, an international animation festival set for late June in Portland, Oregon.

"His death was sudden and a great shock, and he'll be greatly missed by very many people. I saw him in London just last October, and he had been planning to come to Platform, where we will be doing an Animate! retrospective, which will now also be a tribute to Dick."