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Award winning animator Bob Godfrey passes away

Award winning animator Bob Godfrey passes away

THE award winning animator Bob Godfrey has passed away at the age of 91.

Mr. Godfrey will be best remembered for his cartoons Roobarb (see below) and Henry’s Cat which were much loved by children.

But in a career which spanned 50 years, he also produced work which was very much aimed at adults with such productions as Henry 9 to 5 and the Kama Sutra Rides Again.

He won an Oscar in 1975 for the short film Great — a tongue-in-cheek biography of the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Born in Australia, his parents returned to Britain when he was still a baby and he was brought up in Ilford, Essex. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Marines as a commando and was injured in the D-Day Landings.

He began his career as a graphic artist working in advertising before beginning to develop his skills as an animator. There was also a spell with a company which made the first ads for the fledgling commercial television sector in Britain during the 1950s.

But he wanted to concentrate his efforts on animation. However, he was determined to develop a style away from the Disney-esque type of features.

Friend and fellow animator Richard Williams, speaking on the BBC’s Today show, gave an insight into Mr. Godrey’s approach: “Bob was always against doing mountains of drawings. He said ‘the trouble was ... all the professionals are stuck in a rut, and the amateurs are not good enough — I’m an ‘am-pro’. Am-pro is the solution’.”

Mr. Williams said his friend was “hilarious”, adding: “He was a wonderful, marvellous guy. He was his own man. I never met anyone like him.”

As well as being an Academy Award winner, Mr. Godfrey also received three Baftas. He received an M.B.E. in 1986.

He continued to work into his 80s with his final work being Millennium: The Musical — a cartoon which condensed a thousand years of British history and which was made for Channel 4 in 1999.

To see an excerpt from Roobarb, click here.

To view part of an interview in which Mr. Godfrey talked about his work, click here.

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