T h e S p e c i a l Aw a r d
Peter Western Thanks to animated rodents, rabbits, naughty boys and anthropomorphic frozen people, animator and storyboard artist Peter Western has enjoyed a career spanning more than 40 years, which has taken him from Soho to Hollywood and back again...
T H E
T
his year’s Special Award recipient, Peter Western, considers himself a man of action. “Directors cast animators for their strengths. If you need mice running across a station concourse, like in An American Tale: Fievel Goes West, with all these huge feet treading down, that’s something I can do,” Western says, before pondering: “That took three months and I’m still proud of it.” Ironically, Western got his chance to show off his gift for rodent adventures thanks to a rabbit. “I was lucky enough to get onto Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” he says, “which opened doors. When [Steven] Spielberg wanted to get into animation more, they asked me to come onboard Amblimation. It was great.” As a boy weaned on the Beano and The Dandy, Western’s also a man with a wicked sense of humour – a trait that helped him segue into children’s television at the turn of the millennium, when demand for traditional hand-drawn 2D animation was drying up. “Things like Horrid Henry suited my sense of humour, with kids being rude and a bit vulgar,” he laughs. “The director, Hilary Audus, liked the kind of humour I throw into my drawings, and brought me onto The Snowman and the Snowdog, which was a real highlight late in my career. I was working on Tree Fu Tom, and the world had changed… The younger artists working digitally were just flying through the storyboards at a rate I couldn’t keep up with. Then I got the The Snowman. “Initially, it was just to storyboard a gag-driven sequence where all the snowmen were in a race, bringing levity to an otherwise gentle film. I did the storyboards then cheekily asked if I could do the animation… and they said yes. I got to take it from storyboard to layout to animation, which was wonderful.” Other notable mentions among his impressive roster of animation, storyboarding, layout art and animatics work include Space Jam, The Magic Sword: Quest for Camelot, Angelina Ballerina, Fungus the Bogeyman, Jungle Junction, Chop Socky Chooks and Kerwhizz. He also worked on the BAFTA-nominated animated shorts The Village (1994) and Jolly Roger (2000).
23
N O M I N A T I O N S
words by Rich Matthews | Portrait by Scott Kershaw