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35mm, Technicolor, 17 mins
Directors: Anthony Gross
Hector Hoppin
Production Company: H.G. Productions
Sponsor: British Film Institute Experimental Film Fund
Music: Tibor Harsanyi
Cast: Donald Pleasence (voices)
Phineas Fogg bets £50,000 that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days, and has an adventure in India.
In the 1930s, animators Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin were contracted to Alexander Korda's London Films, for which they made their best-known film Joie de Vivre (1934) and Fox Hunt (1936), the first British animated film in three-strip Technicolor.
In 1938, after the worldwide success of Walt Disney's groundbreaking feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Gross and Hoppin began work on an ambitious adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days,
but only two sequences were completed before war intervened and
production shut down. In 1955, a grant from the BFI's Experimental Film
Fund enabled the film to be, if not completed according to the original
plans, at least put into releasable shape with a coherent structure and
soundtrack (with Donald Pleasence providing all the voices).
Without advance knowledge of the production history (though the film's full onscreen title, A Sequence From Round the World in 80 Days,
provides a hint), the film seems distinctly lop-sided, paying
inordinate attention to the start of the story (Phineas Fogg's hiring of
his manservant Passepartout, the Reform Club wager that he can
circumnavigate the globe in just eighty days) while rushing through the
rest - but the Indian sequence at least hints at the extent of Gross and
Hoppin's ambition.
Although clearly under-resourced compared with
Disney's features, the film has a highly distinctive graphic style
(sinuous figures with elongated heads) and a great deal of imaginative
energy, particularly in the Indian scenes (the film is also known as Indian Fantasy,
reflecting their dominance). These incorporate a race against time to
save a bride from immolation in her husband's funeral pyre (the flame
effects are particularly well realised), a chase involving elephants,
horses and a rickety wooden bridge, as well as more subtle effects such
as the bride's diaphanous flowing purple veil. If the other planned
sequences had been completed to a similar standard, there's every
possibility that the film could have stood comparison with Max
Fleischer's late 1930s Disney-challengers like Gulliver's Travels (US, 1939).
Michael Brooke
