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Snippy is an Artful Dodger
Title:
Snippy is an Artful Dodger
NFSA ID
5727
Year
1925
A young boy, Snooks, chases the animated figure of Snippy up a ladder in his back garden. Snippy teases Snooks before springing over his head and up a tree, then onto a children’s roundabout. Snooks pushes the roundabout but Snippy steals away and climbs through a ventilation hole in the side of the house. Snippy taunts Snooks from inside the hole, his words appearing in a speech bubble, ‘Ta ta Snooks, see you next week’.
Summary by Poppy De Souza
The clip uses a combination of live action and cell animation.
Snippy is an Artful Dodger Synopsis
This short film, with animation by David Barker, features a young boy (Snooks) and a cartoon character named Snippy. Snooks is asleep in his garden, dreaming, when Snippy appears. Snooks chases him around the garden, but Snippy eludes capture.
Curator's Notes
This is a charming example of an early Australian cartoon from around 1925. Snippy is an Artful Dodger superimposes cell animation over freeze-frames of live action to create Snooks’s dream world. This simple technique was used by Yoram Gross in his Dot and the Kangaroo films made in the 1970s and 80s. A small segment in Snippy uses a rapid succession of still frames to create the appearance of movement as Snooks tries to catch Snippy on a children’s roundabout.
An artist from Ballarat, David Barker was a cartoonist, illustrator, painter and etcher. He worked for the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia as a cartographer during the First World War, and exhibited his etchings and watercolours in New South Wales in the 1920s.
Notes by Poppy De Souza
Producer
David Barker
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.