100 Greatest Animated Shorts / The Hill Farm / Mark Baker

Featured

Stephen Cavalier

Writer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9qWzPeADoY

UK / 1988

The Hill Farm is a beautiful, 18-minute, dialogue-free and funny short; it covers the events of three days and shows how different people use the same hilly countryside in different ways. The farmer cares for the animals, a group of holiday-makers camp nearby and take photos, and hunters hunt everything they see. A storm and a big bear cause problems and everything resolves as the different groups react differently to the events and shelter in the farmhouse.

In this universe a small amount of movement and animation seem to express a lot about the characters, a bit like the low-key Hitchcock approach of suggesting a character using minimal acting, further defining them by their actions in a given situation and letting the audience fill in the gaps. This can often be better and more powerful than overacting, over-explaining and over-emoting, an approach that mainstream animation filmmakers can often be accused of. Often there is nothing so boring than the obvious.

The Hill Farm was made over a three-year period at the UK’s National Film & Television School, and was completed in 1988. It had a budget of around £18,000 and used mainly traditional animation techniques. Mark Baker worked on the film alone, with some input from visiting lecturers. Baker also had some help from the paint department at Richard Purdum Productions, where he had worked previously. The Hill Farm won the Annecy Grand Prix and, like Baker’s other shorts The Village and Jolly Roger, was Oscar-nominated and won major awards around the world.

The backgrounds and characters in The Hill Farm are simple flat shapes but beautifully designed and animated, a perfectly-turned graphical style with minimal detail and flattened perspective. Here similarities to the design approach of UPA in the 1950s can be be detected, simple designs which perfectly suit the understated but nicely crafted animation; less is more. Similarities in this design approach and the trademark hilly terrain would later feature in Mark Baker and Neville Astley’s worldwide hit television series Peppa Pig from 2005 onwards, which made them among the most successful British animators of their generation.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!