Bermuda Shorts

With The Incredibles set to smash box office records all over again, it's clear that animation is as healthy and profitable as it ever was. Making Movies chats to Trevor Murphy and Jade Caffoor of Bermuda Shorts - one of the UK's most forward looking animation houses - to get a sense of what's happening over here.

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What is the enduring appeal of animation?

With animation, anything is possible; the only limits are the boundaries of the animator's imagination. With live action, a human character sets up certain expectations about the way they can act, with animation you can create an entirely different universe. This makes it truly a magical medium in which to tell stories. It's interesting that Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg (a former executive at Disney responsible for The Lion King) called their company DreamWorks because dreams are very important for animators. Their job is to make dreams work.

How has it become a multi-million pound business?

Let's take the example of Pixar. Pixar (the makers of Toy Story, Finding Nemo) have created two and a half billion dollars of revenue with just five films. Incidentally, half of that is from toy merchandise, and so on. The reason for this is that the bosses at Pixar understood two important things: one, that the films that make big money are the ones you want to watch again and again and two, they knew that if they could make films that appealed to adults as well as children, they could make animations even more popular that Disney. Pixar began when animator John Lasseter made a funny short film called Luxo Jr. about an Anglepoise lamp. Lasseter wanted to prove that not only could you use computers to animate a character, but you could also impart a personality to an inanimate object. Pixar now have a whole department responsible for developing facial expressions for their characters, and like all successful animations, their films transcend language barriers because they can be effortlessly re-dubbed - audiences feel like they are watching the original.

Next: What are the different types of animation?