MOSI Exhibition - Cosgrove Hall

Manchester Museum of Science and Industry recently held an animation exhibition, focussing on Cosgrove Hall films. The exhibition was smaller than I'd have liked it to be (only a room!) but it was full of storyboards  and scripts and different models and parts of models form their films and TV shows.

The creators of the company, Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall met at university in Manchester, later becoming co-workers at Manchester College of Art and Design (which is now Manchester Metropolitan University). Hall created his own company - Stop Frame Productions in 1969, with Cosgrove joining shortly after. The company ran for 6 years until 1975, after which the producer of one of the serieses' they made called Rainbow created his own animation studio called Cosgrove Hall Films, comissioning the two as lead animators. The company changed ownership a fir bit until it finally ended up in the hands of ITV.

Some of the companies' most famous work consists of Dangermouse, The Wind in the Willows, Bill and Ben and James and the Giant peach, all things I watched when I was younger. Childrens' shows became one of the studio's specialities, but they also made the BBC's first fully animated webcasts, Ghosts of Albion, and also an animated Doctor Who story made just for the BBC website.

James and the Giant Peach

Bill and Ben models

As ITV began cutting down on franchises, they had a financial review deciding that there was not enough interest in Cosgrove Hall  to invest further, and so the company was shut down. In 2011, Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick Entertainment was formed with the help of an intellectual property lawyer, Francis Fitzpatrick. Mark Hall died later that year, and his son took his place working alongside Brian Cosgrove.
Notable other people having worked at Cosgrove Hall include Ian MacKinnon and Peter Saunders (MacKinnon&Saunders) and John Squire (Stone Roses)