Twenty years is a long gestation for a TV series, but Noel Price is happy with the result. Frustrated by the piles of toys discarded by his children for broken old favourites or the latest gadgets, Price had longed to create a show to deal with the problem. “Rather than just put the toys at the bottom of the wardrobe, I wanted to encourage (children) to somehow renew them.” He says. Twenty years later, his vision has been realised with an animated series, The Adventures of Bottle Top Bill and His best friend Corky.
The characters and their world take shape on screen using everyday odds and ends. Empty bottles become submarines or exotic sea animals. Spoons become propellers and buttons become headlights. Carpet-lined buckets become caves and boats are created out of sandshoes.
The idea, Price says, who heads the animation and children’s production unit for Southern Star, is to encourage preschool children to create new toys, creatures and worlds using household materials and their imagination. In the process, they become aware of the broader issue of recycling.
“The key characteristic of the series is using what you have to make something new without having to go out and buy more stuff,” Price says. “It’s about recycling what we already have and encouraging kids to look (in a different way) at stuff that they have developed a certain familiarity with … hopefully it’s a way to explore their sense of possibility.”
This is what Price and animator Cameron Chittock had to do to create the series. Belying its simplistic appearance, the animation is so complex it required building an animation studio, Southern Star Singapore, to make it. The show combines 2D and 3D animation. After model makers created each background and creature, the models were stripped, rebuilt and photographed digitally. Sophisticated software was used to combine the 2D and 3D elements.
Price declines to put a figure on the cost of the venture, which involved a team of 50 people from UK, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia, but admits the production of the 26-episode series was expensive.
“It’s a totally different kind of animation program, which required different prcesses to be created in order to realise it,” he says. “It is almost an anti-merchandising show so , therefore, it’s out of the mainstream in a sense as it’s not driving people to go and buy toys – It’s doing the reverse of that.”
Price hopes children will be entertained while learning positive values. During each 12-minute episode, Bill and Corky encounter a problem and set about solving it, often with unexpected results. In the first episode, they thwart a villain’s attempt to steal and cage a “junkosaurus”, but end up forging a friendship of sorts with the villain. In the second episode, they follow instructions to find hidden treasure, then distribute it among the sea creatures they meet along the way. The concepts of friendship, selflessness and team work are constant subtexts.
“They are, in a sense, stories that are based on positive affirmation,” Price says. “We just try to underpin values of engaging in the world in a problem-solving way.”
Claire Henderson, the ABC’s head of children’s TV and executive producer of the series, believes the show will be enjoyed by preschool and young primary school children on several levels.
“It is an enormously fun story about the wonderful relationship between Bill and Corky on one level,” she says. “But it has a wonderful other layer where children are able to see this world and its characters created in front of their very eyes. It’s to be hoped some might go away and have a go themselves.”
The Adventures of Bottle Top Bill and his Best Friend Corky begins on the ABC today at 8am.
