Sadness Upon Sadness

Many years ago a new creamy topping was introduced called Crowning Glory. It was launched with an expensive advertising campaign which led people to believe it was made by elves. An animated cartoon shown extensively on TV depicted Cornish pixies stealing the ingredients from an old man and putting the Crowning Glory together. The ad ended with the small people being photographed with a box of their creation.

I was so impressed by this I invented a board game in which the Spriggans and Knockers and Piskies and Bockles mentioned in the advert stole the ingredients and competed against each other to make it and be photographed with it. The Knockers were particularly successful I recall. Unfortunately there were six different elves in the advert rather than four teams of two. Once I saw them on a poster beside a park in Birmingham. I went back the next week and the poster had gone. So had the Crowning Glory. I never saw them again. I would never be able to make the figures in my game reflect the ones in the advert. Fortune had turned its face away from me and my dream had been dashed forever.

Sad? I still remember it so maybe. But what about the elves themselves? Would you like to be in their position?

Animated actors have some advantages over human ones. You do not have to pay them once you have drawn them although there are always residuals for creators, agents, interpreters and suchlike. They should also by definition be perfect for any part they play as they can be adapted to suit character and visual taste. But what happens to an out of work animated actor? How can someone who is drawn for a purpose get on with their life when their purpose has gone?

The elves in the Crowning Glory ad will never cease to exist because they have been recorded on videotape, poster and box. Someone somewhere has the artwork for these so they remain fixed in that form forever. They cannot grow old as we that are left grow old. Age cannot weary them nor the years condemn. Nor can years alter their form to make them more suitable for other parts. They are not well known enough to become pin ups or the basis of a range of dolls which can redefine them. They are the Crowning Glory elves and will never be anything else. Unlike the rest of us they have no hope of beneficial change. Their world no longer exists and they are not drawn for another one. They have nothing but an eternal present in which they can neither die nor have a reason to exist. But exist they certainly do and that will curse them forever.

Someone must have told them once that their contracts were not being renewed. How did they take that? Could they even understand the concept of other jobs and other worlds? Their only skill was to steal the ingredients of Crowning Glory and look good doing so. They might have modelled for cream producing companies if they had not been bound to Crowning Glory by copyright. They might have worked in the cream making industry if they had been able to use their hands without the help of an expensive animator. How many cream producers employ animators? The Crowning Glory elves are the only ones who cannot forget themselves. While the world wishes them away they must exist until every piece of art work or memory or advertising and product record have ceased to exist. Then some bloody historian or archaeologist will dig them up and the cycle will start again.

The film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was a sympathetic commentary on the problems of 'toons' as they are called in America. It nevertheless created a glamourised view of animated actors. Not everyone can be Bugs Bunny or Edward Fox. An out of work animated actor is redundant in a much deeper way than a human. They are a perpetual and irrevocable mistake. And the Crowning Glory elves do not even have any of the product to eat after all they tried to do for it. You often wonder if there is any justice in the world.