Ivor the Engine
animated television series
Ivor the Engine is a British cutout animation television series created by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's Smallfilms company. It follows the adventures of a small green steam locomotive who lives in the "top left-hand corner of Wales" and works for The Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited. His friends include Jones the Steam, Evans the Song and Dai Station, among many other characters.
Background
Having produced the live Alexander the Mouse, and the stop motion animated The Journey of Master Ho for his employers Associated Rediffusion/ITV in partnership with Firmin, Oliver Postgate and his partner set up Smallfilms in a disused cow shed at Firmin's home in Blean, near Canterbury, Kent.
Ivor the Engine was Smallfilms' first production, and drew inspiration from Postgate's World War II encounter with Welshman Denzyl Ellis, a former railway locomotive fireman with the Royal Scot train, who described how steam locomotives came to life when he heated them with steam in the morning. Postgate decided to locate the story to North Wales, as it was more inspirational than the flat terrain of the English Midlands. The story lines drew heavily on, and were influenced by the works of South Wales poet Dylan Thomas.
Production
Ivor the Engine used stop motion animation, of cardboard cut-outs painted with watercolours.
The series was originally made for black and white television by Smallfilms for Associated Rediffusion in 1958, but was later revived in 1975 when new episodes in colour were produced for the BBC.
The series was written, animated and narrated by Oliver Postgate, while Peter Firmin provided the artwork. The sound effects were endearingly low-tech, with the sound of Ivor's puffing made vocally by Postgate himself.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ivor the Engine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.