Making animation matter: Peter Sachs comes to Britain

This chapter focuses on the distinctive work of the German-born film animator and art director Peter Hans Richard Sachs (1912-1990), who was permitted entry to Britain in June 1939 to work as a domestic servant, aged 27. Trained in the animation studios of two of Weimar Berlin‘s most highly regarded experimental film animators in the early 1930s, the Hungarian-born George Pal and the German artist and filmmaker OskarW. Fischinger, Sachs first fled in 1934 to Eindhoven in Holland, where he worked on the experimental animated advertisements produced by Pal‘s studio for Philips Radio and Horlicks, brands which were known to British audiences. The first in-depth study of Sachs‘ contribution to animation in Britain, this essay identifies the specific conditions that facilitated his career, the particularities of the powerful and innovative modernist animations he produced for government agencies and advertising companies through the Larkins Studio in London from 1943 to 1955, and his contribution to professional training and education.