Irish-English animator Phil Mulloy, best known for his original, dark satirical shorts featuring distinctive black skeletal figures and minimalistic backgrounds, died on Thursday, (July 10), at age 76. He passed away peacefully in his sleep, according to his wife, animator and educator Vera Neubauer.
Born in Wallasey, Merseyside, Mulloy migrated to Liverpool with his family. He studied painting at Ravensbourne College and filmmaking at the Royal College of Art. Initially, he worked as a screenwriter and director of live-action projects (including the award-winning drama Mark Gertler: Fragments of a Biography) until the late 1980s, when he decided to pursue animation.
He created many inventive idents for MTV, including the famous Boxers to Lovers spot in which tow boxers, stop fighting and embrace each other, much to the disappointment of their audience who demand violence. In the early 1990s, he created Channel Four’s well-received Cowboys series (six shorts titled Slim Pickin’s, That’s Nothing’, Murder!, High Noon, The Conformist and Outrage).
Between 1994 and 1996, he delivered his black-and-white (brush and ink on paper) The Ten Commandments, which won a Special Award at the Hiroshima Intl. Animation Festival. Of the project, he said in Thinkred, “”I had a structure I could work within and a set of ideas I could reinterpret for myself. Similarly reworking and playing with narrative structures creates ways of reinterpreting elements to do with my own thinking about and experiencing of the world.”
In 1998, he created The Chain for Channel four, one of 30 animated shorts by acclaimed animators in a special Human Rights Animation program. The 10-minute short won the Jury Award at the Villa de Condo festival and the Critics Prize at Zagreb’s World Festival of Animated Films. He followed that short with Season’s Greetings (1999), a three-minute live-action/animation mix that offered a “greeting card for the new millennium.”
Among his other award-winning projects over the past two decades were The Sound of Music (1995), The Wind of Changes (1998), Intolerance which won a special prize at Annecy in 2001, The Christies series for Spectre Films in 2006, the feature Dead but Not Buried, which won the top feature prize at the Ottawa Intl. Animation Festival in 2011). His final short film Endgame, which centered on two office workers who engage in war games over the weekend to relax, won the top prize at Animafest Zagreb in 2016.
OIAF director Chris Robinson, who showcased Mulloy’s work at the festival frequently, wrote “Drawn with thick, bold lines featuring stick figure characters with black skulls, white eyes, and a penis-shaped nose, Mulloy’s films are drenched with stinging sarcasm as they unearth social, political, and religious inconsistencies and hypocrisies, while exploring their repressive and often cruel effects on humanity.”
Robinson tells Animation Magazine that a major retrospective of Phil Mulloy’s works was already in the works for this year’s edition of the Ottawa Festival (Sept. 23-28). “He was scheduled to be in Ottawa for a big retrospective and exhibition of his work this year,” says the festival director. “The show will still go on so new crowds can take in his brilliant work.”
Mulloy was once asked at the London Animation Festival, what it felt to be called the enfant terrible of British animation? He responded, “To be called anything is actually quite nice. Recently, I was called ‘brilliant’ and ‘rubbish’ for the same film…perfect.” When asked why he moved from making shorts to features, he said, “When times get tough and films get harder to make, some people stop making films. My films get longer! It’s a matter of the will.”
Mulloy is survived by his wife Vera Nuebauer, and their their children, BAFTA-winning director and screenwriter Daniel Mulloy and Student Academy Award-nominated director Lucy Mulloy.
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