Bevanfield Films was a British animation production company active from around 1981 to the late 90s/early 2000s. Much of their early work was done for The BBC, though their most notable work, several adaptations of Public Domain fairy tales, were released in 1992 on home video. Their outputs are infamous for their less-than-stellar production values and sluggish pacing, though they do occasionally feature one or several Celebrity Voice Actors.
See Dingo Pictures for their German counterpart.
Filmography:
- Murun Buchstansangur (1981-1988)
- What-a-Mess (1990)
- Beauty and the Beast (1992)
- Cinderella (1992)
- Goldilocks and the Three Bears (1992)
- Aladdin (1992)
- Jingle Bells (1992)
- The Jungle Book (1992)
- Rapunzel (1992)
- The Princess and the Pea (1992)
Tropes in their works:
- Adaptation Expansion: Their version of Beauty and the Beast adds an entire subplot about Beauty's father getting robbed by his cousin. To the film's detriment, it ends up taking up half of the runtime, despite never being resolved.
- Adaptational Wimp: Shere Khan in The Jungle Book might just be the most laughably pathetic incarnation of the character. While he was indeed lame in the original novel and a bit of a fool, he was still a dangerous killer. Besides keeping his bum leg, the Bevanfield version also turned him into a disheveled tiger hobo with bald patches and cartoony bandages around his legs.
- Anachronism Stew:
- Landline telephones are used in The Princess and the Pea, which supposedly takes place in medieval times.
- The ring genie in Aladdin pulls out a number of anachronistic objects, like blowtorches and sneakers. Justified, since he's a genie.
- Domestic-Only Cartoon: Their films were made exclusively in the UK, with no outsourcing.
- Dull Surprise: None of the voice actors read their lines with much emotion, and none of the character models show much of it, either.
- Four-Fingered Hands: Many of their characters are drawn with particularly ugly-looking four-fingered hands. Notably in Beauty and the Beast, there are a few characters with four-fingered hands, while the rest all have five fingers, with some characters switching between four and five fingers between scenes.
- Going Through the Motions: The animation for characters' mundane gestures and motions are used repeatedly through their films, many times for no real reason.
- Gonk: Many of their character designs are incredibly ugly, particularly Monsieur Rodente in Beauty and the Beast. Baloo in The Jungle Book is also hardly a sight for sore eyes, sporting a hairless beer gut and saggy moobs, and tends to look rather creepy in certain closeups.
- Henpecked Husband: The husband in Cinderella is constantly nagged and pushed around by his wife, Cinderella's stepmother.
- Karma Houdini: In Beauty and the Beast, despite Renard and Monsieur Rodente being responsible for Beauty's father's problems, they never get any kind of comeuppance except having to work as chefs.
- The Klutz: Goldilocks from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. She ends up trashing the Bears' house, both in exploring and during her attempt to get away.
- Leave the Camera Running: Many, many times, scenes just linger for a while, with the characters either not moving or slowly trying to do something to pad out the runtime. A lot of scenes also have the camera running for a second or two before the characters even appear onscreen, or for a few seconds after they've walked out of the frame.
- Limited Animation: Their animation has a lot of cost-cutting measures, including backgrounds not changing despite the characters doing so, and numerous instances of Recycled Animation and Stock Footage.
- Lip Lock: According to an interview
with a former Bevanfield employee, the animation was made first, with the director "guessing" the mouth flaps, and forcing the voice actors to basically try their best to match them with the dialogue when they recorded their lines afterward, making the dialogue sound extremely stilted, with many pauses in the middle of sentences. Even then, most of the mouth flaps still don't match the dialogue. - The Mockbuster: Most of their 1990s movies were based on public domain tales with Disney films, and were released at about the same time as the Disney films to piggyback off their success.
- Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Despite taking place in other countries, no one speaks in anything other than a British accent, with the exception of Christopher Lee in Beauty and the Beast.
- Obviously Evil: Beauty and the Beast doesn't try very hard to hide the fact that Monsieur Renard and Rodente are the villains, what with their suspicious appearances and all.
- Soul Brotha: Their interpretation of the ring genie in their adaptation of Aladdin is Genie Jordan, an afro-sporting black James Brown/Prince wannabe.
- Stock Footage: A lot of their character animations and scenes are reused over and over within the same film. Their opening sequences are often recycled as well in different productions.
- Talking Heads: Quite a few scenes of the characters talking are just the exact same close-up shot of the characters' heads, with only their mouths and maybe their eyes moving.
- Truer to the Text: Their movies tend to stick close to the original source material. For example, The Jungle Book follows the plot and characterizations from the book more closely than the Disney version, like Kaa being an ally of Mowgli's, Shere Khan being lame, and Tabaqui being included. Of course, the sloppy execution proves how this trope doesn't guarantee a good movie.
- Verbal Tic: The characters frequently pause awkwardly in the middle of dialogue, in an attempt to match the lip flaps.
- Viewers Are Goldfish: Their films constantly repeat things that the characters (and, by this point, the audience) should already know.
