Barry Purves

Barry J.C. Purves is an English animator, director and screenwriter of puppet animation television and cinema and theatre designer and director, primarily for the Altrincham Garrick Playhouse in Manchester. Known as one of Britain's most celebrated animators on account of his six short films (see filmography below), each of which has been nominated for numerous international awards (including Academy Award and British Academy Film Awards nominations), he has also directed and animated for several television programs and over seventy advertisements, title sequences and animated insert sequences. His film credits include being head animator for Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (before the decision was made to use computer animation in place of stop motion), previsualisation animation director for Peter Jackson's King Kong and being "casually involved," simultaneous to this, with animation for the same director's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King during the 2003 film's post-production. Purves has taught animation, made documentaries, written articles for magazines and books and his own book Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance] was released through Focal Press in 2007. He has held workshops about animation in several colleges in Europe and beyond as well as major North American studios such as DreamWorks, Pacific Data Images, Pixar and Will Vinton Studios (now Laika Entertainment House). Around 1996 he made plans to shoot a full-length film of Noye's Fludde, Benjamin Britten's opera version of a mystery play about the Deluge; one of his strangest credits was co-presenting, in Mandarin, the live final of the Chinese talent search show Super Girl in 2006. A selection of his films, and those with animation by Ray Harryhausen, the bolexbrothers, Suzie Templeton and others, were included alongside those of Kihachirō Kawamoto himself in the Watershed Media Centre season Kawamoto: The Puppet Master in 2008.