“St. Trinian’s” Titles

The Submarine Channel’s subsite Forget the Films, Watch the Titles has posted the opening titles to the recent live-action film St. Trinian’s, based on Ronald Searle‘s classic print cartoons. Title was designed and directed by Paul Donnellon and animated by Petria Whelan. It looks like a low-budget job and points to how difficult it is to capture the spirit of Searle’s drawings in animation. Searle has been faithfully translated into animated form before, as in the 1957 industrial cartoon Energetically Yours and various commercials from the 1960s, but it requires a sensitivity for design and draftsmanship that isn’t evident in these titles.