I need to get used to blogging more often, so here's my May entry! My first attempt at this whole blog at least once a month was this Great Wall of Yap on my personal website and my plans for it, but this time I'll be talking about something just a little different:

The Evolution of Narration in Thomas the Tank Engine

I will be talking exclusively about the UK voice claims for Thomas throughout the course of this blog, as that is the version I grew up with. Nevertheless, my point should probably still apply, as the scripts for each episode seem largely the same, from my limited experience with US dubs of early Thomas.

I'll also be putting the style tags down the bottom of the page to see if I can get away with actually having real text in the preview, rather than just a bunch of CSS properties! Because I'm still new to FriendRewind the CSS will probably be quite simplistic while I try to figure out how to get it to actually work, but I'll get there eventually.

When the Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends first aired in 1984, there was only once voice actor: the narrator, who would describe everything as if reading a story. There was no Thomas yawning and saying "Oh dear, oh dear," it was Ringo Starr (Michael Angelis and Mark Moraghan in later years) describing it all: "At last, Thomas started. 'Oh dear, oh dear,' he yawned." In fact, the intro sequence of each episode would say "told by" him, rather than saying "narrated by" or something similar, really perpetuating the idea that this is kind of like reading a child a story. The narrator knew all and spoke all, and everyone else silently enacted the tales of Sodor. Compare that to modern Thomas, where the narrator generally says very little, the show is full CGI (except for All Engines Go, call me a purist all you want but I'm not a fan of what they did with AEG), and the characters do all the talking. It's something I've come to notice within the past few years, and something I've been very curious about; how a show that started off directly mimicking a storybook has now lost that identity, and has trodden on a new path. Based on my experience and watching back some of the episodes to see where the transitions happened, I've come to the conclusion that a few reasons were involved.

• The static nature of models VS the fluid nature of animation

Look up any episode of Thomas before Series 12, and you'll find it's all models moving around a model area in real-time. The trains are models, the ground is a model, the trees are models, the locations are models, the people are models, the coaches are models, the trucks are models - it's all models, none of which can change facial expressions or move limbs without some kind of outside help. The people needed human hands to move them, the trucks, coaches and engines needed human hands to swap out face plates, etc. The trains themselves are a bit of an exception, as there are some sequences where they either start or stop moving while a shot is being filmed, but that's because you can do that with functioning models anyway. Because the face panels have to be swapped out between shots, and because things need to be moved manually between shots, things rarely change during shooting, and I think that kind of static-ness lends itself very well to storybook-style narration, at least far better than CGI could. Heck, you could quite easily make a picture story book using purely still images taken directly from the episodes - and my family have some exactly like that at home! For a more direct comparison, here's S11E2: Emily's Rubbish, and S12E2: Steady Eddie.

I should note that in the second example, the CGI was only used to animate the engines' faces and the people, as Series 12 was something of a transition between Series 11's fully model-oriented production and Series 13's change to full CGI, but I'd say my point still stands in this example. There are awkward pauses in Steady Eddie where the engines are just casually looking at each other while the narrator (Michael Angelis in this case) is describing the scenes, and despite his usual different accents and mannerisms for each character, it's still quite jarring to hear all the fully animated faces have the same voice. Now take S13E3: Tickled Pink, the third episode of the first fully CGI Thomas season. It's abundantly clear they made changes to the writing style, now that each character has their own voice actor, and the narration, while still very much present, has been significantly reduced and simplified due to the fact that it's no longer necessary to voice over every single action, character, and thought; any internal monologue is now voiced by the characters to themselves privately (e.g. James's "Oh no, all the engines are going to think I look silly! I need to go and hide!" dialogue in Tickled Pink), although sometimes the narrator will voice the characters' thoughts (mainly thinking of the segment in Day of the Diesels where Percy debates on visiting the Dieselworks for the first time).

Interestingly, there is one exception to this whole narration thing, that being the first full-length film for the series - Thomas and the Magic Railroad. It's a bit of a funny one in general, what with there being two different dimensions in a way, magic being a fundamental part of the plot, and a combination of live-action and modelling action (oh and murderous Diesel 10), and it tends to be somewhat polarising in terms of its wider reputation and peoples' opinions on it (banger soundtrack though), but why I mention it is because of its lack of narration (with the exception of a few things said by Mr Conductor) and the separate voice actors for all the trains, a lot of which are probably never seen again on the show due to the 9 or 10-year gap between The Magic Railroad and Hero of the Rails, and personally I didn't think that was all that bad. It seems I'm much more willing to adapt to model trains with their own voices than CGI trains with the same voice. Why did I mention this? Just wanted to, honestly.

• Mattel's acquisition of Thomas and the Americanisation of Sodor

Even after the switch to CGI, as shown in Tickled Pink, the narrator still had a fair amount to say, mostly sticking to describing character events in such a way that the episodes could probably be treated as audiobooks, and you'd still get the full story - but, as shown in S20E3: Henry Gets the Express*, the narrator is continually given fewer and fewer lines, and it even gets to a point where the narrator is replaced entirely by Thomas, and even then he's not saying much at all. Case and point, S22E11: School of Duck*. That change was brought about due to the Big World! Big Adventures! revamp the series got in 2018, as part of a move to make Thomas more similar to other preschool shows airing in the US. My guess as to why they did that is because TV shows that mimic reading out of a storybook aren't much of a thing in the US (as well as Thomas never particularly taking off compared to in the UK), whereas it's quite a common trope for English kids' TV, with shows like Old Jack's Boat (2013) and Jackanory (1970s if I recall correctly) having pretty good reputations; if that's not good enough to solidify the idea that kids like being told bedtime stories via the telly, CBeebies, a branch of the BBC and one of the most popular kids' channels in the UK to date, has a designated Bedtime Hour from 6 til 7 PM, where the shows broadcast are all somehow tied to bedtime stories, whether it's characters in the show that are telling the stories or narrated shows, and usually end with different hosts coming on each day to read, you guessed it, a bedtime story. It's a distinctly English thing to do, it seems, so it makes sense that once it passes into American hands, it loses that quality, even if gradually for the most part. I'm somewhat saddened by it, in all honesty, it's not something you get all that frequently in most modern shows I hear about despite it being a very British thing to do, but you can't win them all.

• The CGI adoption that sent waves across children's animation, and the decline of stop-motion

I've already talked about how the advent of CGI in Thomas the Tank Engine resulted in the narrator's significance... tanking, but why did that come about, you say? Well, firstly, the models and sets were costing quite a bit, so the team decided to jump ship and go straight to full CGI (except for Series 12 testing the waters a tad as mentioned before). Secondly, at that point, CGI had gotten good enough to no longer be the nightmare fuel it used to be in the 90s, and so was serviceable enough to continue the show (Nitrogen era for the win by the way, 2009-2012 Thomas was the best out of the 3 CGI eras). There is also something I personally noticed from experience... that a LOT of other shows I watched or otherwise knew about that used stop-motion rigs either flat-out ended (e.g. Fifi and the Flowertots, Roary the Racing Car, Rastamouse) or switched to CGI (e.g. Fireman Sam, Bob the Builder - what have they done to Bob), with Aardman basically being the last holdout (although Postman Pat did continue for a while until 2017). Sure, they use some level of CGI in their productions now, but it's still quite distinctly claymation. So when you've got costs stacking up thanks to the train models, and couple that with the massive trend of ditching stop-motion for 3D animation for much cheaper, it's only natural for that switch to occur eventually.

...okay, I think that's enough now. TL;DR, the role of the narrator in Thomas the Tank Engine fell off hard because of the switch to CGI and the American acquisition.

December Winterwolf OUT.

*Full uploads of these episodes could not be found

Song used: Gordon's Theme (Series 1) - Mike O'Donnell (I think?)