Dougal and the Blue Cat is the 1970 animated film by Serge Danot that features a mysterious voice and a cat named Buxton that plot to take over the world and turn it blue. The animated film is based on the British tv series The Magic Roundabout (1965-1977), a series primarily aimed at children but also loved by adults. The series was also created by Serge Danot and animated by a young Ivor Wood, screening on French television from 1964 to 1974 titled Le Manége Enchanté.
The first episode of The Magic Roundabout was broadcast in the UK by the BBC just before the main evening news on October the 18th 1965, but Eric Thompson who was hired to do the translated voiceover hated the original French stories, claiming that the stories were simplistic and dull. Instead, while watching the episodes with the sound turned down, Thompson invented entirely new stories to match the on-screen action. He created new names, personalities and mannerisms for the characters. The only remnant of the French version was the visuals.
The characters were all formed by the voice over, Thompson voicing all the characters himself, created Dougal the cantankerous and domineering dog, Florence the little girl, Brian the cheerful snail, Ermintrude the pink cow, Dylan the sleepy rabbit, and Zebedee the red-faced moustached character who bounces around the garden announcing “Time for bed”. The scripts often worked around the visuals rather than with them, adding an otherworldly sense to the show and making it feel very much like a trip into the imagination, with walking alarm clocks and snails racing trains. Often, when a tv series becomes a feature film, the script remains a series of short, interlinked stories. However, in Dougal and the Blue Cat, its creators Danot and Thompson were much more ambitious, and rather than continuing to set their stories within the garden, they explored a darker world altogether. The Magic Roundabout was a series of surreal episodes.
Surrealism balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. While Zebedee might suggest it is time for bed, the inhabitants of the Garden, and the viewers, are already in a dream world where nothing is real. They inhabit a garden with no grass and with no greenery. The cut-out trees are garish pinks and blues and the sky and the ground are a clinical, cold and sterile white. The stop-motion animation produces a not-quite-realistic movement. The characters shudder and jerk, controlled by unseen hands. The narratives are erratic and non-linear, jumping around the garden like Zebedee on his spring. There is the eerie disconnect between the gentle, whimsical yet archness tone of Thompson’s narration and the creepy, at times nightmarish quality of the film’s visuals and atmosphere from the empty landscapes and slightly awkward movements produced by the stop-motion animation give it that faintly dreamlike feel, making the animated film feel like a dream one of its characters might be experiencing.
At one stage Buxton must pass through different blue doors, but only after correctly identifying their correct shade, be that Cobalt, Saxony, Prussian or Indigo. The Room of Dreams is reminiscent of German expressionist art with ranks of tribal masks. Meanwhile Dougal bemoans “to eat or not to eat” while locked in a room full of sugar lumps and the inhabitants of the Magic Garden are imprisoned in a dungeon. Florence sings a song to her friends there, which while similar to Jessie’s song from Toy Story 2 (Lasseter, 1999), is quite depressing for a children’s film. She sings of the fear of death and how she feels that it is her fault that her friends are in danger when she sings “will we ever play our games again or will the games we play end here?” Despite protests to the contrary, students in particular loved pointing out the various drug references they saw in the show: Dougal’s LSD trips on sugar lumps, Brian the speedy snail on amphetamines, Dylan the stoned rabbit and Ermintrude the cow chewing a poppy flower which made her head spin around.
Xander Markham argues that “On one level, the film is a story about a scruffy dog having his world taken over by a devious cat; on another, about children’s worst nightmares coming true; on yet another, about the divides tearing a post-Colonial Britain apart during the transition to a more modern culture.”[i] Moreover, “the surrealist movement’s aspiration towards the liberation of the mind as well as the liberation of artistic expressions has also meant seeking political freedom.”[ii] Could it be a coincidence that Dougal cries out Vote Conservative on waking from a dream about impending doom and the world turning blue when blue is the color of the ruling Conservative party at that time?
For the first time Eric Thompson did not perform all the voices. Fenella Fielding, star of Carry On Screaming (Thomas, 1966), provided the other-worldly tones of the Blue Voice as she intoned in a sinister and seductive way, “Blue is beautiful, blue is best.” While the Blue Voice’s desire to take over the world and make everything blue sounds similar to the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine (Dunning, 1968), would even the Beatles have come up with dyeing Dougal blue and locking him in a cave filled with sugar which he can’t eat?[iii]
In the end, when a trip to the moon to turn it blue goes wrong, the Blue Voice’s plot is foiled and after one last ride on the roundabout, it’s time for bed.
References
[i] Markham, X. (2020) The Cult Club: Dougal & The Blue Cat (1970), Flixist [online] available at https://www.flixist.com/the-cult-club-dougal-and-the-blue-cat-1970/
[ii] Tate (2025) Surrealism, Tate, [online] available at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/surrealism
[iii] Pulver, A. (2008) If you thought The Magic Roundabout was spooky …, The Guardian, 2 October 2008 [online] available at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/02/dougal.magic.roundabout
Cormac O’Kane is a lecturer in Animation at the Atlantic Technological University in Donegal, Ireland. Having studied Animation at Edinburgh College of Art, he taught at the National Film School at IADT, Dun Laoghaire before relocating to Donegal where he was instrumental in developing the Animation degree program there. He teaches animation production across all four years on the undergraduate degree program and specializes in traditional and non-digital animated techniques. He is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at the University of Galway on the Banshee and examining how oral folklore can be preserved and presented in an increasingly visual world.