One of the highlights of 2007, never mind 2007, of the decade, was when I received a DVD of Levi's Monkey Mike from his new creator Haitham Al-Ghani. I have to be honest, before I watched Haitham's brilliant creation Levi's Monkey Mike was never one of my favourite Formby songs. But since watching the animation it all falls in to place and now the song is up there with the best of my Formby Favourites - all thanks to Haitham. The timing of the piece is stunning and the animation is so reminiscent of the classic early cartoons like Felix the Cat and early Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Bill). I know that not only did Haitham create Levi but he also had to study the history of animation and the success of that study can easily be judged by watching Levi. On the right you can view some early images that Haithan developed in to the project. The work Haitham took on creating the whole project must have been immense and I am proud that www.georgeformby.co.uk is able to show the complete footage. Haitham is 22 years of age and has just finished his National Diploma in Multi Media Studies at Hastings College of Art & Technology. He was awarded a triple distinction and won The Vincent Lines Award for Creative Excellence. The award is given to the most outstanding Student of the Year, and with a roll of over 700 students, in his year, it was quite an accomplishment. Haitham is grateful to George Formby for this accolade, since it was his cartoon animation of Levi's Monkey Mike which won over the judges and bagged him the prize. It was a labour of love which took many, many hours of work. He was told by his tutors, that in the time alloted to him to complete this final major project, it would have taken a team of animators to produce this piece! Haitham was born in Hastings, East Sussex, but spent all of his childhood in Bahrain. His mother is a Lancashire lass, from Chadderton, and his father comes from Qatar. He has a sister, Sarah, who works in banking in the city. Haitham's father worked as an airline exectuive with Gulf Air, based in Bahrain and Haitham attended St Christopher's School on the island. He left St. Christopher's with many happy memories and 8 GCSE's to continue his education in the UK. He studied Fine Art and Photography and completed a two year course in Early Years before going on to study Multi-Media. Haitham has Semantic Pragmatic Disorder, an Autistic Spectrum Condition, which means he sometimes has difficulty processing language. He was very amused to see George Formby, in the film Boots! Boots!, displaying some of his difficulty with misunderstanding of language, at the beginning of the film! Haitham is already a published author and cartoonist with the National Autistic Society and it is his ambition to write and illustrate children's books. His love of animation, especially from the 1930's, led to a chance encounter with the music of George Formby and his first attempt was an animation set to Chinese Laundry Blues. His tutors loved this and he was encouraged to try another, hence The Monkey!

I am sure he will look to George Formby for more inspiration in the future, but at the moment he is working on a children's book. The George Formby Society have been very helpful to Haitham when he was researching for his final project and it was one of your members, Dennis Back, from Florida, who encouraged him to send in the animation to Peter Pollard, after he sent it to him to see what he thought. Turned out that Dennis is a music teacher and he was very pleased that the animation kept time with the song!

Bringing a George Formby oldie to life

Haitham was kind enough to look over our website and his web page recently and has brought us up to date with what is going on in his life 10 years after creating the Levi’s Monkey Mike animation. It has been ten years since I did the Levi’s Monkey Mike cartoon animation. I left my studies earning a triple distinction and The Vincent Lines Award for Creative Excellence - all thanks to that cartoon! Since then I have illustrated many books - some of which have been translated into Chinese, Czech, German, Polish, Italian and Korean. I have a best selling book called ‘The Red Beast’ – and I use the royalties to travel two or three times a year. So far, I have been to Florence, Venice, Rome, Barcelona and Qatar . I am off to Valencia at Easter and then Stockholm for Christmas. So I guess you could say I more than achieved my goal of becoming a book illustrator. I have been on a fantastic journey since getting inspiration from George Formby – and to quote the legend himself – it sure “turned out nice again” for me. Thank you George and thank you Peter!

THIS IS HAITHAM TODAY

AT A RECENT BOOK SIGNING

A SELECTION OF HAITHAM’S BOOKS.