British Children's Cinema

From the Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit

Noel Brown

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786721013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica della televisione

British children's films have played a part in the childhoods of generations of young people around the world for over a century. Until now, however, their cherished status has remained largely unexplored. In this book, Noel Brown relates the history of children's cinema in Britain from the early years of commercial cinema to the present day, to reveal the reasons behind its acclaim in international popular culture.Drawing on multiple sources, Brown provides in-depth analysis of a range of iconic films, including The Railway Children, The Thief of Bagdad, Bugsy Malone, the Harry Potter films, Mary Poppins, Nanny McPhee, Paddington, Oliver!, and Aardman's Wallace and Gromit series. Futhermore, he investigates industrial and commercial contexts, such as the role of the Children's Film Foundation; and includes revealing insights on changing social and cultural norms, such as the once-sacred tradition of Saturday morning cinema. Brown challenges common prejudices that children's films are inherently shallow or simplistic, revealing the often complex strategies that underpin their enduring appeal to audiences of all ages and backgrounds.In addition, he shows how the films allow a privileged access to historic cultures and the nation's political past.
In doing so, Brown firmly establishes children's cinema as an important genre not only for students and scholars of film studies but also for those interested in socio-cultural history, the production and reception of popular entertainment and anyone looking for entertainment, escapism and nostalgia.

1

In the Beginning: Children and British Cinema in the Silent Era

Commercial cinema began in late December 1895, when the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, held their first public screening of projected motion pictures for a paying public at the Grand Café, Paris. Among the ten shorts on display was L’Arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled, 1895), a 49-second film in which a young boy turns a garden hose on a grown-up gardener, and is rewarded for his impertinence with a smacked bottom. This modest offering has since been identified as the first ‘children’s film’, and it dates to the very beginnings of cinema as a commercial proposition. However, French illusionist and filmmaker Georges Méliès was a more abiding influence on his British counterparts. Méliès produced possibly the first children’s narrative fiction film, a six-minute adaptation of Cinderella (Fr. Cendrillon), in 1899. He was an early pioneer of the fantasy film, and his wonderful shorts A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902) and The Impossible Voyage (Voyage à travers l’impossible, 1904) remain cherished instances of early narrative cinema.

Until around 1906, commercial cinema in Britain was still in its infancy, with little industrial infrastructure. As Rachael Low notes, ‘anyone with the ingenuity to devise or adapt the elementary apparatus needed, and film a few hundred feet of “phantom ride”, comic scene or news event, could claim to be a film producer’.¹ During this period, thousands of films were produced, many of them comprising only a couple of hundred feet of film (equating to less than a minute running time). There was little pretension to art, much less to originality, and several of the early British film pioneers – including Cecil Hepworth, G. A. Smith, James Williamson and R. W. Paul – borrowed or appropriated from Méliès (as well as each other) with impunity. Smith remade the Lumière brothers’ The Sprinkler Sprinkled as Gardener with Hose, or the Mischievous Boy (date unknown), and Low suggests that Smith was also the first British filmmaker to produce ‘trick films’ in this vein with Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother (1898), which used double exposure as a visual effect. Paul’s The Magic Sword (1902) similarly drew on fairy tale mythology, concerned ‘a knight, a lady, a ghost, a witch, an ogre of large proportions, a battlement, a cave, an abduction of the lady by the witch, a magic cauldron, and a Good Fairy’, and was described by the filmmaker as ‘a sumptuously produced extravaganza.² The exchange was not entirely one-sided: in 1912 Méliès remade Paul’s Voyage of the ‘Arctic’, or How Captain Kettle Discovered the North Pole (1903) as À la conquête du pole (Conquest of the Pole).

The inherited codes and conventions of children’s literature and the British theatrical tradition ultimately played a greater role in the development of British children’s cinema than the trick photography film. But many of these early ‘trick films’ were concerned with showcasing and advancing the technical potentialities of the new medium. Their child-friendly subject matter, which routinely drew on the fantasy, fairy tale and science-fiction literary forms, was a vehicle for spectacle, and a means by which the technical specificities of cinema could be promoted in ways not possible in the Lumière brothers’ more realist mode. Furthermore, as Low observes, ‘many of the pioneer producers came to cinematography through photography or the optical lantern’, and this is another reason for their particular interest in trick photography films.³ One of the most notable productions is Cecil Hepworth’s lavish, ten-minute adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1903). Based on Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations, it was sold on the basis of its ‘remarkable fidelity’ to Lewis Carroll’s book (1865), and that: ‘No pantomime or stage effect is introduced in this film; the whole of the various scenes having been produced in pretty natural surroundings’.⁴ The description is notable in its attempt to distance itself from the theatrical tradition and instead assert its cinematic credentials, and in its refusal to assign itself to any specific audience demographic. Rather, like most early films, it was intended for ‘everybody’.

At this point, most films were exhibited in family-orientated exhibition spaces such as music halls, village concerts and, later, fairgrounds. As Low recalls:

It is to the fairground showman that the cinema owes its ultimate success. The new toy, a passing fancy in the music-halls, became a firmly established feature of the fairgrounds. It was they who bridged the gap between the music hall days and the later, more respectable picture palaces, and they disappeared only with the First World War – long after the coming of the regular cinema.⁵

There was a natural affinity between the cinema and the fairground. Both were quintessential family recreational activities, particularly amongst the working-classes. Music halls, too, despite the frequent incursion of more ‘adult’ material (especially by comedians), were venues in which families pursued an evening’s entertainment. Specialised children’s matinees, at this early point, were relatively rare. Low suggests that, after an ‘early fad’, exhibitors found them unprofitable ‘without adequate co-operation from school authorities’.⁶ There was little reason to suppose that cinema was more than an ephemeral and basically harmless curiosity, so the pressures that civic, religious and educational organisations later brought to bear on exhibitors to remove children from increasingly adult-orientated movie programmes had yet to be felt. One early instance of an explicit children’s film performance is a tour by the Great American Bioscope in 1900, which showed in Mickleover, Derbyshire, in February 1900. The screening was promoted as ‘free from vulgarity throughout’ and the admission fee for children was 1d. as opposed to 3d. for adult patrons.⁷ The practice of charging children reduced admission (typically half-price) was later adopted by theatrical exhibitors throughout the country.

Early British Films and Children

By the mid-1900s, British producers were developing more sophisticated narrative types. Cecil Hepworth was a key figure, both in the relative sophistication and popularity of his productions and in his films’ particular appeal to the family audience. In 1905, Hepworth produced Rescued by Rover, which became ‘the most famous story film of the period’.⁸ This seven-minute short was, as Hepworth later recalled, ‘a particularly family affair’: ‘My wife wrote the story, my baby – eight months old – was the heroine, my dog the hero, my wife the bereaved mother and myself the harassed father’.⁹ It follows the dog Rover’s attempts to rescue the baby after she is snatched from her pram by a beggar woman. Having located the baby, Rover alerts his master, who, with the dog’s help, recovers her. Made for just over £7, Rescued by Rover proved phenomenally popular, to the extent that Hepworth twice had to remake the film after wearing out the original negatives. Moreover, it was a watermark in British cinema’s maturation from amateurish experimentation to increasing formalisation. Low felt that it revealed ‘an advanced form of film technique such as [D. W.] Griffith was to work out in his films’, and on account of its success, Hepworth ‘began to contemplate building an indoor studio for film-making’.¹⁰

Image 1.1Hepworth’s own child and family dog starred in his seminal production, Rescued by Rover (1905)

Hepworth made Rover – arguably British cinema’s first bona fide star – the centre of a long-running series of films spanning 1905–13. Starting with Black Beauty in 1907, Hepworth also embarked on a series of horse films, which alternated (and sometimes combined) with Rover. Hepworth thus created the animal film, one of the key sub-genres of British children’s cinema. He was also a leading populariser of the child-star film, with his Tilly the Tomboy series (1910–15), starring teenaged Alma Taylor and Chrissie White. ‘The great aim and object of these Tilly girls’, Hepworth recalled, ‘was to paint the town extremely red, and the joyfully disarming way in which they thoroughly did it was the great charm of these delightful little comedies. Mischief without any sting in it is the one unfailing recipe for child-story pictures’.¹¹ Clarendon also produced a shorter lived series of shorts based on the misadventures of Did’ums, ‘the truly awful eponymous curly-haired boy-child’ whose storylines centre on ‘baby-stealing, tormenting policemen, swapping hotel room numbers and so on’.¹² As with James Williamson’s earlier short Our New Errand Boy (1905), in which the child ‘plays cruel, unmotivated tricks on customers’, all of these naughty child figures, as Laraine Porter argues, subvert ‘the Edwardian era of childhood innocence’.¹³

There were several shorter-lived production cycles during the early-1910s that may have held particular interest for younger audiences. Some of these films – most of which are now, sadly, lost – are detailed in Rachael Low’s compendious volumes on early British cinema. For instance, Low observes that ‘novelties’ like ‘odd silhouette and puppet films [were] produced from time to time’; these included the puppet films The Doll’s Revenge (Clarendon, 1911, 410 ft) and Cinderella (Butcher’s, 1912, 997ft).¹⁴ Another interesting movement was the ‘boys’ film’, a screen counterpart to the ‘penny dreadful or the later Gem and Magnet form of schoolboy serial literature’.¹⁵ One rare instance is the Samuelson Film Manufacturing Company’s serialised, two-reel western, The Adventures of Deadwood Dick (L. C. MacBean and Fred Paul, 1915). Another, more notable enterprise was the Lieutenant Rose films, a series of action-adventure two-reelers produced between 1910 and 1915 by Clarendon, directed by Percy Stow, and centring on a dashing naval lieutenant (played by P. G. Norgate). As Staples suggests, these films are very much in the Boys’ Own tradition, their hero displaying the appropriate virtues of patriotism, loyalty and service to King and Country. Staples also speculates that ‘children, perhaps mainly boys’ would have found Rose ‘a fairly attractive hero, one with whom they could identify’.¹⁶

These exceptions notwithstanding, the vast majority of British films from the silent period were intended for general audiences. This is true of many films that might now appear to be primarily child-orientated. Alma Taylor, star of the Tilly films (which Staples identifies as ideal fare for young girls), was massively popular amongst adults: a 1915 poll conducted by Pictures and the Picturegoer found her to be the country’s most popular British-born film star, ahead of Charlie Chaplin.¹⁷ This cross-demographic appeal mirrors that of the Hollywood star Mary Pickford (to whom Taylor has often been compared), and prefigures that of Shirley Temple in the 1930s. In family-orientated literary adaptations, such as Hepworth’s productions of Oliver Twist (Thomas Bentley, 1912) and David Copperfield (Bentley, 1913), contemporary critical judgement emphasised their universal appeal. They were suitable for children, but not designed specifically for them. Of this period, Low observes that there ‘seems to have been no particular effort to make special films for children’.¹⁸ In fact, the idea of the ‘children’s film’ was largely alien to producers and exhibitors, who were concerned with attracting as broad an audience base as possible. I have found almost no references to ‘children’s film’ (or to related terms) in popular publications of the period.

The only definitive exception is the most overtly family-orientated British genre of the silent era: the Christmas pantomime film. This genre followed the post-1840s Victorian pantomime tradition as ‘a Christmas family holiday, particularly aimed at children’,¹⁹ and was a yuletide perennial of British cinema from at least the mid-1900s to the mid-to-late 1910s. As Low recalls, such films ‘were adapted anew year after year and sometimes accompanied by special films such as the Clarendon pair for Christmas, 1907, The Water Babies and The Pied Piper of Hamelin’.²⁰ Originally, they were probably shown at fairgrounds, in penny gaffs or as part of music hall programmes. They were heavily promoted in the trade pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Cinema and Society series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction
• 1 In the Beginning: Children and British Cinema in the Silent Era
• 2 The Children’s Adventure Movie, 1930–60
• 3 Family Entertainers: Formby, Hay, Lucan, Wisdom
• 4 J. Arthur Rank, Saturday Morning Cinema and the Children’s Film Foundation
• 5 Happiest Days: British Cinema and the Family Audience in the Fifties
• 6 Disney in Britain
• 7 Summers of Love and Winters of Discontent: The Sixties and Seventies
• 8 From Thatcher to Blair: The Eighties and Nineties
• 9 Exporting Englishness
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Filmography
• Select Bibliography