The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
This film is part of Free
Anthropoid Anecdote
An animated battle of the sexes as seen from the husband’s viewpoint, before the impact of modern feminism put a dent into male chauvinism.
From the collection of:
Overview
A film that shows that amateurs, even in the pre-digital age, could be excellent animators. The storyline though, of a happy-go-lucky chimp who becomes a henpecked husband, would surely be too sexist for most people today, and probably today also for the young female narrator. Using all the old clichés of the nagging wife and browbeaten husband, the film might be taken as being ironic, but as this is the mid-1960s, probably not.
Nothing is known of the animator, Eric Booth, or of most of the others involved in the film. The exception being Leeds maverick filmmaker Alan Sidi, who invented his own cine-synch machine in the 1960s for adding sound to film. Fiona, Alan’s daughter who voices the narration (born in 1956), appeared on Yorkshire TV’s Calendar in 1976 ironically talking about a new woman's magazine, interviewed by Richard Whiteley. One doesn’t have to look too far to see the common attitudes to gender in the 1960s, the British TV comedy ‘George and the Dragon’, which first appeared in November 1966, would be one example. Judging by the BBC’s ‘Reggie Yates's Extreme UK: Men At War’, these attitudes are still very much with us.