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
Little Cinders
A magical film in many ways, a fairy tale story using trick photography and with artful and imaginative stop motion animation.
From the collection of:
Overview
Delightful is the only way to describe the wonderful animations that appear half way through this charming film. A small girl, filmmaker Jack Eley’s daughter Susan, misses her friend’s birthday party due to having mumps, only to then fall asleep and have a vivid dream of a fairy appearing and bringing to life the fairy stories in a book. For an amateur of this time, the stop motion animation is of a very high order.
Jack Eley was a major player in the very active Leeds Cine Club in the 1950s and ‘60s, making films over nearly fifty years, from 1932 up until 1980. He rarely took typical family home movies, but preferred to make accomplished documentaries, along with a few comedies. Fairy tales lent themselves to stop motion animation, although around this time this was a form mainly found in Europe, and usually using puppets rather than cut outs. Eley may have been inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s wonderful short, The Story of Hansel and Gretel, of 1951, or even by the amazing cut out silhouette animations of Lotte Reiniger, who settled in England after the war. There was no animation on the early British television of the time.