This film is part of Free
The Princess and the Wonderful Weaver
It’s the 60s – what better way to sell wool than animating a spurious fable about a mile-high naked princess?
Overview
What do you get if you cross a fairy tale with a naked mile-high princess, a history of manufacturing, modernist animation and a happy ending? Increased UK wool sales? Who knows – but that was why this unusual promotional film for the National Wool Textile Export Corporation was dreamed up. With the Beatles' Yellow Submarine on the big screen, the swinging 60s offered new creative freedoms for animation producers.
Director Richard Taylor (best known for producing the nation's favourite Charley Says cartoons) had been pushing the boundaries of animation design in sponsored filmmaking since the mid-1950s. He later wrote that "despite some occasional felicities, and the prizes it was awarded", he considered this film "a desperate failure" because of the number of fingers in the creative pie during its two year gestation. The frustrations of a creative artist aside, the resulting film remains enormous fun.
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