Persil: Mousewife's Choice

1948
Sound
2m

An animated 'mousewife' finding a way to ease her washing day woes may not be very progressive, but it's delightfully sweet.

A mousewife's work is never done, but this delightful animated ad offers a solution of sorts. The production values of this stop-motion animation are impressively high; the puppets are beautifully articulated and the sets constructed with an impressive attention to detail, some of them on a large scale.

Signal Films was a stop motion animation studio set up in 1947 by Gerald Holdsworth (something of a Special Forces hero in WWII) who had worked with ad agency J Walter Thompson and 'puppetoon' pioneer George Pal in the 1930s. He recruited some of the best talents from Pal's old Dutch studio and set them up in the UK. Though they produced a number of similar high-quality commercials, their attempts to break into theatrical work with a feature-length version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince failed, and the studio sadly folded.

Animated Ads

British animation won great success as an entertainer, but it has long had a lucrative second career in sales

In cinemas and on TV, animated adverts have frequently outshone the main attraction. In the early days of the cinema, animated ads were often relative epics, with five-minute comic encounters leading to a pack-shot punchline. The arrival of commercial television in 1955 brought the animated ad down to bite-size, but if anything they packed an even harder punch. Advertisers found that animation could soften the edges of a hard sell approach, and bring cartoon brand characters to life.