In 1971, EMI Films released Tales of Beatrix Potter. It was one of the few films from Bryan Forbes’ ill-fated tenure as head of production at Associated British to make money in the short term (the other was The Railway Children (1970)), though seemingly by the time that it saw release, Forbes had a few months prior resigned his position and EMI merged Associated British and Anglo-Amalgamated into a single entity rather than have them compete for their love… I mean, funding. Anyway, the existence of that film plays heavy in this film’s marketing; trying to play to the nostalgia crowd, I guess? Stories from a Flying Trunk is the directorial debut (well, -ish, more on that later) of Christine Edzard, who’s not really a household name but who’s quite a well-respected filmmaker. She co-wrote (or whatever you want to call it) the earlier film along with its production design, and focuses on the works of Hans Christian Andersen. Despite actively inviting people to do so, the comparison is perhaps setting the film up for failure. Tales of Beatrix Potter is a ballet film, there’s no dialogue, just some of the familiar stories of the eponymous author acted out through the medium of dance except through the magic of film you don’t constantly hear the dancers thudding about the place like a dog trying to navigate the stairs whenever they do anything and god ballet is such a disappointment in real life. Flying Trunk is not a ballet film, though it does have some ballet sequences in it, but rather a quite talky part-animated affair, with two of the three stories it adapts not exactly being top tier Andersen stories that everyone knows, and it feels like they might be rather loose enough to not be immediately recognisable. It also feels lower budget, though actual numbers don’t seem to be available; on that point, it would seem worth noting that EMI’s investment in the homegrown film industry was rather dwarfed by their ambitions to crack America at this point.

The story’s the film gives us are, in order, the story-within-a-story from ‘The Flying Trunk’ about the kitchen, ‘The Little Match Girl’ and ‘Little Ida’s Flowers’. They’re all transposed to then-contemporary London and bridged with some stuff about Andersen (Murray Melvin) finding inspiration for stories which could be anywhere with a bit of imagination or whatever. In case you didn’t guess, I’m calling ‘Little Match Girl’ the one of the three that everyone knows; people would likely get to that one if they were for some unfathomable reason reeling off a list of Andersen stories that they know long before the other two, assuming they’re familiar with them at all. In the first story, some snobby matches (forged from a grand old pine tree) look on with disdain as the kitchen implements with whom they are forced to mingle come to life while the family are away. It ends badly for them. The second follows a young girl as she ventures into the heart of the city lured by promise of meeting the queen. It ends badly for her. The third is about a group of vegetables, feeling unloved, breaking out of the cupboard and staging a ballet. Surprisingly, it does not end badly for them.

The film is an amalgamation of stop-motion animation and dance sequences together with more traditional film shenanigans. It skews rather theatrical in its approach, with many dialogue heavy sections. The first section in particular relies heavily on the dialogue of the not-very-anthropomorphised pots and pans and crockery that make up its odd microcosm; the implication alluded to in the original story that the different parts of the kitchen represent different social strata are developed further, as the characters discuss some basic class theory and have an attempt at revolution put on ice by mass apathy. It was the late ‘70s and everyone was miserable again apparently. This is rather extrapolated, but the basis is in Andersen’s tale, even if the execution doesn’t immediately line-up. Stranger is the variation on ‘Little Match Girl’. Here the girl (Tasneem Maqsood) is Asian and the film doesn’t present the same miserable backstory as Andersen. There’s no actual match selling or abusive stepfathers or anything, there’s just some old time East London grimness that she’s running, or perhaps more accurately meandering, away from. The ramblings of a local down-and-out suggest that the good queen will entertain the select few, such as himself, who go her way, and so she waltzes off to the city to find her. She comes to rest at a statue of Victoria, lights the last of matches (which throw off implausibly good light, natch), and the statue comes to life to throw a party in the girl’s honour, and you know how this all ends. The aesthetic takes a particular magical realist bent, and the fantasies are quite beautifully realised as they are unsettling. There’s honestly quite a bit to unpack here, and I don’t know if I can be bothered here, but let’s have a go, I guess: the image of Britain is a lie long perpetuated, as the British make up self-aggrandising histories that don’t reflect reality (this also plays into the first section of the film; the antiques in the kitchen wilfully mislead the other objects to seem more significant than they are). The girl is quite blithely mistreated and conned by the people she comes across, all of whom peddle this false dream, as she makes her way westwards, and it’s all a vaguely problematic allusion to imperialism and that. It doesn’t quite work, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

The third segment is by far the longest, as well as the one that takes most liberties with the source material. As you might have noticed, the original story is called ‘Little Ida’s Flowers’, but my vague summary earlier talked about vegetables instead. The original story doesn’t really have that much of a plot; Ida’s flowers wilt, she’s told by some guy that they’re tired because they’ve been dancing all night as flowers have marvellous balls and that, there’s an authority figure who’s all ‘boo, imagination’, then at night she sneaks out of bed and witnesses all the flowers in the neighbourhood coming together and dancing, then the next morning her flowers are dead because this is an Andersen story, and so she holds a funeral. It’s perhaps a tad more optimistic than some of his stuff, as the flowers promise that they’ll return next year from whence she buried them, though the story as ever ends with the funeral, but, hey, it doesn’t pull the reward in the next life card. Here the story’s framed around Ida (Johanna Sonnex) doing poorly in her ballet class and the dude who tells her about dancing veg is Andersen with her playing the role of sceptic. At night, all the vegetables in the neighbourhood kitchens and shops converge to discuss their exclusion from the dance, led by a potato (Graham Fletcher), who resolve to put on their own damn dance, right in Covent Garden (geddit?). And so, the story follows their prep and training for the big day. The bulk of all that is done in stop motion, with the last half hour or so of the film being taken up entirely with the recital. When the prima (a lettuce) has to drop out due to death, Ida takes her part, tying it all together. It’s all very cute, and the production and wardrobe design and the attention to detail on display are quite amazing.

‘Little Match Girl’ is the aforementioned “-ish”. From what I can tell, it was a short that was made a couple of years earlier and then integrated into Flying Trunk. There’s some stuff that suggests all three pieces were separate and distinct shorts that were later combined à la Disney’s The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), but I’m not really convinced about the other two. The nature of the production of ‘the Kitchen’ (as the promotional material refers to it) and ‘Little Ida’, the integration of Melvin’s part into them, and the cast and location overlap between the two seems to me like they were designed to be part of a whole. That said, ‘Little Ida’ is by far the longest segment and the one with the most involved production design, so perhaps the film as a whole was built around the idea of selling that rather than trying to do so as its own thing. Or not. I mean, I’m just speculating. 

While there’s a lot to like overall, problematic as it is at times, there’s this nagging question of ‘who exactly is this for?’ The stories aren’t exactly exciting, and it frequently seems like they drift into being a bit dark for many children; the explicit moralism of Andersen's writing is being mercifully left as subtext (if that), but one does wonder what very young children would take away from the stories if left to their own devices. At the same time, they also seem like they’re generally a bit too simple for adults, exquisitely made though they are. It’s all very charming, but feels a bit less than the sum of its parts.