Trouble in Toytown

An immensely charming toy story in which a distracted pupil becomes an attentive teacher and explains road safety to dolls

Young Tom may be a daydreamer at school, but some lessons clearly stick better than others. When he is put in charge of sorting out road safety in Toytown (a world glimpsed through a hole in his skirting board) he certainly knows what to do. Pixar’s Toy Story is the most famous example of a long cinema tradition of bringing toys to life. Though not as technically accomplished, this film is certainly as charming.

Dudley Shaw Ashton was not a professional filmmaker, and large parts of this film appear to have been shot in and around his modernist home in Poole. He would go on to make a number of art documentaries for the BFI Experimental Film Fund and the Arts Council, including portraits of Barbera Hepworth and Henry Moore.