Leeds Animation Workshop’s Give Us A Smile: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy

Fig. 1 - The protagonist of Give Us a Smile is cat-called with the film’s title slogan.

Give Us a Smile (1983) is an animated short film (with some live action elements) made by Leeds Animation Workshop, a West Yorkshire based cooperative of women filmmakers and animators founded in 1978 which continues to operate today, producing and distributing animated films on a number of different social education issues (Fig. 1).[1]

As Else Thomson writes, highlighting that a key concern of these films is the effects and impacts on women’s lives of socio-political issues, the workshop’s early films tended to feature “female protagonists, connecting them to feminist second-wave activism,” and the “use of humour and simple line drawings, compressed in a short time span” represented the workshop’s attempts to “present in an accessible form, complex issues, designed to attract a wide, popular audience” (2020). In this way, the films work in part to try to raise consciousness of these issues and, I would argue, to do the work of what Laura Pottinger theorises and conceptualises as “quiet activism,” which she describes as “embodied acts, often of making and creating, that can be either implicitly or explicitly political in nature” (2017, 215). The films made by Leeds Animation Workshop are thus defined by how they use animation to differently confront and depict issues that relate to social justice and social inequalities. The focus of this blog post, Give Us a Smile, is one of the workshop’s most noteworthy films in this regard, particularly with respect to its overtly politicised feminist approach to the depiction of gendered social inequalities between men and women in the context of the time and place of its production: West Yorkshire in the early 1980s.

Give Us a Smile was developed, funded (with support from the Yorkshire Arts Association and the BFI) and made in the early 1980s at the collective’s workshop in Leeds (Wragg 2019). As such, the events and related impacts of the so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ case, in which thirteen women were murdered by a serial killer between 1975 and 1980 across the West Yorkshire and Manchester areas of the north of England, with many more having survived brutal attacks, are key contexts in relation to which the content of the film, and its anti-misogynist revenge fantasy narrative can be understood.

Fig. 2 Terry Wragg of Leeds Animation Workshop holds aloft a reclaimed Yorkshire Evening Post sandwich board poster bearing the headline that so mischaracterised the as-yet-unmade Give Us a Smile in 1981

In fact, a misperception of the film’s themes, subject matter and focus, seemingly based on a combination of its status as an animation and its connection to the events, contexts and notoriety of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ case, caused Give Us a Smile to be grossly mischaracterised by a story in the local press in Yorkshire (where headlines about the case represented high sales and circulation) in 1981. A story at the time characterised it as “a fun film about the ripper,” much to the dismay of the members of the workshop (see Anon. 1981; Wragg 2019). In some ways the nature of this headline’s misrepresentation of the film is unsurprising, stemming as it apparently does from common assumptions that deterministically equate animated and/or fantasy films straightforwardly with fun and frivolity, and from related tendencies to hold such films in low regard as bad cultural objects (Fig. 2). From a standpoint like this, the proposed film’s alignment of fantasy/animation with subject matter relating (albeit tangentially) to the serial sexual murder of women became easy to frame in ostensibly pejorative terms for the purposes of an inflammatory news headline. As workshop member and animator Terry Wragg explained to me when I asked her about her memories of this press attention for the film, “when we saw this we were so unbelievably horrified and aghast that we wouldn’t speak to a journalist for some years after that” (2019).

Give Us a Smile (Leeds Animation Workshop).

Give Us a Smile is not a fun film about the Ripper, albeit the context in which that killer’s crimes were enabled is extremely important to the film’s genesis, narrative, and content, and to the nature of its political messaging. It is actually concerned with women’s experiences of street harassment and sexist media imagery, and of having to navigate their social and cultural worlds in the face of cultures of predatory masculinity, and of mainstream media cultures of misogyny. The short makes use of the visual and representational possibilities afforded by its animated form and fantastical narrative to imagine a revenge fantasy that appears to act as a real-world call to arms for women to intervene in and push back against what is presented as this ideological status quo. One thing that puts these possibilities into perspective is the film’s sparing use of intercut live-action segments to depict some of the more egregious of the real-world misogynies on display, such as an aggressive victim-blaming police interview with a rape victim that features early on in the film. With this realist mode having been offered up at the outset as a counterpoint, the film’s later use of animation to imagine fantasies of anti-misogynist retribution, for example the retaliatory melting of a man’s head in the denouement, the form enables the feminist revenge fantasy to be visually and representationally realised. The film has a two-act structure, the first of which follows a woman at the beginning of what seems to be an ordinary and unremarkable day. She leaves her home and makes her way on foot along a local high street, purchasing a paper from a newsagent and taking a seat to read it on a nearby park bench. When she steps out of the door she is smiling and standing tall, but very quickly, her smile turns to a frown, then her posture becomes stooped, until eventually she is hugging herself and trembling with apparent anxiety and exhaustion (see left).

Fig. 3 - Sensationalist news stories about men’s violence against women are on sale alongside pornographic images of naked women in the newsagent’s shop window where the protagonist of Give Us a Smile purchases her paper.

This is because at every step of the way she has endured unsolicited wolf-whistles, cat-calls and gendered sexual intimidation from men on the street, and from sexist billboard advertising, sensationalist (gendered) news headlines on display in shop windows, and the matter-of-fact presence of high-street pornographers. These men only appear either from the neck down (intervening in the longstanding tendency of mainstream media to fragment women’s bodies for the purposes of objectification), or as disembodied in the form of a hand groping her, or voices haranguing her with, for example, the titular taunt to “give us a smile,” and the more confrontationally and aggressively sexual “when did you last ‘ave it luv?” (Fig. 3).

Even within her home the protagonist is unable to take refuge from this quotidian onslaught of misogyny, as she continues to be deluged by the sexism that springs forth across multiple media platforms. First the radio, which she turns off in exasperation at the victim-blaming rhetoric of a police spokesperson exhorting women not to walk home alone at night if they want to stay safe from male attackers (Fig. 4). Then the newspaper, which she flings aside in disgust upon seeing a cartoon depiction of sexual violence.

The tipping point comes with her viewing of women’s bodies on display in a television programme, the end credits of which satirically list all members of the production personnel (except the wardrobe and make-up assistants) as ‘A. Man.’ It is at this point that the protagonist begins to enact her counter-patriarchal revenge fantasy. Removing the rear of her television as if it were a curtain being lifted, she brushes aside the de-individualised phalanx of men working behind the scenes of the production, prompting the now lone female performer to raise her arms in joy at her ostensible liberation. Thus begins the second act, as the protagonist returns to her television screen to find a written-text graphic exhorting her, and all women to “fight back” against the kind of street harassment and media misogyny that the film has elsewhere depicted as having overwhelmed her experience of everyday life (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4 - Give Us a Smile depicts women’s encounters of victim-blaming discourse through the mainstream media.

Fig. 5 - Following her backstage intervention, the protagonist’s television urges her, and all women, to “fight back” against sexism and misogyny.

The sexist posters that beat her down earlier are defaced as the protagonist flings red paint at them, high-street pornographers are set alight to burn, and tables are turned as men, not women, are placed under a night-time curfew. These depictions of women fighting back against their everyday experiences of social and cultural misogynies are all nods to the strategies and tactics of second wave feminist direct action that had then recently taken place in Leeds, but also across the breadth of the UK, and globally.

As Terry Wragg explained to me when recalling aspects of the workshop’s creative decision-making process for this part of the film: “We were trying to say ok, so here are all the things you can do… although no one, of course, is recommending arson.” (2019) Give Us a Smile’s blend of live action and animation with fantasy works extremely effectively to both imagine and depict the counter-patriarchal possibilities offered up by the filmmakers as a riposte to the ongoing social problem of street harassment, and the ongoing socio-cultural problem of media misogynies.

To support Leeds Animation Workshop, Give Us a Smile can be streamed or downloaded by rental or purchase through Vimeo, and is also available to purchase on DVD from the Leeds Animation Workshop website.

All of my research on this topic is dedicated to the memories of Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Jean Jordan, Yvonne Pearson, Helen Rytka, Vera Millward, Josephine Whitaker, Barbara Leach, Marguerite Walls, and Jacqueline Hill, and to all victims and survivors of violence against women. #EndViolenceAgainstWomen

**Article published: January 29, 2021**

Notes

[1] For further explanation of the ethos and background of Leeds Animation Workshop, go to https://www.leedsanimation.org.uk/about/.

References

Anon. 1981. “Yorks ‘Fun’ Film Prompted by the Ripper.” Yorkshire Evening Post, May 29: 1, 4.

Pottinger, Laura. 2017. “Planting the Seeds of a Quiet Activism.” Area 49: 215-222.

Thomson, Else. 2020. “Leeds Animation Workshop.” In The International Encylopedia of Gender, Media and Communication, edited by Karen Ross, Ingrid Bachmann, Valentina Cardo, Sujata Moorti and Cosimo Marco Scarcelli, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, available here.

Wragg, Terry. 2019. “Interview with the author.” January 3 Leeds Animation Workshop, Leeds.

Biography

Hannah Hamad is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media and Culture. She is the author of Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood (New York and London: Routledge, 2014).  This blog post comes from initial findings of exploratory research towards Hannah’s new project on media, culture and misogyny in the Yorkshire Ripper years. The first output from this work is available now as “The movie producer, the feminists and the serial killer: UK feminist activism, misogynist 70s film culture and the (non) filming of the Yorkshire Ripper murders” in James Fenwick, Kieran Foster and David Eldridge (eds), Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 235-250. Hannah’s book Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the Yorkshire Ripper Years  is under contract with BFI Publishing (in partnership with Bloomsbury) and due to be published in 2023.