by Rosie White
To my shame, I attended this event with little knowledge of the Leeds Animation Workshop (LAW) or its history. This event remedied that, and I would encourage anyone to look at the Workshop’s website and the resources being catalogued in the Special Collection at the University of Leeds’ Brotherton Library. If you can visit in person, even better, as the Brotherton Library is a beautiful space with friendly and helpful staff.
The Workshop is a collective which continues to work with girls and women to produce animated films that deal with social issues:
Leeds Animation Workshop is a not-for-profit, cooperative company, run by women, which produces and distributes animated films and films on social and educational issues. The organisation began in 1976 as a group of women friends who came together to make a film about the need for pre-school childcare. After completing ‘WHO NEEDS NURSERIES? – WE DO!’, the group was formally established in 1978 as Leeds Animation Workshop. Throughout its history the Workshop has been run by women, who have carried out all stages of the production process, from initial research to final distribution.
(https://www.leedsanimation.org.uk/about/)
In 2021, the University of Leeds received a Research Resources Award from the Wellcome Trust to ‘secure the archive in a publicly accessible repository’, based on LAW’s role in providing public health information. This has enabled the Special Collections Research Centre to employ designated staff and expertise to deal with an extensive archive, including print material and mixed media production resources such as hand-drawn images and animation cels.
In the first part of the afternoon session, Sarah Prescott (literary archivist at Leeds and lead on the LAW project) introduced the ongoing archival process, which includes Workshop members as living ‘archives’ regarding their memory of the Workshop’s history. Terry Wragg, who has been part of the Workshop since it was founded, attended this event and was able to provide details about their work and history. In a 2016 interview with Yvonne Tasker, Terry notes how Channel 4 provided the Workshop with an equipment grant; they also bought the rights to the Workshop’s first three films and broadcast them three times over five years. Channel 4’s interest and support of the Workshop appears symptomatic of the broadcaster’s radical tendencies during its early years, but the longstanding nature of LAW’s interactions with Channel 4 is evident in the archive file devoted to correspondence between the Workshop and the broadcaster.
In response to my question about the extent to which the Leeds Animation Workshop has engaged with broadcast television, Terry pointed out that many of the films had a ‘15’ certificate, which meant that broadcasting was problematic; the films are mostly shorts, which are not easily inserted into a conventional schedule. Leeds Animation Workshop films have been used in police training programmes and by women’s groups; there is a file in the archive regarding screening and distribution. As Terry said, these productions are about ‘narrowcasting rather than broadcasting’, designed to raise questions and provoke discussion. Workshop films are distributed via their website. There is also a correspondence file in the paper archive regarding applications for funding to broadcasters such as Channel 4 and the BBC.
In the second part of the session, Hannah Hamad (Cardiff University) talked about using the LAW archive in her continuing research on ‘Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the “Yorkshire Ripper” Years’. Hannah’s account began anecdotally, tracing the way in which she came to discover the LAW archive and start to work on one of its films. The presentation demonstrated the significant ways in which the Leeds Animation Workshop has engaged with feminist activism, cultural politics and media history during its existence.
Hannah was steered to the LAW archive via research at the Women’s Library (LSE) about Mary Stott and the history of feminist media studies. This took her to Feminist Archive North (also held at the University of Leeds) and the Sandra McNeil collection regarding Women Against Violence Against Women; an early proposal for a Hollywood film about the Ripper case prompted angry responses from women in the UK. It also mentioned a short film made by the Leeds Animation Workshop, which was about and against the wider culture of misogyny and harassment that women faced on a daily basis. This was ‘Give Us a Smile’.
Produced in 1983 and lasting 13 minutes, ‘Give Us a Smile’ was developed during the ‘Ripper’ years when women were being told to stay home:
This film was made by women who lived in Leeds during the 1970s and early 80s, when a series of murderous sexual attacks by the so-called Yorkshire Ripper led to a virtual ‘curfew on women’. In response, the many women’s groups already active in the area decided it was time to put their own point of view.
(https://www.leedsanimation.org.uk/films/33/ )
As Terry Wragg notes during the 2016 interview, women were being murdered in the areas where women involved with the Workshop lived; the film was inspired by rage at their needless deaths, street harassment and attitudes to sexual violence. As I write, the current ‘scandal’ around Russell Brand demonstrates that this work is still unfortunately necessary.
Work on the Leeds Animation Archive is in progress, to catalogue and preserve this important history, while the Leeds Animation Workshop still supports and empowers women’s work in animation and political activism. Long may it continue!
Dr Rosie White is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Northumbria University. She writes about film, television and popular culture with regard to gender and feminism. Recent publications include Making fun of feminism: British television comedy and the second wave (2023), Evidence of Cruel Optimism: Nick Broomfield’s Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) (2020) and Television Comedy and Femininity: Queering Gender (IB Tauris, 2018).
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