The Adventures of Little Pea and Petits Pois (1968)

D. Victor Hill
Colour


There was always something so worthy about The Children’s Film Foundation. For the uninitiated (who never saw their body of work repeated ad nauseam on kid’s TV through the early 1980s) it was a body set up by the British government to make films for children. However with government money and civil service oversight, it was a body that never ever felt the need to take risks. Its product was as safe as it was twee as it was bland. In a way it was what the BBC would have become if it hadn’t been hijacked by enterprising talents who wanted to do something unique with television. In the Children’s Film Foundation there was very little striving for originality (unless you count casting Keith Chegwin as a teen Robin Hood, which is pretty original), there was just safe play by the numbers and tick all the right boxes.


That’s not to say their work is completely lacking the odd curiosity though.


What, for example, are we to make of ‘The Adventures of Little Pea and Petit Pois’? One of the few animations the foundation ever produced. On first blush you’d think that any animated film made in 1968 that concerned two big, round, green peas wandering through a wild jungle would be a LSD, surrealist treat. You’d think it was the kind of film made for stoners to stare at and find newer and stranger meanings each and every time. And yet with the best will in the world, making films for the counter-culture wasn’t really in the Children’s Film Foundation’s remit. And besides, for all the madness of its set-up, the film is just so bloody tame. All the characters speak in very pucker, received pronunciation – with the exception, of course, of Petit Pois who talks in comedy French. And when I say it’s a wild jungle, it’s the most harmless and child appropriate wild jungle ever committed to celluloid. The kind of wild jungle specifically created not to scare the three year olds. On their travels, Little Pea and Petits Pois meet El Rico, a grain of rice who speaks and sings in a Spanish accent and is desperate for Petits Pois and Little Pea to join his gang (some peas coming together with a  Spanish grain of rice, it does feel like a subliminal paella recipe). They meet a lettuce called Hans who travels with them while talking and singing of his childhood in Dusseldorf; then they hang out with a bouncing orange bean named Victor who duets long and loud with them in the most over the top Dutch accent seen on screen until ‘Goldmember’; before they picnic with some brussel sprouts from – well – Brussels.  It’s all so utterly bizarre, all so unspeakably surreal – and yet still so totally bland. And that’s the really incredible thing about this film: it takes all these amazing concepts and makes them so utterly safe and anodyne. It’s 1960s counter culture reimagined as an advert for your greens. It’s the avant grade as seen through the eyes of a civil servant.


So, what the hell is all this about?


Maybe its meaning is something to do with better cooperation with our European cousins. Here we have a British pea and a French pea who walk hand in hand and get along oh so well. Along the way they meet Spanish, German, Dutch and Belgium vegetables and have fun with them (there is no conflict in this movie, no antagonist. It is 72 minutes of getting along, which may partly explain why it’s so strange and stultifying). It’s brotherly love in produce form. But even more than that, with the exception of Spain, these food substances are all members of the new EEC. Is this then a plea that Britain should join up with the Commonmarket? Obviously Spain wasn’t yet a member, but then the Spanish accent on display is quite funny (and camp, unbelievably camp – the campest Spanish grain of rice I have ever witnessed) and maybe that’s why he’s included.


But then did The Children’s Film Foundation ever do politics, even in the form of cartoons? I think possibly not. So that brings us back to what the bloody hell is this film for? A surreal food substance romp which manages to null most of its surrealness and is just too sedate to be all that rompy; a wild and psychedelic ride which manages to be neither that wild or that psychedelic (and making a film about anthropomorphic vegetables in a wood and not making it psychedelic is quite a feat); a truly bizarre and weird film which is made even more bizarre and weird by the fact that clearly there were civil servants in the background doing their utmost best not to make it look bizarre and weird.


Ladies and Gentleman, I give you ‘The Adventures of Little Pea and Petits Pois’ – one of the strangest, most middle of the road, head-spinningly, safe pieces entertainment you will ever see.