Holland invites the World

Story

Dutch cheesemonger Dutchy invites guests from all over the world to come to the Netherlands. We follow his invitations and see the happy reactions of the guests. Dutchy has a nice surprise programme for his guests. They all come and are given a festive welcome. Afterwards, everyone returns home satisfied.

The huge commercial success of the earlier Dutchy film, A Dream Comes True (1955) naturally called for a sequel. And it certainly came! Several shorter films were made starring Dutchy. The length was usually around 2 minutes. ‘Holland Invites the World’, however, has a running time of 10 minutes. This time, Cor Icke was asked to do the animation. Composer Dolf van der Linden was already a familiar face at Dollywood studios and built on the musical themes he also featured in previous Dutchy films.

Donald Duck

‘Holland Invites the World’ is basically an advertising film. With its exceptional running time of 10 minutes, it was given the function as a (sponsored) supporting act in cinemas. Dutchy had to compete in cinemas with Disney films of similar length featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, among others. Not infrequently, daily newspapers explicitly mentioned a long promotional film like this one as a supporting act to the main film when reviewing the film programmes in cinemas. The subtle way of advertising did not bother audiences. In fact, the majority of cinema audiences were charmed by the adventures of this friendly peasant and enjoyed the combined use of animation and colour film. Realise that it was still common to make feature films in black and white.

However, Dutchy films were also frequently used in private screenings around promotional campaigns of the Dairy Agency. Numerous handy 16 mm copies were made for this purpose.

Trivia

It is common knowledge that in the 1940s through the 1960s, the tempo of film storytelling was very slow. All actions are shown linearly and integrally: Dutchy writes a stack of invitations. He goes to the mailbox with it, puts mail in the box and we see the postman stamping the stamps. Then we see the letters being delivered. This method of storytelling produced an atmospheric film that was very accessible to an international audience. One drawback was that it reduced the main subject the film was about, the Dairy Show, to 10% of the entire running time. In the film, the show is only 60 seconds. After the Dairy Show, the story ripples on and we see that everyone goes home, with cheese! This slow method of narration was a conscious choice by the client at the time. The films literally went into circulation worldwide. The medium of puppet films was so new that the client deliberately chose a simple method of narration. This gave the international audience ample opportunity to absorb the message.

‘Holland Invites the World’ was considered by many to be a free (sponsored) animation film. Nothing was less true, the film had an emphatic advertising message. This way of making animated films gave the studio enormous freedom in creativity. To this day, you can see that the film was made with care and love for the craft.

Wooden shoes

The character Dutchy was the Dutch Dairy Agency's brand icon brought to life. Because of the films' intensive deployment and worldwide rotation, Dutchy also grew to become the image brand of Holland culture. The Dutchy films confirmed abroad the stereotypical image of Dutchmen walking on clogs and women wearing Volendam costumes. The client, Het Nederlands Zuivelbureau maintained this image for a long time by promoting Dutch cheese at party markets in countries such as Germany, among others, where hostesses were dressed in Dutch costumes.

Ageless

Nowadays, it would be unthinkable for a film to win a film award more than five years after it was released. Back then, different rules applied to film festivals. It was not unusual that one of the selection criteria was that a film could not be submitted to the festival before. Thus, ‘Holland Invites the World’, which was made in 1957, could still win a film award in 1962. Below is a report from De Tijd of 12-02-1962. This shows that Joop Geesink's Dollywood film genre was apparently timeless.