The Story With A Beard

Story

The fairy tale of the cursed prince with eternal beard growth.
An entertaining commercial film for Philips Philishave electric shavers. With a nod to a familiar fairytale, a newly born prince gets cursed with a perpetual beard. The Philishave electric razor s(h)aves the day, making it possible for the prince to find true love.

Trivia

This movie is crafted with great skill and showcases cutting-edge techniques. It includes every possible element of puppet animation from that era. A memorable part is when the Barber of Seville appears in the story while singing. The one-minute clip highlights the barber's numerous facial expressions. Puppet creator Harry Tolsma contributed by cleverly dividing the face into separately movable eye and mouth features. This separation was cleverly hidden behind a animated moustache.

World premiere

Joop Geesink was a celebrated filmmaker during this period. He was someone who clearly distinguished himself among filmmakers. On 2 October 1958, the Nederlandse Bioscoop Bond (later: Nederlandse Film- en Bioscoopbond (NFB) celebrated their fortieth anniversary. This took place with a big party where, of course, special productions were shown. Marten Toonder Studios brought the production ‘Metrographic’ to its Dutch premiere and Joop Geesink even brought The Story With a Beard to its world premiere. The film with the prince is cursed with a perpetual beard, was also shown to His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard who was a guest here.

The Cinema Association produced a lavishly illustrated report with photos of Joop Geesink, Prince Bernhard and ‘The Story With a Beard’.

Craftsmanship

It would be almost half a century later that this technique with split phase masks was used by others. In 2009, US production Coraline applied the same technique, but at the time could only be realised thanks to computer assistance to retouch away the seams.

The Big Three

In 1958, computers did not exist. Visual problems were solved with mechanical and artistic ingenuity of the Dollywood artists. For this production, Henk Kabos was in charge of the creative direction, Harry Tolsma turned the drawings into puppets and Cor Icke made the puppets come to life through animation. This team formed a triumvirate that can retroactively be called the Big Three of Dollywood. The most beautiful films were created from the collaboration between these three craftsmen. Incidentally, nothing to the detriment of the many other often very gifted artists working at the studio at the time.

Paulus the Wood Gnome

The Story with a Beard was released in several languages. For each country, a speaker was sought who could carry the story. In the Netherlands, Jean Dulieu was recruited, who shone on the radio at the time in fine radio plays, including his character Paulus de Boskabouter. He also did all the voices in The Story with a Beard. Older Dutch web visitors will recognise the Paulus characters of yesteryear.

Cor Icke's Touch

Halfway through the film, we see an old man dragging his own beard in a wheelbarrow. Cor Icke had noticed that when road workers had to pick up their wheelbarrows full of heavy stones, they often spit in their hands first for extra grip. So he made this doll do the same.
To make the scene of Seville's singing barber more interesting, Cor Icke timed the barber's shaving actions perfectly with the accents in the music, so that they naturally reinforce each other.
The somewhat peculiar way the princess waved to the crowd at the end of the film was reminiscent of the way the beloved Dutch queen mother of the time (Queen Wilhelmina) waved. Joop Geesink appreciated the added value of Cor Icke's animations and increasingly assigned him to more prestigious films.  

Glass Plates

This website features both the Dutch and English versions of this film. Compare how the English and Dutch voice artists act. However, Spanish, German and probably a French version have also appeared. The film titles were included in full in the production process. Above are the respective titles.
Photo-setting machines or laser printers did not exist. A specialised artist painted the required titles by hand on glass plates. These were placed in front of a background drawing and filmed. People saw it as saving time that the background drawing did not have to be redrawn. Making the titles was a very time-consuming and precise job. Text painter Joop Onink worked almost full-time in the Dollywood studios as a title painter.