WATCH: Rare 1979 footage of Santa heading around the world with a helping hand from Sunderland

Here is your chance to glimpse an excerpt from the 45 year old footage which was created in 1979 by the award-winning animator Sheila Graber.

Santa around the world

The full version, called Christmas Round The World, can be found on the North East Film Archive website and our thanks go to NEFA for sharing it.

Sheila, from South Shields, has animated well-known programmes including the popular BBC children’s television series Paddington.

Her work has been screened at the Tate Gallery, the Open University and on BBC’s Blue Peter.

‘Still going strong at 86’

Sheila looked back on that festive production from 1979 and told the Sunderland Echo: “It featured singing of King George Madrigal group led by Brenda Orwin who also did the music for Round the World.. still going strong at 86!”

The film features three robins who help Santa to deliver presents all over the world.

It follows their adventures as they cross continents from Asia through Africa, Europe and the Americas.

Making their way back to Santa’s grotto

Along the way they deliver presents to a number of interesting characters including a lion in Africa and King Kong in America.

The film ends with them making their way back to Santa’s grotto, collapsing with exhaustion into their comfy chairs.

Sheila was the Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland where she started the Animation course in 2002 and taught on it until 2021.

70,000 original pieces of film

The North East Film Archive library has a vast collection.

Its team has painstakingly taken on the task of preserving, cataloguing, and digitising these vital collections of reminders of our past.

NEFA has a huge catalogue of over 70,000 items of original film, video tape, and born-digital material. Its team painstakingly preserves, catalogues, and digitises these vital collections of reminders of our past.

NEFA operates the The Yorkshire Film Archive in York, and the North East Film Archive, in Middlesbrough.

You can see more of Sheila’s work on ‘An Animated Life’, available to rent for just £4.99 from https://yfanefa.vhx.tv/.

All proceeds will help to safeguard regional moving image history.

If you have cine film of Sunderland and County Durham in the past, we would love to hear from you. Email [email protected] and tell us more.