Charles Kingsley’s much-loved 1863 children’s book The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby has proven resistant to screen adaptations. There was a 1935 film titled Water Babies though it seems to have little to do with Kingsley though an earlier film, 1907’s The Water Babies; or, The Little Chimney Sweep directed by Percy Stow looks like it might have been a more straightforward, if truncated, adaptation. The only feature length version remains this misjudged 1978 mix of live-action and animation, the penultimate feature film from actor-turned-director. Given that the book has fallen out of favour in recent times due to its racist attitudes, it seems likely that it will remain the only screen version for some considerable time.

12-year-old street urchin Tom (Tommy Pender) ekes out a living in mid-19th century Yorkshire by fair means or foul. He throws in his lot with the abusive Grimes (James Mason) and his toadying assistant Masterman (Bernard Cribbins), crooked chimney sweeps who are planning to rob the home of Sir John Harriott (David Tomlinson) and his wife (Joan Greenwood). Tom befriends their daughter, Ellie (Samantha Gates, who had just appeared in the ghost story Full Circle (1977)) but is framed for theft when Grimes is disturbed trying to lift the family silver. Fleeing the house, Tom falls into a nearby river and is presumed drowned. But in fact he’s entered the world of the water babies where be befriends a swordfish (voiced by Paul Luty), a lobster (Jon Pertwee), a sea horse (Lance Percival) and a walrus (David Jason). They help him find the water babies, a race of fairy-like creatures, who can help him return to the human world while battling the evil shark (Mason) – don’t try to work out what a shark is doing in a Yorkshire river… – and an eel (Cribbins).

On paper, this should have been a triumph. The book was, at the time, still popular with readers young and old and Jeffries was an old hand at this sort of thing. A popular and prolific character actor in mainly comic roles, Jeffries had made his directorial debut with the hugely successful The Railway Children in 1970, following it the drama Baxter! (1973), which was before the ghost story The Amazing Mr. Blunden (1972) but released afterwards and followed The Water Babies with the big screen spin-off from hit BBC children’s show The Wombles (1973-1975), Wombling Free (1978). But the decision to represent the underwater world through animation proved a disaster.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the animation as such. As created by the staff of Film Polski under the direction of Tony Cuthbert (one of the animators on The Beatles (1965-1969) television series and the Fab Four’s animated big screen adventure Yellow Submarine (1968), also set largely underwater), the animation is perfectly acceptable. It’s cruder than you’d expect from contemporary Disney films but that only adds to its charm. The problem lies not in the technical qualities of the animation but in the jarring tonal shift that occurs once we plunge beneath the water.

The opening scenes have a grimly Dickensian feel, Jeffries not shying away from the squalor and deprivation of the working-class life in a northern town in the late 19th century. But as soon as the animation begins, we’re suddenly regaled with “comedy” sound effects, eccentric voice acting and the seemingly obligatory songs (it’s animation, so there must be songs, right?). Written by Phil Coulter and Bill Martin the tunes are unremarkable and forgettable, even though one of them, High High High Cockalorum is repeated ad nauseum throughout Tom’s sub-aquatic adventure. One can’t help escape the feeling that the two teams at work on The Water Babies – Jeffries live action crew working at Denton Hall, Wharfedale, North Yorkshire and Cuthbert’s team in Poland – barely spoke to each other during production. How else to explain the difference in tone between the two parts of the film they produced?

Screenwriter Michael Robson (this was an atypical piece from the writer of Hardcore (1977), Holocaust 2000 (1977) and Let’s Get Laid (1978)) makes significant changes to the story. In the book, the young hero appears to die before he’s allowed into the world of the water babies, later revived, and returned to the human world. Here Tom just falls into a river and finds a world of talking fish and crustaceans. To underline the moral of the story, here the villain, Grimes, is given an equally unpleasant sidekick and they both face retribution in the human world as well as their counterparts under the water. Thankfully, the xenophobia of the book, mainly aimed at the Irish, Catholics and Jews, was ditched though the campness of Percival’s effeminate Terence the sea horse will prove just as problematic today.

The best parts of the film are the live-action scenes where Jeffries again proves himself a master of making exciting and engaging films for young audiences and where the excellent cast are given room to shine. Mason is wonderfully nasty as the Yorkshire-accented Grimes and Cribbins effectively plays against type as his only marginally less repellent partner-in-crime but it’s Billie Whitelaw, in multiple roles, who impresses the most. We first see her as a disembodied head as Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby in a carnival sideshow then as an old woman who menaces Tom on the moors. Her most substantial role is as the enigmatic Mrs Tripp who seems to have some supernatural powers (she may even be related to the water babies ad knows more than she’s letting on) though we never find out who she really is.

The Water Babies is a disappointing film from Jeffries, his good work sabotaged by the silliness of the lengthy animated scenes. After the poorly received Wombling Free – which replaced the stop-motion models of the original television series with actors in full-size Womble costumes to laughable effect – Jeffries made the short film Nelson’s Touch in 1979 then called it a day. Asked by Howard Maxford in an interview for Shivers magazine why he hadn’t directed more films, Jeffries said that “at the time, it was the beginning of the collapse of the British film industry. The confidence had just gone. I made more pictures than any other British director. Three films in two-and-a-half years. Then there was a crashing halt for everyone. A total lack of confidence.” It’s unlikely that the gentler, somewhat old-fashioned (in the best sense of the phrase) films that had become Jeffries stock in trade would have survived for much longer anyway. The release of George Lucas’ block-busting space opera Star Wars (1977) had young audience clamouring for more high octane screen adventures and the more charming, old-school works of Lionel Jeffries would have been unlikely to cut the mustard among the now action-hungry young audiences.