Old Lady's Camping Trip
1983 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Les Drew
The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe takes her many children and Cousin Jim camping, teaching him fire and outdoor safety rules after his carelessness leads to repeated near-disasters.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A nursery rhyme adaptation that actually *commits* to its source material's weird logistics—the shoe, the brood, the arbitrary cousin—instead of sanitizing it into something safe; Drew leans into the absurdity rather than apologizing for it, which is almost radical for 1983 family animation.
Drew's NFB pedigree shows in the formal restraint here: a tight educational spine wrapped in genuine wit, animated with the kind of deliberate craft that respects both the source text and the young audience's intelligence—this is lineage animation, the kind that sits comfortably between Grimm and mid-century Canadian pedagogy.
The genius move is treating the 'Old Lady' as a competent mentor figure rather than a punchline; that single reframing—from nursery-rhyme absurdity to genuine authority—carries the whole film, and on a modest budget, that's exactly the kind of character choice that makes animation feel earned.