Children's Film Foundation: films that made innocent fun look like child's play Change is on its way. The British Film Institute recently acquired the complete Foundation collection and plans to release many of its films on DVD. The Foundation, established in 1951, embodied both a kind of Reithianism for children and a well-intentioned paternalism in synch with the mood of Welfare State Britain. It was a collaboration between Rank Film Distributors, which wanted cheap, home-made fare to lure matinee audiences, and the British government, which was alarmed by reports that cinemas were exposing boys and girls to violent and unsuitable material. Appearing at the start of a decade when sociologists inveighed against what they saw as the increasing Americanisation and vulgarity of British popular culture, the films were precisely calibrated not just to edify - its first Executive Officer Mary Field sought to promote proper diction and "BBC English" - but to entertain; one of her guidelines asserted: "There is a great drop in audience attention when the children on the screen sit down. Thus money can be saved, and interest retained, by not writing any meals into the storyline. One pleasure of watching the films today is spotting pint-size performers who went on to have successful careers: Michael Crawford, Francesca Annis, Dennis Waterman, Keith Chegwin and, yes, Phil Collins all scamped across and hollered through the films. Directors such as Michael Powell, Alberto Cavalcanti and Lewis Gilbert also featured. But it's their unfamiliarity that most compels. To watch The Salvage Gang (1958) and Operation Third Form (1966), two of the films on the first BFI release, is to suspect that a bomb has been dropped on the capital: where are the cars, the advertising billboards, the mobile phones, the designer clothes? Did there really exist quite so many men who bought scrap iron for a living? The streets are empty; the whole capital is a theatre, a playground, an invitation to imagine and to roam. The films often feature what would today be called posses or crews, groups of youths tearing through neighbourhoods, but they're never portrayed as social menaces. Perhaps that makes them sentimental. Egyptian-mummy-smuggling crooks and train-robbing rascals may never be too far away, and the down-at-heel urban settings in Night Ferry (1976) may recall the edgy wastescapes of Derek Jarman, but the films" dominant tone of chirpy social realism leaves no space for the weird otherness and mystery of Hiyao Miyazaki's features, the yearning lyricism of Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon (1956) or the avant-garde experimentalism of the shorts Abbas Kiarostami made in the early Seventies for Iran's Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Is DVD the best medium via which to watch these films? The matinees where children originally saw them were social as much as cinematic experiences. Boys and girls might arrive dressed in flying helmets or balaclavas. They screamed, fought, threw sweet wrappers at each other. Terry Staples's All Pals Together (1997), a history of children's cinema, quotes a youngster who recalls: "It was like when you have a supply teacher at school. Everyone knows that supply teachers are fair game. Well, we had supply usherettes every week. The Foundation really began to struggle in the second half of the Seventies. Cinemas were closing or diversifying into music venues. Television programmes like Swap Shop and Tiswas were competition, as were the advent of home video and computer games. The Conservative government's 1985 decision to scrap the Eady Levy (a tax on box-office receipts that helped UK film production) finally led the Foundation to stop making films two years later. Today the idea of children's film seems anachronistic. They still go to the cinema, but with one or two exceptions - Wallace and Gromit, Harry Potter - rarely see British films. At home, where the computer screen is supplanting the television, their eyeballs are assailed by a random mishmash of reality shows, YouTube clips and social-media sites. Meanwhile, marketeers and advertising companies try to destroy the category of "children" by creating niche demographics like "tweens" or "young adults." Faced with this relentless war of data and commerce, it's hard not to feel wistful for an age when watching schoolchildren whizz about on go-karts seemed the last word in juvenile fun. The CFF's 'London Tales" (U cert, BFI) is on sale from Monday