A naked redheaded woman steps into a pond to wash her hair. A British man walks an anthropomorphic three-piece suit through the process of getting cleaned and pressed.

A young woman driving a roadster is harassed by a mask-wearing heavy who threatens to clog the valves of her engine. Gingerbread men voiced by Steve Buscemi and Norm MacDonald banter about cell service. A man and his distressed stomach, the latter voiced by Gene Wilder, bicker in a therapy session about the man’s eating habits.

These are just a few scenes from “A History of Animated TV Commercials,” an hour-long overview of American animated television commercials from 1948 through the 1980s. Curated by Richmond-based animator and artist Janet Scagnelli, the film will be screened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts this Sunday for the first time in 26 years as part of the James River Film Festival.

While cartoons like “South Park,” “Looney Tunes” and “The Simpsons” are celebrated and studied, few have focused on the history of animated commercials.

“Nobody does that,” Scagnelli says. “Commercials don’t have credits. Sometimes [commercials are] annoying, but there are incredibly beautiful ones. I started asking companies I worked for if I could borrow their sample reels and pull commercials out to make a compilation.”

Attendees of the screening will get an overview of the advertising and animation trends that have been popular over the decades. Commercials were usually 60 seconds in the early days of TV, much longer than the 15- to 30-second spots that are common today.

“It starts in the ’40s with theatrical cartoon advertisements,” explains Scagnelli of animated ads. “Into the ’50s, you’ve got women in these housedresses with high heels, tiny little waists, the big skirt. There’s always a spokesman coming in in a suit, either animated or live, who’s telling them how to get dinner on the table.”

Things took a turn for the psychedelic in the ’60s and ’70s. Frank Zappa scored an ad for Luden’s Cough Drops; 7 Up had a campaign in the style of the Beatles film “Yellow Submarine.” Both ads are part of the screening.

“It was the golden age of advertising: ‘Mad Men,’” Scagnelli explains. “The commercials had so much money poured into them. They would grab designers and illustrators. New Yorker [magazine] cartoonists would design commercials.”

A native of the Bronx, Scagnelli’s career in animation began at the age of 13. Her oldest sister worked at Terrytoons, the animation studio best known for “Mighty Mouse,” and would bring her work home with her. Before long, Scagnelli was getting paid to paint the backs of animation cells in color. As a teen she worked on animator Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated black comedy “Fritz the Cat,” which was based on Robert Crumb’s comic strip of the same name.

After obtaining an art history degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton—during which she continued to work in animation on weekends and school breaks— Scagnelli returned the Big Apple and pursued her career.

“When I came back to New York, it was a job I could make a lot of money at, better money than anything else, so I stayed in the business,” she says of animation. “The ad agencies were all in Midtown Manhattan, and all the commercial animation studios were right there also.”

Work was abundant enough that Scagnelli and a friend founded Chelsea Animation Company in the 1980s. Her company worked on the pilot for Nickelodeon’s “Doug” and did interstitials for “The Ren and Stimpy Show.”

On the “Doug” pilot, Scagnelli did the inking, painting and coloring. The show bucked cartoon norms by coloring people in shades of blue, purple, orange and green. Scagnelli says she tried to color a family with a yellow mother, a blue father and green children, but Nickelodeon didn’t approve.

“That was not OK with them,” she says. “Nickelodeon turned that down.”

Completely by chance, “Doug” creator Jim Jinkins is from Richmond and based the cartoon on his childhood in the River City; Scagnelli moved to Richmond in 1990, and only learned of the “Doug” connection after moving here.

As for commercials, Scagnelli says she worked on so many she can’t keep track. One prominent job was painting the cells for a Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo commercial featuring the nude bathing redhead.

“That was a big commercial in the ’70s,” she says. “If I see that logo I can still smell it. Every hippie used that shampoo.”

Scagnelli’s film is an attempt to highlight animation history that she feels is neglected.

“We were not acknowledged,” she says of advertising animators. “It wasn’t work that people talked about or cared about. If I saw it on TV, it didn’t mean anything. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, I worked on that.’”

Sunday will be the first time the film has been shown since it debuted at the sixth James River Film Festival in 1999.

“I got a good reception back then,” says Scagnelli, who has since swapped out roughly 20 minutes of computer-generated commercials for ones that are hand-drawn or feature puppets. “I think it’s even better now.”

Scagnelli says attendees will be entertained by this stroll through the animated commercials of yore: “Sitting and watching an hour of these, I think you will be surprised and delighted and fascinated by the history.”

“A History of Animated TV Commercials” will be screened Sunday, March 23, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Reynolds Lecture Hall, 200 N. Arthur Ashe Blvd. 3:30 p.m. $8 to the public, $5 for VMFA members. For more information, visit jamesriverfilm.org.