Animal Farm

John Halas and Joy Batchelor's Animal Farm opened at London's Curzon Cinema in December 1954 as the first feature-length British animated film. The Halas-Batchelor studio, founded in 1940, had spent the war producing instructional animations for the Ministry of Information; Animal Farm was the studio's first long-form work and remained, for several decades, the most ambitious British animated production by anyone other than Disney.

The film is adapted from George Orwell's 1945 novella of the same name. Production was partly funded — covertly, as later confirmed by declassified documents — by the United States Central Intelligence Agency through the front operation of producer Louis de Rochemont, as part of a Cold War cultural-influence programme. Sonia Brownell Orwell (the writer's widow) had sold the film rights without knowing the funding source. The screenplay is by Halas, Batchelor, Lothar Wolff, Borden Mace and Philip Stapp; voices are provided by Maurice Denham (every animal in the film) and Gordon Heath (narrator).

The studio employed approximately eighty animators across the production, an unprecedented scale for British animation at the time. Cinematography supervision is by S. G. Griffiths, with a score by Matyas Seiber. The film is widely cited in studies of postwar British animation as the foundational predecessor to the later work of Bob Godfrey, Geoff Dunbar and Aardman; the political context of its CIA backing has also generated extensive academic literature on the cultural Cold War in cinema.