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 its first long-form work, and for several decades it remained the most ambitious British animated production by anyone other than Disney.

The source is George Orwell's 1945 novella of the same name. Part of the money came, covertly, from the United States Central Intelligence Agency, routed through producer Louis de Rochemont as a front for a Cold War cultural-influence programme; declassified documents later confirmed it. Sonia Brownell Orwell, the writer's widow, had sold the film rights without knowing where the funding came from. The screenplay is by Halas, Batchelor, Lothar Wolff, Borden Mace and Philip Stapp. Maurice Denham voices every animal in the film, and Gordon Heath narrates.

Roughly eighty animators worked on the production, a scale British animation had never attempted before. S. G. Griffiths supervised the cinematography and Matyas Seiber wrote the score. Histories of postwar British animation treat the film as the ancestor of the later work of Bob Godfrey, Geoff Dunbar and Aardman, and the political context of its CIA backing has produced a sizeable academic literature on the cultural Cold War in cinema.