Forgotten British rivals to Disney
Halas & Batchelor turned out animations on a shoestring – and helped win the war with their cheery shorts, says Robbie Collin
‘The live-action lens can only see what is in front of it. But the animation lens is the mind itself: it can visualise everything you can think of.” Which visionary animator said those words? Walt Disney, Tex Avery, Hayao Miyazaki? Think again.
It was John Halas – who with his wife Joy Batchelor founded what was for the best part of the last century Britain’s most successful and accomplished animation studio. Eighty years ago today, Halas & Batchelor was established in a spare room at an advertising agency in London’s Aldwych.
And over the next half-century, from a series of equally unassuming locations – some rooms above a grotty restaurant on Soho Square; converted houses in Bushey and Stroud – the studio changed the history of British animation.
Their 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm was the first animated feature to be made in Britain; their 1964 short Automania 2000 the first British animation to be nominated for an Oscar. Yet the Halas & Batchelor story – which is told in a new documentary to be broadcast on Sky Arts this evening – is now largely unknown, except among the keenest animation buffs.
Why? Jez Stewart, a non-fiction curator at the British Film Institute’s National Archive, and one of the aforementioned buffs, offers an explanation. “They were the backbone of the British animation industry, but didn’t establish themselves as a brand,” he tells me. “They developed only a very few recognisable characters, and they couldn’t compete with the American cartoons that were being widely shown on British television from the Fifties onwards.” Ironically, in its latter days, Halas & Batchelor would themselves end up animating some of those shows for US TV networks: Popeye, The Lone Ranger and The Jackson Five all brought secretly to life in the Cotswolds.
The couple were recruited in 1940 by the Ministry of Information to make a series of 70 wartime propaganda cartoons: brief one-reelers like 1941’s Dustbin Parade, in which bits of rubbish chirpily “enlisted” at their local recycling centre. Topics like this – or domestic food shortages, or Axis incursions into the Middle East – would have been confusing or troubling in a newsreel. But through animation, they could be explained in ways that weren’t just immediately accessible to viewers of all ages, but actually boosted morale.
These early shorts mixed cute, Disney-like characters with a graphic dynamism that was European to its core. John himself was a Hungarian Jew, born János Halász in 1912, and had studied art at the Bauhaus school in Budapest. He came to London in 1937 to run a UK satellite of his Hungarian studio Coloriton, and posted an advert looking for “experienced animators”. Joy responded. Born in 1917, she too was a born artist, and after graduating from the Watford School of Art had been working for three years at a small cartoon studio in Soho.
That business closed after a year, but John and Joy’s partnership flourished. After collaborating on 1938’s Music Man, the first Technicolor cartoon to be made in Britain, they moved to Budapest together as colleagues and lovers. But the souring political climate prompted a hasty return to London, where the two married in April 1940, and founded their studio the following month.
One of the first animators John and Joy hired was Vera Linnecar, who was with Halas & Batchelor until the Fifties. Now 97, she tells me about the punishing hours involved: nine every weekday and four on Saturdays, with all the overtime you could stand. “It was a real slog,” she laughs. “There was so much work to do and not enough people to do it. But the war was on: everyone else was dying and having terrifying things happen to them. So what did it matter if you were working your socks off?”
After the war, Halas & Batchelor was again taken on by the MOI – now under Clement Attlee’s Labour – to produce a series of cartoons about the creation of the welfare state – and, eventually, their propaganda work led to Animal Farm. They were hired in 1951 by an American producer, Louis de Rochement, whose company had purchased the film rights to Orwell’s novel earlier that year – and, unbeknown to Halas & Batchelor, was also being covertly funded by the CIA to promote the creation of anticommunist art. Incredibly, that CIA money was now funnelled into tiny, bustling studios in London and Stroud, where a staff of almost 100 spent the next three years putting together the 75-minute film. The result was the studio’s most outwardly traditional picture – though even with an ending controversially softened from Orwell’s novel, it pulled few punches.
John and Joy planned many more feature-length productions, including
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Pilgrim’s Progress, for which they’d envisioned the intermingling of animation and live-action 10 years before Mary Poppins. The hurdle, their daughter Vivien tells me, was “Money, money, money. There were lots of scripts done, but my father was a pragmatist. He reckoned that if one out of 10 projects got going, you were doing rather well.” Instead, with the launch of commercial television the next year, Halas & Batchelor’s time was eaten up by advertising. “Murraymints, Murraymints, too good to hurry-mints” was one of theirs – as were pioneering spots for Fox’s Glacier Mints, Kleenex, Michelin and Woodbines.
Yet their success took its toll. Joy, the most successful female animator Britain has yet produced, was left increasingly at home, juggling scripts, storyboards and two young children, while John became the studio’s solo public face. He was credited as director on their showpiece works, such as the acclaimed Automania 2000, while her name tended to appear on less glamorous projects such as Sputum, a film for a German pharmaceutical company which was tantalisingly billed as “an up-to-date synoptic review of bronchial secretion”. Joy’s health was also worsening. The couple’s Chelsea flat had been bombed during the Blitz, and she had been buried up to her neck in rubble, leaving her with lifelong back pain and depression.
She did, however, find professional satisfaction in teaching animation at the London Film School, which she did until her death in 1991. Meanwhile, John held on to the studio – selling it then buying it back twice, each time in a newly depleted form. He died in 1995, months after starting a new satirical series called Know Your Europeans with Bob Godfrey, the creator of Roobarb and Henry’s Cat. Just two episodes were completed – the second of which, and Halas and Batchelor’s last film, was a tongue-in-cheek paean to the United Kingdom, John’s adopted home of 54 years. If the country took a moment today to delve into his and Joy’s work, what an anniversary gift for their studio that would be.