Today's post pays tribute to the films of Halas and Batchelor, the prolific animation producers with studios in London and Cainscross (in the Stroud District of Gloucestershire).
First and foremost, we'll start with a respectful tip of a bowler hat worn by Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel to Vivien Halas, whose YouTube channel offers a treasure trove of Halas & Batchelor films and interviews.
Vivien Halas also co-wrote the splendid Halas & Batchelor Cartoons: An Animated History with Paul Wells, while contributing to the documentary The Animated World of Halas and Batchelor.
Halas & Batchelor, Great Britain's preeminent animation company from 1940 to 1995, are regarded as the United Kingdom's answer to Disney.
Formed in 1940 to produce animation for the World War II effort, the studio made everything from conventional animated cartoons to social commentary to films influenced by experimental cinema and modern art animators Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger.
The studio is best known for its 1954 feature film adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Of the studio's features, we especially like the 1967 film Ruddigore.
The Halas & Batchelor studio has been lauded, celebrated and cited as inspirations by such luminaries as the founders of all-time Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog favorite Aardman Animations.
While the John Halas & Joy Batchelor studio's films are out on Blu-ray and DVD, one will need a region free player to watch them.
It's true - all of us who have presented the KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival and its various offshoots in various venues share a soft spot for the Halas & Batchelor studio's Dodo The Kid From Outer Space cartoons.
We're also big fans of the stop-motion Snip and Snap cartoons, the inventive paper cut-out animation films which remind this writer just a bit of Art Clokey's clay-mation.
The John Halas & Joy Batchelor studio produced 70 films for the WW2 effort. The British approach is much more "stiff upper lip" than Warner Brothers' Private Snafu cartoons, but effective nonetheless.
The studio also produced some very clever animated commercials.
Throughout its six decade run, the Halas & Batchelor studio were prolific producers of industrial and educational films.
Due to the participation of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog favorite Peter Sellers and an emphasis on musicality, we especially like the Halas & Batchelor Tales From Hoffnung series, produced in 1965.
Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog has posted about animation of Great Britain before, with our favorite, by far, being a tribute to the great classic cartoons of Harringay's British Animated Productions, the creators of Bubble and Squeek, led by former Fleischer Studios and Walter Lantz Studios animator George Moreno, Jr.. These blend cartoony American humor and dry British wit.
Also penned an April 2013 post about the studio headed by former Walt Disney Studios producer, director and head animator David Hand that produced the Animaland and Musical Paintbox series.
In closing, we suggest checking out the following Halas and Batchelor animation playlist on YouTube. Many of the studio's films covering the history of Great Britain and more industrial/educational short subjects about life in post-World War II era England can be found there.
The British Film Institute, owners of a Halas & Batchelor collection donated by Vivien Halas, has posted the studio's educational and industrial films on their YouTube channel.
For more info, read the aforementioned Halas & Batchelor Cartoons: An Animated History. It's the last word on the studio and features a foreword by one of our favorites from Aardman Animations, the great Nick Park.
4 comments:
I'm partial to the Halas-Batchelor "Lone Ranger" series from 1966. Loved the music and noir look!
I find the graphic design throughout the Halas-Batchelor Lone Ranger series quite striking and, as you note, the music is terrific.
I'd cheerfully buy a CD of the music alone...
Does anyone know if a 1966 Lone Ranger BGM album was ever released? :)
Don't know of any releases that include the terrific soundtracks from Halas & Batchelor's LONE RANGER series by Entrada Records and other specialists in soundtrack music would have. If a 1966 Lone Ranger TV series album ever got released, it would have been played on the Saturday KFJC Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show hosted by movie, television and animation soundtrack expert Robert Emmett. The composer of the music for this series, Vic Schoen, was nothing if not prolific! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Schoen
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