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The British-based animation team Halas and Batchelor are best known for their adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm, but they made a string of brilliant short films too. Here is their consumerist satire Automania 2000, about a scientist whose inventions cause environmental havoc, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1964.

• The Halas & Batchelor Short Film Collection is released on DVD and Blu-Ray on 29 June Continue reading...

Animator who captured Orwell's Farmer Jones in Britain's first animated feature film, Animal Farm, in 1954

Harold Whitaker, who has died aged 93, drew some of the most memorable scenes in British animation history. He successfully captured the pathetic, drunken brutishness of George Orwell's Farmer Jones in Britain's first animated feature film, Animal Farm (1954), but was most at home in the comedic realm. Figures such as the naive inventor of the self-reproducing car in the allegorical Automania 2000 (1963) were full of boisterous energy, earning that film an Oscar nomination for best animated short – another British first.

A quiet, reserved figure, with a healthy resentment of any camera pointed his way, Harold had no desire to run his own company and preferred to work under the direction of others. Despite this, he became a key player in an industry from which he kept a discreet distance.

He was born in Cottingham, east Yorkshire,...