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Animation company Halas & Batchelor is best known for its feature-length
adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm (1955), which used cel animation in a
'Disney' fashion. But the company could embrace other approaches, with a range
of European influences, as demonstrated in films such as Magic Canvas (1948) and
Automania 2000 (1963). The photomontage technique used in this public information 'filler' reveals influences closer to home, notably the anarchic vision of younger
animators such as Bob Godfrey.
The large, relatively captive audiences for advertising during peaktime
television programming were as attractive for the Government as they were for
commercial sponsors, and spot TV advertisements became an important arena for
public information announcements. Drink driving was a hot political topic in the
1960s, building up to the introduction of the breathalyser in 1967, which
replaced the largely subjective judgement of sobriety with a strict legal limit
of alcohol in the bloodstream. In this cartoon sponsored by the Central Office
of Information, the focus is on the Christmas office party, synonymous with the
opportunity to imbibe a small part of the company's profits, often leading to
unusual drinking habits and a drunken commute home.
As many as a third of all adverts in the first few years of commercial
television were animated. Though this dropped off into the 1960s, animation was
still popular with advertisers for the way it could engage a wide audience,
vividly express the many abstract claims of product brands and keep costs under
control. Halas & Batchelor was set up in 1940 under the auspices of the
advertising agency J Walter Thompson, and its first productions were cinema
advertisements for products such as Kellogg's Cornflakes and Rinso. The company
also began to make public information films during WWII and in the postwar
period, notably the Charley series in 1947, and so was in a prime position to
profit from the introduction of advertising on television in 1955.
The filler's most striking feature by comparison with today's drink drive
campaigns is its polite, safe tone. Similar adverts today use
shock tactics to jolt viewers out of the comfort of their sofas, and ram the
message home. Here the jolly Christmas music and playful animation would do
little to distinguish the advert from the other commercials which would surround
it.
Jez Stewart
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Complete film (0:40)
