After a spell in Hungary, they moved back to London in 1938, got some work for the BBC and, because that organisation was connected with the Ministry of Information during the war, were hired to make a succession of animated propaganda films from the studio they had set up in Bush House. “They had to make so many of these so quickly they really became masters of their trade,” says Vivien. “My mother learnt to write scripts, too, by making interesting and succinct stories about things that were on the face of it often rather boring.” In this period the couple married, otherwise Halas would have been sent to an internment camp, along with many of his compatriots, on the Isle of Wight.

The war ended, the company rolled on. They took on different roles in the production process and hired more staff. “My father became something of an ambassador for animation. He brought people together from all over the world, forming ASIFA, the international federation of animators.” In 1950 the company was commissioned to make a feature-length animation of Orwell’s Animal Farm. It was a massive task. “Looking back it’s likely that part of the funding came from the CIA,” says Vivien. “They were putting a lot of money into American art at the time, and Orwell’s book was clearly an anti-Stalin satire.” Halas and Batchelor managed to put their own take on the movie, however. “When the windmill is blown up, it is very reminiscent of the nuclear bomb exploding.”The film was a huge success, a very European take on feature-length animations, a heavyweight antidote to the fluffy stuff coming out of America. It was enormously successful and has lost none of its power over time. If the company had carried on making serious feature-length cartoons who knows what weight the name ‘Halas and Bachelor’ would carry nowadays.