Handling Ships

Handling Ships
Directed by	Alan Crick John Halas
Produced by	John Halas
Written by	Alan Crick John Halas
Music by	Ernst Hermann Meyer
Distributed by	(British) Admiralty Halas and Batchelor (training film, not formally released to theatres)
Release date	1945
Running time	70 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

Handling Ships is a 1945 British stop motion animated film made by Halas and Batchelor. The 70-minute film was created at the request of the British Admiralty, as a training aid for new navigators joining the Royal Navy. Although never formally released to cinemas because of its small target audience, Handling Ships was an "Official Selection" at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, and is recognised as the first feature length work, and the first work in Technicolor, in British animation history.

After independent careers in animation, John Halas and Joy Batchelor began working together in 1938, and founded Halas and Batchelor in 1940 to create war information and propaganda films. Approximately 70 films were created for the Ministry of Information, the War Office, and the Admiralty over the course of World War II; most of these were shorts intended to improve morale or spur on increased contributions to the war effort, such as Dustbin Parade, about recycling, and Filling the Gap, about gardening. Halas and Batchelor also created a series of anti-fascist cartoons intended for viewing in the Middle East; starring an Arab boy named Abu, who was "enticed and misguided by the forces of Hitler and Mussolini." The heavy workload (at one point the studios were creating a minute-long short every three weeks) and minimal budgets meant that simple animations with economically driven stories were the norm.

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