History of British animation

The history of animation in the United Kingdom began at the very origins of the artform in the late 19th century. British animation has been strengthened by an influx of émigrés to the UK, renowned animators such as Lotte Reiniger (Germany), John Halas (Hungary), George Dunning and Richard Williams (Canada), Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton (USA) have all worked in the UK at various stages of their careers. Notable full-length animated features to be produced in the UK include Animal Farm (1954), Yellow Submarine (1968), Watership Down (1978), and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).

The history of British animation has gone through several stages of development significantly influenced by both internal and international political, economic and cultural factors. Important among these is the relative impact of the United States' own far-reaching animation industry, which in several instances has been seen as both a challenge to produce more local content, and as a creative and/or commercial inspiration to follow or work against.

In order to clarify the emergence and interplay of the different agendas, aesthetics and industrial relationships that have shaped British animation history, media scholar Van Norris posits a rough chronological taxonomy of animation's development in the UK along three distinct "waves", the first comprising the establishment of the British animation industry, the second detailing the impact of the incursion of dissident politics, fringe artistic communities and emergent distribution systems in the industry, and the third representing the neoliberal re-consolidation of all of these tendencies into more commercially-driven and comedic popular media.

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