The Animated Shakespeare
| Shakespeare: The Animated Tales | |
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UK DVD Box-Set
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| Also known as | 'The Animated Shakespeare (US) |
| Genre | Comedy, Tragedy, History |
| Created by | Christopher Grace |
| Developed by | Leon Garfield |
| Written by | William Shakespeare |
| Creative director(s) | Dave Edwards |
| Country of origin | UK/Russia |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of seasons | 2 |
| No. of episodes | 12 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) |
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| Producer(s) | Renat Zinnurov |
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| Original network | |
| Picture format | 4:3 |
| Audio format | Stereo |
| Original release | 9 November 1992 – 14 December 1994 |
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (also known as The Animated Shakespeare) is a series of twelve half-hour animated television adaptations of the plays of William Shakespeare, originally broadcast on BBC 2 between 1992 and 1994.
The series was commissioned by the Welsh language channel S4C. Production was co-ordinated by the Dave Edwards Studio in Cardiff, although the shows were animated in Moscow by Soyuzmultfilm, using a variety of animation techniques. The scripts for each episode were written by Leon Garfield, who produced heavily truncated versions of each play. The academic consultant for the series was Professor Stanley Wells. The dialogue was recorded at the facilities of BBC Wales in Cardiff.
The show was both a commercial and a critical success. The first series episode "Hamlet" won two awards for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation" (one for the animators and one for the designers and director) at the 1993 Emmys, and a Gold Award at the 1993 New York Festival. The second-season episode "The Winter's Tale" also won the "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation" at the 1996 Emmys. The episodes continue to be used in schools as teaching aids, especially when introducing children to Shakespeare for the first time.
The series was conceived in 1989 by Christopher Grace, head of animation at S4C. Grace had previously worked with Soyuzmultfilm on an animated version of the Welsh folktale cycle, the Mabinogion, and he turned to them again for the Shakespeare project, feeling "if we were going to animate Shakespeare in a thirty-minute format, then we had to go to a country that we knew creatively and artistically could actually deliver. And in my view, frankly, there was only one country that could do it in the style that we wanted, that came at it from a different angle, a country to whom Shakespeare is as important as it is to our own." Grace was also very keen to avoid creating anything Disney-esque; "Disney has conditioned a mass audience to expect sentimentality; big, gooey-eyed creatures with long lashes, and winsome, simpering female characters. This style went with enormous flair and verve and comic panache; but a lot of it was kitsch."
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Wikipedia