Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (Seasons 1–2)

Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992) is an animation anthology you can watch online on iFILM. Twelve of Shakespeare's most celebrated plays — Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and others — are retold as 26-minute films.

The series came out of an unlikely partnership: Welsh broadcaster S4C commissioned it for the BBC, while the animation was handled by artists from Soyuzmultfilm, the Soviet Union's principal animation studio, working through Moscow's Christmas Films. Each play went to a different director, and the visual techniques vary accordingly — paint on glass for Hamlet, cel animation for Macbeth, stop-motion puppets for Twelfth Night. Directors include Stanislav Sokolov, Nikolai Serebryakov, and Natalia Orlova; production ran from 1989 to 1994.

What holds it together is the commitment to letting each animator bring their own visual language to the text. The result is uneven in the best sense — twelve distinct encounters with Shakespeare rather than a uniform house style. Stream Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992) online on iFILM.