Johnny the Giant Killer is a 1950 French animated film directed by Jean Image

Jean Image

Emeric Hajdu better known by his stage name Jean Image was a director, script writer and producer of French animation films. He emigrated to France in 1932 where he worked on films and eventually produced several shorts on his own...

. The film was made in 1½ years with a very small crew. The music was composed by René Cloërec

René Cloërec

-Filmography:* En cas de malheur * La Traversée de Paris * Marguerite de la nuit...

.

The film won the Venice Film Festival

Venice Film Festival

The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...

's Grand Prix for children's films, and was picked up for U.S. distribution in 1953 by Lippert Pictures, a company specialising in B-movie

B-movie

A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....

s. Johnny the Giant Killer was never copyrighted at all, hence its current public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

status which has led to numerous VHS and DVD copies of the cartoon published by various distributors.