Mark Hall

Mark Hall, who has died of cancer aged 75, was the co-creator of Danger Mouse and Count Duckula and one of the Britain's leading animators in the 1980s and 1990s.

Working with Brian Cosgrove, whom he met at art school, Hall took elements of James Bond, Danger Man and Mighty Mouse, mixed them up together and came up with a cartoon character who became an icon for a generation of children (and young adults).

Danger Mouse was a secret agent who wore a superhero costume and a piratical eyepatch (which he didn't actually need – it was just part of the costume). His secret base was inside a London pillar box and he was assisted, somewhat reluctantly, by Ernest Penfold, a timid, bespectacled hamster.

They saved the world from a rogues' gallery of villains, including the evil frog Baron Silas Greenback and Count Duckula, a vegetarian vampire who got his own spin-off series. Danger Mouse originally ran for around 90 episodes on ITV between 1981 and 1992 and at its peak was attracting a UK audience of 19 million. It sold to dozens of countries and laid the foundations for the success of Cosgrove Hall as a company.

Danger Mouse was traditional animation, whereas Hall had a particular passion for model animation and he had great personal success with The Wind in the Willows (1983-90), with its charming little animal characters, with the clothes and attitudes of English country gentlemen from a bygone age. David Jason, who had voiced Danger Mouse and Duckula, provided the voice of Toad.

Wind in the Willows began as a one-off, feature-length television film. It won Hall and Cosgrove a Bafta award for best children's programme and proved so popular that Cosgrove Hall were commissioned to make a series and produced more than 60 episodes over the next seven years.

The son of a railwayman, Mark William Hall was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire. He showed early artistic flair and staged puppet shows for friends and family. He met Mr Cosgrove at Manchester Regional College of Art and during the 1960s they worked as graphic designers for Granada Television.

Hall left to form an independent company, Stop Frame Animations. Mr Cosgrove joined him a year later and they worked in the shed in Mr Cosgrove's father-in-law's garden. Initially they made commercials and public information films.

Their first TV series was The Magic Ball (1971-72), which featured a boy who could travel through time. It was written and narrated by Emma Thompson's father Eric Thompson, who was best known for his work on The Magic Roundabout.

They also did the title sequence and animated inserts for the long-running children's programme Rainbow when it started in 1972.

Cosgrove Hall Productions began in the mid-1970s, making programmes for Thames Television, and its earliest productions included Noddy (1975), Chorlton and the Wheelies (1976-79), both of which were stop-motion, and the Captain Kremmen cartoon inserts for Kenny Everett's show (1978-80).

Hall and Cosgrove won another Bafta for the short Alias the Jester (1985) and Hall had a further 15 nominations, including one for the Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG (1989). Hall particularly enjoyed animating the work of children's writers he personally liked.

He worked on several Terry Pratchett projects – Truckers (1992) and the Discworld stories Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters (both 1997) and Hall and Pratchett became personal friends.

Hall and Cosgrove retired in 2000. But the company, which had evolved into Cosgrove Hall Films, continued. It produced new instalments of Bill and Ben, Andy Pandy, Postman Pat and an animated Doctor Who adventure. That led to it providing animated visuals for Doctor Who episodes where the film had been lost, but the soundtrack survived.

As a business Cosgrove Hall had already been through dramatic upheavals, including Thames' loss of the franchise in 1992. Ultimately the company was a subsidiary of ITV, which shut it down in 2009.

Recently Hall and Clark had become involved with the Dublin-based entrepreneur Francis Fitzpatrick in forming a new company Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick.

Mark Hall is survived by Margaret, his wife of 50 years, and by their two children Rachel and Simon.