According to Mark Cousins in his "The Story of Film: An Odyssey: Episode #1.12", painter Pablo Picasso called this one "the best film ever made."
When shown for the Academy Awards, the section when the characters murder each other's wives and children was edited out, and so it remained for 15 years for distribution in the USA - until the director, pressed by viewer complaints, had the film restored to the original.
Instead of the word THE END, the film ends with a sentence repeated in fourteen different languages: LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR.
Production is by the "old school" animation process with live characters; essentially stop motion technique, frame by frame.
The version of the film that was submitted and won the Academy Award was not the complete film. A sequence that showed each man breaking down the house of the other and murdering his wife and baby child was edited out in order to make the film more palatable to American judges. By the time of the Vietnam War public opinion had so changed that McLaren was asked to reinsert the excised footage, but the original negative had been destroyed. The scene was added using an inferior quality positive print.