Based on Charlie Mackesy's illustrated book, this hand-drawn short unfolds as a quiet walk-and-talk between four unlikely companions crossing open, wintry country.

What is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse about?

A boy sets out across a snowy landscape and, one by one, picks up company he never planned on: a mole with a weakness for cake, a fox nursing old wounds and old grudges, and a horse who seems to already understand the ground they're walking. There's no chase and no villain here — the four simply talk as they go, and what they say to each other about fear, kindness, and the difficulty of asking for help becomes the film's real substance. The animation keeps the loose, watercolor-style linework of Mackesy's original drawings, with plenty of white space left on screen so a single line of dialogue can sit and breathe before the next one arrives. It plays more like an illustrated conversation brought to motion than a conventional story with rising and falling action, which suits both its short runtime and its source material.

About the cast

The English-language voice cast brings together Jude Coward Nicoll alongside Tom Hollander, Idris Elba and Gabriel Byrne, four performers working in a register closer to bedtime storytelling than blockbuster voice acting — soft-spoken, unhurried, built around warmth rather than spectacle.

Context & significance

The film adapts Mackesy's bestselling illustrated book, and it keeps close to that source's short, aphoristic passages rather than expanding them into a longer plot. A joint UK-US production, it runs just 32 minutes, placing it between a short film and a featurette — built for one uninterrupted sitting rather than a long watch. K-Time lists it under Animation, Drama and Family, and while the visual style and pacing read as gentle, the conversations about fear and vulnerability are pitched as much at adults as at children, which is part of why the book found readers well beyond its original shelf.

Watching The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse on Ktime

The film streams on K-Time with a free account login — no purchase required to read this page or browse the catalogue, only to press play. It carries a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so it's ready to watch in Farsi from the first frame, part of K-Time's broader push to make family-friendly animation genuinely accessible to Persian-speaking households rather than an afterthought bolted onto an English release.