Animal Farm *** (1954, voice of Maurice Denham) – Classic Movie Review 13,151

It’s a CIA plot (not George Orwell’s)

The secretly CIA-funded 1954 British animated feature Animal Farm is made by John Halas and Joy Batchelor, and features the voice artistry of Maurice Denham as all the animals.

The secretly CIA-funded 1954 British animated feature Animal Farm is co-written/ produced and directed by John Halas and Joy Batchelor, and features the voice artistry of Maurice Denham. Undercover CIA agents approached George Orwell’s widow for the rights, and the CIA turned the novel’s plot into anti-communist propaganda, producing it in England where they thought animators and illustrators were unaffected by the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist.

Ace animators John Halas and Joy Batchelor 1955 ambitiously turn George Orwell’s famous 1945 political satire novella Animal Farm about some animals being more equal than others into a careful, attractively drawn, darkly humorous adult cartoon, lensed in lovely Technicolor.

As Napoleon the Pig leads a farm revolt, then takes over the barn tyrannically himself, the plot stays close to the novel but dilutes the fable and goes for a more upbeat ending. It was only 40 years later that the reasons for the altered ending were discovered in the film’s archives: it was a CIA plot. In a bravura effort, Maurice Denham does all the voices of the animals on the soundtrack, apart from the narration by Gordon Heath.

It was funded as propaganda by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who made changes to the script. Orwell’s widow Sonia was approached for the rights by undercover agents of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a branch of the CIA that dealt with the use of culture to combat communism. Halas, Batchelor and the animation crew were kept unaware that the CIA had initiated and funded their film.

It took 15 years to make a profit, but became influential and popular as it was much screened in schools in the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand over five decades. Generations of schoolkids brainwashed!

Halas and Batchelor hired John F Reed, the only American involved in the project, as animation director from The Walt Disney Studio, and hired a team of 80 animators from The Rank Organisation’s disbanded animation division.

The CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination was funding anti-communist art for E Howard Hunt’s Psychological Warfare Workshop. Hunt chose The March of Time newsreel producer Louis de Rochemont and his production company Louis de Rochemont Associates as a front organization for the Animal Farm film’s production, though Louis de Rochemont was busy as producer, implementing the changes demanded by The CIA investors.

Hunt said the film was ‘carefully tweaked to heighten the anti-Communist message’. Louis de Rochemont, acting for the CIA, had the film rewritten during production by Philip Strapp and Lothar Wolf to end with the animals successfully revolting against the pigs (who represent communists), although Batchelor fought to try to oppose this change from the novel.

Halas and Batchelor were hired in November 1951, and filming ended in April 1954, with the animation done in London and camera work in Gloucestershire.

Release dates: 29 December 1954 (New York City) and 7 January 1955 (London).

© Derek Winnert 2024 – Classic Movie Review 13,151

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