julian_craster

The story behind Animal Farm [Halas and Batchelor, 1954]
by J. Hoberman
London Review of Books
5 July 2007


In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden years:
the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, conducted
experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own operatives as unwitting guinea
pigs), ran literary journals and produced the first general-release,
feature-length animation ever made in the UK.

It was Howard Hunt who broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm, John
Halas and Joy Batchelor's 1954 version of George Orwell's political allegory
of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, played out in a British
farmyard. Cashing in on his Watergate notoriety, the rogue spook and
sometime spy novelist took credit in Undercover: Memoirs of an American
Secret Agent (1974) for initiating the project, shortly after Orwell's death
in 1950. The self-aggrandising Hunt may have exaggerated his own importance
in the operation - possibly inventing the juicy detail that Orwell's widow,
Sonia, was wooed with the promise of meeting her favourite star, Clark
Gable - but, as detailed by Daniel Leab in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the
Filming of 'Animal Farm' (Pennsylvania, $55), the operation was real.

Leab is a historian who has done extensive research into the production of
Hollywood's Cold War movies; the central figure in his account is Louis de
Rochemont, the former newsreel cameraman who supervised Time magazine's
innovative monthly release The March of Time and, beginning in 1945 with The
House on 92nd Street, produced a number of so-called 'journalistic features'
for 20th Century Fox (which were praised by James Agee, among others, for
their extensive use of location shooting). De Rochemont was also well
connected to various government agencies. The House on 92nd Street
dramatised the FBI's role in arresting Nazi agents; its 1946 follow-up, 13
Rue Madeleine, celebrated the wartime exploits of the Office of Strategic
Services, the CIA's precursor, but a dispute between the studio and the OSS
director, 'Wild Bill' Donovan, resulted in the organisation's being
disguised as an intelligence outfit called '0-77'.

De Rochemont subsequently became an independent producer affiliated with the
Reader's Digest. In 1951, while preparing a new FBI collaboration, Walk East
on Beacon (adapted from an article by J. Edgar Hoover originally published
in the Digest), he was recruited by the CIA's blandly titled Office of
Policy Co-Ordination to produce an animated Animal Farm. The CIA was already
engaged in spreading the Orwellian gospel - as was the clandestine
Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office. (Both
agencies had been engaged in making translations and even comic-book
versions of Animal Farm and 1984.) Nor were the CIA and the IRD the only
interested parties: according to Leab, both the US Army and the producers of
Woody Woodpecker cartoons also made inquiries as to the availability of
Animal Farm's film rights.

The trade press reported that de Rochemont financed Animal Farm with the
frozen British box-office receipts from his racial 'passing' drama Lost
Boundaries; in fact, Animal Farm was almost entirely underwritten by the
CIA. De Rochemont hired Halas and Batchelor (they were less expensive and,
given their experience making wartime propaganda cartoons, politically more
reliable than American animators) in late 1951; well before that, his
'investors' had furnished him with detailed dissections of his team's
proposed treatment. Animal Farm was scheduled for completion in spring 1953,
but the ambitious production, which made use of full cell animation, was
delayed for more than a year, in part because of extensive discussion and
continual revisions. Among other things, the investors pushed for a more
aggressively 'political' voice-over narration and were concerned that
Snowball (the pig who figures as Trotsky) would be perceived by audiences as
too sympathetic.

Most problematic, however, was Orwell's pessimistic ending, in which the
pigs become indistinguishable from their human former masters. No matter how
often the movie's screenplay was altered, it always concluded with a
successful farmyard uprising in which the oppressed animals overthrew the
dictatorial pigs. The Animal Farm project had been initiated when Harry
Truman was president; Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with
John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state and Allen Dulles heading the
CIA. Leab notes that Animal Farm's mandated ending complemented the new
Dulles policy, which - abandoning Truman's aim of containing Communism -
planned a 'roll back', at least in Eastern Europe. As one of the script's
many advisors put it, Animal Farm's ending should be one where the animals
'get mad, ask for help from the outside, which they get, and which results
in their (the Russian people) with the help of the free nations overthrowing
their oppressors'.

Animal Farm's world premiere was held at the Paris Theatre in December 1954,
then as now Manhattan's poshest movie-house, and was followed by a gala
reception at the United Nations. The movie received respectful reviews - as
it did when it opened several months later in London - but performed poorly
at the box office. (Its major precursor as a 'serious' animation, Disney's
1943 collaboration with the aviator Alexander de Seversky, Victory through
Air Power, was also a flop.) Halas and Batchelor did achieve a reasonable
approximation of stretchy, rounded Disney-style character animation but, as
the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther observed, 'the shock of straight
and raw political satire is made more grotesque in the medium of cartoon.'
This was a dark cuteness. While praising Animal Farm as 'technically
first-rate', Crowther concluded his review by advising parents to not 'make
the mistake of thinking it is for little children, just because it is a
cartoon.'

Actually, Animal Farm was ultimately seen mainly by schoolchildren -
particularly in West Germany. Possibly the movie was perceived by this
captive audience as an unaccountably dour and violent version of Walt
Disney's Dumbo. But, however the CIA's fervent call for an anti-Soviet
revolt (with
'help from the outside') was received by the world, it was rendered moot
some eighteen months after Animal Farm's European release by the much
encouraged and subsequently abandoned Hungarian uprising.

J. Hoberman is senior film critic for the Village Voice and the author of
The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties.

Lady Lois

This was compulsory viewing in our household once we got hold of a video player back in 1982... my mother was always one for showing us that the world was not Disney-fied... hence us all being given the original versions of Snow White, Cinderella, Litte Red Riding Hood and the Three Pigs (TWO get eaten before the third eats the worlf) to read... this animated Animal Farm has remained ingrained in my mind... and helped somewhat with my English Literature O Level in 1986. It seems quite tame now... but as a child... talking pigs taking over and wearing clothes... Everyone is equal... but some are more equal than others...