http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n13/hobe01_.html
London Review of Books 5 July 2007
The story behind Animal Farm [Halas and Batchelor, 1954]
by J. Hoberman
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.
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