{"id":1255,"date":"2014-06-07T02:57:48","date_gmt":"2014-06-07T02:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=1255"},"modified":"2014-06-07T02:57:48","modified_gmt":"2014-06-07T02:57:48","slug":"animal-farm-watch-the-animated-adaptation-of-orwells-novel-funded-by-the-cia-1954-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/animal-farm-watch-the-animated-adaptation-of-orwells-novel-funded-by-the-cia-1954-2","title":{"rendered":"Animal Farm: Watch the Animated Adaptation of Orwell\u2019s Novel Funded by the CIA (1954)"},"content":{"rendered":"

in Animation, Film, History | June 5th, 2014<\/span>
\n<iframe width=”500″ height=”374″ src=”\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3YYEoWAAmDE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n

In the middle of the twentieth century, America\u2019s Central Intelligence Agency saw art and culture as a weapon: they secretly funded not just abstract expressionist painting and a Russian-language printing and distribution campaign of Doctor Zhivago, but an animated adaptation of George Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm. Anybody could have seen the anti-Soviet propaganda value of George Orwell\u2019s satirical, allegorical tale in which livestock overtake their farm from its human owners and turn, without hesitation, into illogical tyrants. Though widely read in novel form, a film version of Animal Farm would, so the CIA presumably hoped, get the message across more immediately and accessibly \u2014 especially after they\u2019d demanded certain simplifications of the story. Taking pains not to reveal its identity, the CIA simply became in 1954 a set of somewhat demanding \u201cfinancial backers\u201d for the animated Animal Farm; to take on Orwell\u2019s \u201cmemorable fable\u201d (as the opening titles put it), the CIA went with the animation studio of John Halas and Joy Batchelor, resulting in the first British-made animated feature ever theatrically released, which you can watch at the top of the post.<\/p>\n

The Guardian\u2018s Karl Cohen writes that \u201cthe production employed about 80 animators. In Halas\u2019s book The Technique of Film Animation, 1959, he states that the film\u2019s target audience was adults rather than children and that they needed to simplify the plot. Vivien Halas [Halas and Batchelor’s daughter] adds that the film wasn\u2019t shown in Paris until the 1990s as it was considered too anti-communist. When it finally premiered in Paris in about 1993, the mayor of Aubervilliers (a suburb of Paris) \u2018introduced it as a tribute to communism! My father said no, this is not communist or anti-communist. It is a fable for all time. It is anti-totalitarian and it has a humanist message.\u2019\u201d Still, this aesthetically impressive piece of work ignores, at the CIA\u2019s request, Orwell\u2019s original ending, an indictment of not just animals, and not just the pigs who would memorably declare that \u201call animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,\u201d but every living species, from humans on down. The then-concealed CIA had requested this change (along with a less sympathetic treatment of Trotsky figure Snowball) but Halas had a justification of his own for the happier conclusion: \u201cYou can not send home millions in the audience being puzzled.\u201d Fair enough, though it hardly needs pointing out that, 60 years later, we remember not that ending, but the one Orwell wrote.<\/p>\n

You can find Animal Farm in our collections: 550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free and 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.<\/p>\n

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From:http:\/\/www.openculture.com\/2014\/06\/animal-farm-animated-funded-by-the-cia-1954.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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