The ‘Animal Farm’ adaptation that was funded by the CIA
There’s nothing quite like sitting down on a Saturday night and slapping on a Quentin Tarantino film, a Martin Scorsese crime epic or, if you’re in the mood, a long and complex Stanley Kubrick movie. One thing you know you’re getting with such filmmakers is an untainted vision, uncompromised by outside pressures from social groups, politicians or the CIA, right?
Well, whilst we’d like to preface this with the fact that none of Tarantino’s, Scorsese’s, or Kubrick’s movies have been tampered with by the CIA, there have been countless movies since the organisation’s inception in 1947 that have. Wishing to change their image in the public light, the organisation stepped up their activity in the world of entertainment in the 1990s, giving advice and unprecedented access to such films as Zero Dark Thirty and Black Hawk Down ever since.
As the veteran CIA operative Chase Brandon told The Guardian in 2001: “We’ve always been portrayed erroneously as evil and Machiavellian…It took us a long time to support projects that portray us in the light we want to be seen in”.
Indeed, the CIA has long been tampering with and funding key projects from Hollywood history, once helping to produce and even write an animated adaptation of the 1945 novel Animal Farm by George Orwell. Helmed by British animators and documentarians John Halas and Joy Batchelor, the 1954 film came into existence when the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), an arm of the CIA that dealt with combating communism in popular culture, got into contact with Orwell’s widow, Sonia, whilst undercover.
Having got the ball rolling on production, the CIA looked outside of Hollywood in order for their film to be made, distrusting American animators due to the industry blacklist of the time that discarded any talent that had links to communism. Despite the CIA’s heavy involvement, directors Halas, Batchellor and their whole crew of animators were kept in the dark about the funding from the American intelligence service.
But the meddling of the CIA didn’t just come before the project, they also altered how the movie looked whilst it was still being made.
Altering the plot of the iconic novel, the CIA had the animals of the movie successfully revolt against the oppressive pigs during the finale. Whilst Joy Batchelor opposed these changes, they eventually went through, with another of the biggest alterations being to the character of Snowball, who initially was portrayed as they are in the book: intelligent, compassionate and courageous.
Yet, as the book Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm suggests, they wished for Snowball to be depicted as a “fanatic intellectual whose plans if carried through would have led to disaster no less complete than under Napoleon”.
Generations after its release, the animated version of Animal Farm remained a staple in schools across the world, with the CIA being successful in their anti-communist agenda.
