Animal Farm: Watch the Animated Adaptation of Orwell’s Novel Funded by the CIA (1954) — openculture.com

In the middle of the twentieth century, America’s 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’s Animal Farm. Anybody could have seen the anti-Soviet propaganda value of George Orwell’s 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 — especially after they’d demanded certain simplifications of the story. Taking pains not to reveal its identity, the CIA simply became in 1954 a set of somewhat demanding “financial backers” for the animated Animal Farm; to take on Orwell’s “memorable fable” (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.

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