four legs good, two legs bad (13. 972)

Though in my mind I at first conflated the memory with Charlotte’s Web—Templeton is not a character in the adaptation of the Orwell novella, I can recall the animated version striking as not the usual middle school cartoon fare with violent uprisings, political betrayals and a murderous regime become exactly the oppressive elements that they wanted to overthrow. Departing from the original script and with a more hopeful ending, however, we had no idea however that the 1954 production, a collaboration of husband and wife team John Halas and Joy Batchelor picked for their previous work directing documentaries for the Marshall Plan and British Ministry of Information, was secretly funded in large part by the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Policy Coordination, a branch of the CIA that used cultural programming to counter Communism. Distrusting American studios at the time of the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist, stakeholders approached British talent. The March of Time newsreel producer Louis de Rochemont was selected as a front organisation for distribution resulting in the first UK feature length animated film to receive a cinematic release—rated “U” for universal audiences, again despite its themes. In theatres, the film was a box office failure, taking fifteen years to recoup its losses, though achieving its objective of becoming a classroom staple that displaced the original work, whose narrative took a more nuanced critique of Soviet leadership and palace intrigue. The role that the CIA played in securing film rights, re-scripting the story to have the porcine politburo overthrown by other animals, and Halas’ and Batchelor’s unwitting involvement (the sensibilities of the social democrat couple would not have liked to have been duped into making propaganda), was not discovered by historians until four decades afterwards. Much more from Richard Metzger for Dangerous Minds at the link above.