The report Saunders says, “Offers a definition of the Cold War as a psychological contest, of the manufacturing of consent by ‘peaceful’ methods, of the use of propaganda to erode hostile positions. And, as the opening sallies in Berlin amply demonstrated, the ‘operational weapon’ was to be culture. The cultural Cold War was on.” (The opening sallies included our government using German/Nazi entertainers for propaganda/cultural events in the mid-1940s.)

John Halas (left) and Joy Batchelor work on Animal Farm. © The Halas & Batchelor Collection Limited. Courtesy of the Animation Research Centre Archive.

The CIA’s Role in Producing Halas and Batchelor’s Animal Farm
By the late 1940s the CIA was spending our tax dollars creating culture as a secret weapon to combat Communism and to promote our way of life around the world. Their choice of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as an animated film to produce almost makes sense. Almost, because the book’s ending shows both the pigs and humans joined together as corrupt and evil powers. They probably bought the rights assuming that the ending could be changed to better serve their purposes.

To use Animal Farm for their purpose, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (they directed covert government operations) had two members of their Psychological Warfare Workshop staff obtain the screen rights to the novel. Howard Hunt, who became infamous as a member of the Watergate break-in team, is identified as head of the operation. His contact in Hollywood was Carleton Aesop, brother of writer Joseph Alsop, who was working undercover at Paramount. Working with Alsop was Finis Farr, a writer living in Los Angeles. It was Alsop and Farr who went to England to negotiate the rights to the property from Sonia Orwell. Mrs. Orwell probably knew Farr as she moved in literary and artistic circles as an assistant to the editor of Horizon magazine. This is well documented in The Girl From the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling (Hamish Hamilton, 2002). Mrs. Orwell signed after Alsop and Farr agreed to arrange for her to meet her hero, Clark Gable. “As a measure of thanks” a CIA official named Joe Bryan made the arrangements for the meeting according to The Paper Trail, edited by Jon Elliston.

The CIA used Howard Hunt and his Hollywood contacts to obtain film rights to Animal Farm from Sonia Orwell. Here, Mrs. Orwell is seen dining with (left to right) Halas, Batchelor and Bordon Mace, president of the company which produced Anim

Hunt selected Louis de Rochemont to be the film’s producer at Paramount. He had created The March of Time in 1935. It was a new form of screen journalism that combined the newsreel and documentary film into a 15 to 20 minute entertaining short that went behind the news to explain the significance of or reason for an event. The March of Time, sponsored by the Time-Life Company, was a popular monthly series for over a decade. The series ended in 1951.

Hunt probably chose De Rochemont because he had once worked for him on The March of Time series. De Rochemont had also worked on socially/politically sensitive films for many years. He produced the anti-Nazi spy film The House on 92nd Street (1945) and Lost Boundaries (1949), one of the first racially conscious films (it is about a black doctor who passes for white until he is unmasked by the black community).

A recently published book suggests De Rochemont chose Halas and Batchelor to animate the film as production costs were lower in England and because he questioned the loyalty of some American animators (British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus by Tony Shaw, 2001). The House Committee for Un-American Activities hearings on Communists in the film industry began in earnest in 1951 (Disney testified at short-lived hearings that were held in 1947) and as I’ve shown in my book Forbidden Animation several people in the animation industry were blacklisted, careers were ruined or disrupted, Columbia forced UPA to purge suspected individuals from their ranks and a successful studio making animated TV commercials in New York had to close when conservative journalists identified the owners as two men denounced by Disney in 1947 as probable Communists.

While Shaw has proposed an interesting theory, Vivien Halas, daughter of the film’s co-directors John Halas and Joy Batchelor, suggests the real reason they got the contract is that Louis De Rochemont was a Navy buddy and good friend of screenwriters/producers Philip Stapp and Lothear Wolf. De Rochemont had worked with them in the Navy’s film unit and Vivien’s mother had worked closely with Stapp in 1949 on The Shoemaker and the Hatter, a Marshall Plan film produced by Halas and Batchelor. Eventually Stapp and Lothear would be hired to work on Animal Farm’s script.