Trivia / Animal Farm (1954)

• Acting for Two: In the animated version, all of the animals and Farmer Jones are voiced by the Doctor's old mentor, Azmael, better known by his Earth name, Maurice Denham.
• Creator's Favorite: Maurice Denham stated he had the most fun voicing Squealer.
• Executive Meddling: From the CIA, no less! The 1954 Animated Adaptation was secretly funded as anti-Communist propaganda. Orwell's strong implication that capitalism and communism weren’t that different was downplayed, Snowball (the Leon Trotsky expy) was made less heroic, and a happy ending where the animals rebelled against their pig oppressors was added on, though the filmmakers were in favor of changing the ending anyway as they felt the book's ending was too downbeat.
  • Among the demands made by the CIA were to portray Jones as even more villainous to make it more clear why his animals revolted, but to have him as the only bad human farmer, specifying that the other human antagonists should be farmhands rather than farmers. It’s been suggested this was done to avoid offending American audiences who might be involved in agriculture.
  • The scene where some animals on other farms are shown dismissing the news of the rebellion was also added at their insistence.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Not the work itself, but a public domain DVD publisher called Digiview got sued to death when it was discovered that they were making DVDs of the animated movie. Digiview assumed it was a public domain work when it was really still copyrighted.
• Troubled Production: The film's script went through numerous rewrites, and the work of animating the characters was reportedly exhausting, with one animator feeling Jones's drunkenness was difficult to portray. A longer version of the narration was also rejected on the grounds that this would have required even more animation work.
• What Could Have Been:
  • One suggested scene would have shown Snowball in exile in a foreign land, and would have had a friendly-looking pig approach him, only for the pig to reveal himself to be one of Napoleon's dogs and slit Snowball's throat, emulating Stalin's assassination of Trotsky.
  • One draft of the narration was rejected for being too blunt and heavy-handed, such as outright telling the viewer the farm now operated under the principle that "some animals were more equal than others" while the film makes the point more subtly by showing the altered Commandment while satirical music plays. The narrator also would have commented that the pigs bought whiskey "with the money they had bought with Boxer's blood" which was toned down to "Boxer's life."
  • The scene where the animals start to rebel against Squealer following Boxer's death would have been followed by Napoleon bursting out of the farmhouse in uniform and walking on two legs, quelling the would-be uprising, which was rejected as too melodramatic.
  • One version of the ending would have had Napoleon and the pigs meeting with human farmers as in the book but the CIA insisted the humans be taken out, claiming that the animals overthrowing both them and the pigs would make the political message unclear and could be taken as endorsement of anarchism.
• Writer Revolt: The filmmakers were reportedly displeased by the CIA's attempts to seize editorial control of the film and dismissed some of their ideas. In particular, the film's closing narration seems at odds with the CIA's intention to use the film as anti-Communist propaganda, as it states that the animals' original ideals might one day be realized once they get rid of Napoleon.