On the other hand, 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 Lothar Wolff. The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on communists in the film industry began in earnest in 1951 (Disney testified at short-lived hearings that were held in 1947) and several people in the animation industry were blacklisted, careers were ruined or disrupted. He produced the anti-Nazi spy film The House on 92nd Street (1945) and Lost Boundaries (1949), one of the first racially aware films (it is about a black doctor who passes for white until he is unmasked by the black community).Ī recently published book, British Cinema and the Cold War: the State, Propaganda and the Consensus by Tony Shaw, 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.
De Rochemont had also worked on socially and politically sensitive films for many years. Hunt probably chose De Rochemont because he had once worked for him on The March of Time series.
#Joseph cartoon movie kids series#
The March of Time, sponsored by the Time-Life Company, was a popular monthly series for over a decade before ending in 1951. Before the war, in 1935, De Rochemont had created The March of Time, 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 an event. Hunt selected Louis De Rochemont to be the film's producer at Paramount. "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. Mrs Orwell signed after Alsop and Farr agreed to arrange for her to meet her hero, Clark Gable. This is well documented in The Girl from the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling. Mrs Orwell probably knew Farr as she moved in literary and artistic circles as an assistant to the editor of Horizon magazine. It was Alsop and Farr who went to England to negotiate the rights to the property from Sonia Orwell. Working with Alsop was Finis Farr, a writer living in Los Angeles. His contact in Hollywood was Carleton Alsop, brother of writer Joseph Alsop, who was working undercover at Paramount. Howard Hunt, who became infamous as a member of the Watergate break-in team, is identified as head of the operation. To use Animal Farm for its purpose, as Stonor Saunders reveals, the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, which directed covert government operations, had two members of their Psychological Warfare Workshop staff obtain the screen rights to the novel.
Almost, but not quite, because the book's ending shows both the pigs and humans joined together as corrupt and evil powers. The CIA's choice of George Orwell's Animal Farm to produce as an animated film almost makes sense. When Frances Stonor Saunders published Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, she mentioned a single animated film, John Halas and Joy Batchelor's Animal Farm, which was made in 1954. By the late 1940s, the CIA was spending tax dollars creating culture as a secret weapon to combat communism around the world. Whether it's through classic Disney stories for the whole family or unique comic book adaptations that wowed audiences, there is no shortage of exciting movies starring kids with incredible superpowers that may have gone unnoticed by fans over the years, which we'll be exploring further today.A merica's use of animated propaganda during the second world war is fairly well known, but propaganda made after the iron curtain went up is rarely seen or discussed. Updated on January 2nd, 2021 by Scoot Allan: Young children with powers have appeared on the big screen and in other mediums for decades, though there is no doubt that the big superhero boom of the last few decades has created a larger space for these types of stories to develop. It’s not hard to understand why, since family-oriented films have traditionally been some of the biggest money-makers for the Hollywood studios, particularly during the summer months.Īs a result, there have been quite a few exciting films with kids as the stars over the past couple of decades, most of which have showcased the ways in which even young people can be the heroes of their own stories, doing all that they can to fight against the forces of evil and darkness. Hollywood seems to have a bit of an obsession with the idea of kids with immense powers.
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