John Halas, Joy Batchelor - Animal Farm (1954) The first commercial, feature-length British animated movie starts a tradition which would last far into the future of really disturbing British animated films with horrible things happening to animals. Like a 1950s predecessor to Watership Down, this film is very much in that tradition with the added bonus of being really an anti-Stalin propaganda piece. The film was in fact funded by the CIA as a propaganda piece, but both in the case of the film and the book only a very superficial and uninformed reading can make you think that the story is actually anti-communist. It's actually pretty pro-communist, it's anti-authoritarian and anti-Stalinist for sure, but it's not like the condition of the animals before they took over was sustainable, there was indeed a need for a revolution. The problem is not in the animals taking over the means of production, the problem is with authoritarian figures, the pig Napoleon in this case appropriating the production for his own ends, perverting what was really a better situation than being exploited by the human, under the good pig Snowball. In fact at the end Napoleon ends up resembling humans. Orwell fought for the anarchists in Spain during the Civil War, after all. However, if you don't get the references of the old dying pig as Lenin/Marx, Snowball as Trotsky, Napoleon as Stalin and the human farm owner as the Tsar, as I am sure must have been lost on much of the viewers, it can come off simplistically as an anti-communist film, while it is actually pro-communist and anti-authoritarian. The animation is pretty Dinseyesque, even if not as polished, the voice acting is excellent with just one guy, Maurice Denham, making all the voices and it's full of upsetting scenes of violence and injustice. Great! (3.5/5) #cinema #cinephile #johnhalas #joybatchelor #animalfarm #orwell #movie #moviereview #film #filmreviews #filmposter #movieposter #poster #animation #british #animatedmovie #georgeorwell (at Lisbon, Portugal) https://www.instagram.com/p/BvnpGOIFo2h/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=5xz7gae0b3yt
