[10] The rights for a film adaptation were purchased from Orwell's widow Sonia after she was approached by agents working for the Office of Policy Coordination, a branch of the CIA that dealt with the use of culture to combat communism.
[11] Despite being a box office flop, taking fifteen years to generate a profit, the film quickly became a staple in classrooms.
Prize pig Old Major encourages the farm animals to oust Jones, and teaches them the revolutionary song "Beasts of England" before his death.
He abolishes farm policy meetings, appropriates all decision-making, and advances the windmill plan that he had snubbed when his rival proposed it.
Napoleon bans the singing of "Beasts of England", declaring the revolution complete and the dream of Animal Farm realised.
The guard dogs are too drunk to act (having been given full access to the distillery) while the animals smash through the house, trample Napoleon and the pigs to death, and reclaim the farm along with their freedom.
Unbeknownst to her, they were actually undercover agents for the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of Policy Coordination, which was funding anti-communist art for E. Howard Hunt's Psychological Warfare Workshop.
[16] John Halas and Joy Batchelor were chosen to direct because of their work on documentaries produced by the Marshall Plan and the British Ministry of Information.
[17] Halas and Batchelor hired John F. Reed, the sole involved American, as animation director from The Walt Disney Studio.
[18] During production, De Rochemont, acting on behalf of the CIA, had the film rewritten from the original novel's plot by Philip Strapp and Lothar Wolf to end with the other animals successfully revolting against the pigs.
Fredric Warburg, original publisher of the novel and a former MI6 agent, also served as a consultant, suggesting that Old Major be given an appearance similar to Winston Churchill.
A memo declared that Snowball must be presented as a "fanatic intellectual whose plans if carried through would have led to disaster no less complete than under Napoleon."
[22] Scenes from Animal Farm, along with the 1954 TV programme Nineteen Eighty-Four, were featured in "The Two Winstons", the final episode of Simon Schama's program A History of Britain broadcast June 18, 2002.
[26] Some criticism was levelled at the altered ending, with one paper reporting, "Orwell would not have liked this one change, with its substitution of commonplace propaganda for his own reticent, melancholy satire".
[25] The film was a box office failure, posting the weakest financial loss in fiscal year 1954, one of the most expensive recessions of all time.
In 2004, Home Vision Entertainment released a "Special Edition" DVD of the movie in the United States, also licensed from Halas and Bachelor, which also included a documentary hosted by Tony Robinson.