when one of George Orwell's most important works was adapted into a movie, the CIA had the final say over its closing moments. That film is Animal Farm, a classic anti-establishment story about rebelling against power. After Orwell died, the film's rights to Animal Farm were purchased by two men, and both were undercover CIA agents. This was in 1954, the height of the Cold War and the Red Scare. When the fear of communism was at its peak, the CIA funded the entire animation. They hired British animators, avoiding American studios to create distance and because the agency distrusted Hollywood animators during the Red Scare and they rewrote the ending.
In Orwell's book, the animals look through the farmhouse window and can't tell the pigs from the humans. The line says, quote, "The creatures outside looked from pig to man and from pig to man and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which." This is the whole point. Revolution replaces one set of oppressors with another. Capitalism and communism are equally corrupt. The CIA couldn't have that message going out. So, their version ends with the animals triumphantly overthrowing the pigs in a second revolution. Communism bad, rebellion good, America wins by implication. See, watch how they storm the building and show it doesn't imply the same message as the book at all. It's subtle, but the new version reinforces the division between good and bad. It creates a moral precedent that corrupt systems can be overthrown and replaced with something better, which is a really comforting thought unless you realize it's exactly the story the CIA tells every time it topples a government.
Orwell's ending says the opposite that power corrupts regardless of who holds it and that revolution just replaces one set of oppressors with another. The director Joy Bachelor strongly opposed the change. So the CIA threatened to pull financing. The intelligence officer E. Howard Hunt, who later became involved in the Watergate scandal, said the film was quote carefully tweaked to heighten the anti-communist message.
