Gregory Peck

'Animal Farm' (1954): George Orwell's 1945 satire about the curdling of Communism during the Stalin era isn't the kind of novel that screams film adaptation. The allegorical story details the power struggles between pigs, horses and chickens on a ranch, which leaves two choices:... more Dress up actors as barnyard tyrants (frankly, we'd have paid to see Gregory Peck and Doris Day in piggy suits) or go the 'toon route. Thankfully, producer Louis de Rochemont chose the latter route, and while the result only partially does justice to author's vision of power and corruption, this animated version manages to establish that cartoons didn't begin and end with Looney Toons. Given how close the movie's animated aesthetic is to its Disney and Warner peers, the use of two-dimensional drawings actually makes the film seem even more subversive; it's almost as if you're watching Porky Pig and Donald Duck leading the Bolshevik revolution. The fact that Orwell's bleak ending is changed to a victorious populist uprising (a stipulation by the film's benefactors, the CIA) doesn't make the effort to expand the horizons of '50s animation any less exceptional.