Production
Filming began on August 25, 1998 and ending on November 6. Because of the extensive CGI work and other post-production requirements, the film was not delivered to TNT and Hallmark Entertainment until June 1999.
Fourteen animals were built to represent the animals of Animal Farm at Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London: four pigs (Old Major, Snowball, Napoleon and Squealer), two horses (Boxer and Mollie), a sheepdog (Jessie), a donkey (Benjamin), a raven (Moses), a goat (Muriel), a sheep, a rat, a chicken and a duck.
Ten dogs were cast into the film from Fircroft Kennels. Their Border Collie, Spice, played the role of Jessie.
In early screenplays done by Martyn Burke for this film, Jessie was set to be a male character, rather than a female.
It should be noted the patterns on Napoleon's skin are similar to that of his incarnation in the 1954 animated film of Animal Farm. It is unknown whether this is intentional or merely a coincidence.
Read more about this topic: Animal Farm (1999 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)