Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Off topic
Ironically Disney pinched Bambi. They seemed to think because it was originally in German, that it was free. The original is an Anti-Nazi thing, just like Animal Farm is anti-Stalin.
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1.
Bambi was not registered properly in the US, so under the 1909 Copyright Act it was considered public domain in the US. (Similar, but not quite identical, issues with
Peter Pan, having to do with only one UK version being registered and Disney claiming to have used a different version.) The reasons for this go back to trade wars and hard feelings from British support of the Confederacy, which got hardcoded into the 1870 Copyright Act and not removed for a century (until the 1976 Copyright Act).
2.
Animal Farm's target was a lot wider than Stalin, although he certainly inspired a couple of particulars. For example, there's a basketfull of references to the French Revolution, beginning with naming one pig Napoleon and getting less overt after that. Orwell's target was "totalitarianism, with Stalin as a current example" (by memory so maybe slightly paraphrased, from one of his letters to Fred Warburg, the publisher).