Animal Farm, Without Orwell
The famous allegory for Stalinism that is Animal Farm is a classic for a reason. One of George Orwell’s most famous works, the story drives home a powerful but straightforward message about the dangers of revolution and how power corrupts.
The new animated film of the same title by Andy Serki doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.
To sum up Animal Farm: a group of mistreated animals overthrow their drunken, neglectful owner and seize control of the farm. They establish a new system built on equality and shared ideals, promising a better life for all. But over time, power consolidates in the hands of a pig named Napoleon, who grows increasingly authoritarian. The original principles are gradually twisted and rewritten to justify his rule, and by the end, the pigs are exploiting the other animals just as brutally as the humans once did — becoming virtually indistinguishable from them.
Ridding the world of corruption is not as simple as casting out Napoleons.
Serkis’s Animal Farm, to be fair, preserves many of the original themes. Aside from the altered ending, the basic outline of the story remains largely the same. The animation is polished, the voice acting strong, and the film is competently produced overall. The decision to gender-swap Snowball — the idealistic pig eventually driven off the farm by Napoleon — feels unnecessary, though it has little real effect on the plot. The deeper problem is that several other changes to the story and its setting blunt the political clarity that made Animal Farm so powerful in the first place.
There is, admittedly, always some room to make changes when adapting a story. A measure of artistic license is not inherently a bad thing. Andy Serkis — also known for portraying the criminally underused Supreme Leader Snoke in the Star Wars sequel trilogy — made just this argument in an op-ed he wrote for the The Washington Examiner.
The question is similar to the famous Ship of Theseus thought exercise: how much of the original thing can you strip away before it becomes something else?
I wouldn’t presume to answer that question generally, but the line has certainly been crossed in this case. Rather than just being opposed by neighboring farmers (an allegory for anti-Soviet foreign governments) Serkis’s animal farm is subjected to economic pressure from a sinister corporate monopoly. Many of Napoleon’s actions are therefore tinged with the threat of economic coercion hanging over him.
In other words, Serkis’s Animal Farm is primarily about greed. This contrasts with Orwell’s Animal Farm which, in my view, is about human nature. To be fair, greed is certainly a part of human nature, but it’s merely one aspect of it. One of the better scenes in Animal Farm is when Napoleon takes his fellow pigs to a human shopping center, and he becomes visibly insecure at the people looking down at them.
Now, there is a lot to like about Animal Farm. The addition of Lucky, I thought, added something. Lucky is a pig that goes along with Napoleon until a pang of conscience makes him change sides and he leads an uprising against him. His character is well developed, and his arc makes sense. It’s inspiring, idealistic, and a good role model for children. It’s also, in my view, not in keeping with the central theme of Orwell’s work.
Orwell’s Animal Farm doesn’t have a happy ending, and that change is the primary reason why I think the movie misses the moral mark. One could argue that’s simply because, at the time the original book was written, the question of Stalinism and the Soviet Union was unresolved. Now, however, it has been. As we all know, once the Berlin Wall fell and the communists were brought low, everybody lived happily ever after. One might even call it The End Of HistoryTM.
In all seriousness, the notion that, this time, the revolution is being led by the right people and will lead to a happy ever after for everyone is ludicrously naive and not in keeping with Orwell. Perhaps the most profound statement of that is from Serkis’s op-ed, where he says that his film “has no ideology, but it does have idealism. Our characters enthusiastically embrace capitalism. What they rebel against is corruption.”
That’s the fundamental mistake. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it, the line between good and evil is not between people, but runs through every human heart. Ridding the world of corruption is not as simple as casting out Napoleons. Given the ending of the film one would expect that Lucky would become the next Napoleon, unless we’re to believe that he’s just so virtuous that such power won’t corrupt him. One could argue that’s not a good story for kids. Perhaps it’s not. But that’s why you shouldn’t let the title confuse you: Serkis’s Animal Farm, whatever else you might say of it, is not Orwell’s Animal Farm.
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