New Adaptation of Animal Farm Blames Capitalism
A Hollywood animation of Animal Farm has sparked outrage for turning George Orwell’s classic story into a critique of capitalism and corporate corruption with a billionaire villain and a happy ending. The Telegraph has the story.
The final image in George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm is bleak and unforgettable: as the pigs and farmers drunkenly play cards around the dining-room table, the watching animals realise their porcine liberators have become indistinguishable from the human oppressors they replaced.
The moment exposes the lie at the heart of the Marxist promise of utopian equality. Yet a new animated adaptation of Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis, offers a strikingly different take.
The film, which spent 14 years in development and struggled to secure a distributor, retells Orwell’s 1945 dystopian classic through the eyes of Lucky, a plucky piglet whose character is invented for the adaptation and voiced by Gaten Matarazzo, the Stranger Things actor.
In this CGI retelling, Serkis, who rose to prominence as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings before turning to directing, has said he wanted to make Orwell’s work “accessible”, not “overtly political”, and suitable for a modern audience.
Rather than serving as a critique of totalitarian Soviet Russia, the film shifts its focus towards the dangers of capitalism and corporate corruption.
Serkis has also sought to give the story a more optimistic ending. Explaining why at a round-table discussion at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival last July, he said: “We wanted some hope.”
In the final scenes, Lucky confronts Napoleon, Orwell’s Joseph Stalin figure, voiced incongruously by Seth Rogen, before the animals overthrow their pig leaders and plan for a better future. …
Napoleon’s despotic traits appear muted when set against a new billionaire villain, Frieda Pilkington, voiced by Glenn Close, another invention for the film. She spends much of the story plotting to take control of Animal Farm.
The promotional clip shows stylised cartoon animals briefly living in apparent utopia before the pigs’ ideals are corrupted by Frieda, who is depicted driving a high-tech vehicle, which resembles Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybertruck. The producers said any resemblance to Mr Musk’s electric vehicles was accidental.
Worth reading in full and you can watch the trailer here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The UK cartoon version in the 50s also had a more upbeat ending but it kept the main themes.
I’ll stick to the book although modern sensitivities can be weird. We read it at a book club a few years back and I was amazed at the number of comments that it could be about capitalism and who didn’t get my point that it was a satire on the Russian revolution – I could even point out the characters. I gave up the club soon after.
There is the making of an interesting series here: “How I came to leave our local book club”.
Here’s how it happened to me.
The book in question was “The Good Soldier” by Ford Maddox Ford.
The members’ opinion was unanimous minus one (me): the book would have been improved no end had its events been told in strict chronological sequence and if only the narrator had been reliable.
Conrad, Tolstoy, Dickens … they all must be tossing in their graves, remorseful they missed out on stunning insights from modern book club readers.
I have to say I didn’t realise book clubs even read such serious literature!
I realised I was not representative of the general consensus as I loathed the first book we did “the modern classic” “One Day” – 2 horrible characters who should have left us all alone – and then when I described “The Handmaid’s Tale” as “pretentious drivel”
I read Animal Farm at school and, as you said, we discussed who was who in the characters and our teacher was surprised when we all knew that Trotsky had been killed with an ice axe. But then I guess the teacher was not familair with the works of The Stranglers.
New Adaptation of Animal Farm Blames Capitalism
How delightfully Orwellian!
First they steal the words…
People on the Left have all had an irony bypass.
Orwell would not be surprised. Stick to the book and don’t torture your eyeballs with this nonsense
Tinsel-town luvvie re-writes Orwell. Take a seat and get in the popcorn and rotten tomatoes.
Corporate corruption: representatives of private capital + representatives of organised labour + representatives of the State colluding for mutual benefit how the economy will be run = corporatism, which Mussolini thought best described Fascism.
It also best describes the modus operandi of every “democratic”, developed, “free market” Western government system, its prime example being the EU.
Why are only businesses accused of corruption, when Trades Unions buy politicians and skew government in their favour? The British Trades Unions own the Labour Party – evidence of that in the last two budgets and threatened new labour market regulation, and measures to restore the power of the Unions to pre-Thatcher days.
Some of us remember the regular Downing Street “beer and sandwiches” meetings in the 1960s/70s with a squad of Union officials going into No 10 to decide with the Labour Government how the Country would be run.
Shame. I met Andy when I was treading the boards in London. Amazing movement actor. Should have stuck to what he knows.