One of my favorite possessions is a 50th anniversary copy of George Orwell’s 1945 novella, Animal Farm, with illustrations by Gonzo artist Ralph Steadman, whose chaotic, ink-splattered satirical style only enhances the masterpiece.
I was thinking of this book as I watched the first trailer of the new animated adaptation of Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis and distributed by the socially conservative Angel Studios. From what I could tell, a biting allegory about the Russian Revolution, Stalinism, and dangers of collectivism was now a dumbed-down, generic Disney-like romp with virtually nothing to do with the book. As critics have noted, the film is “audience-friendly,” a movie that “trades a dystopian tone for something a little more uplifting.”
Deadline’s Pete Hammond wrote that the movie is “not outwardly trying to be political.” How is that even possible? It would be akin to making Orwell’s 1984 into a comedy about a single dude who gets annoyed with his overbearing boss. “Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole,” Orwell wrote in an essay literally titled “Why I Write.”
Now, destroying classic works of literature is something of a Hollywood tradition, so I don’t want to be a wet blanket. But if other reviewers are accurate, the movie is worse than a trite, ideologically neutral retelling of the book, but an act of cultural vandalism.
“Rather than serving as a critique of totalitarian Soviet Russia,” the Telegraph noted, “the film shifts its focus towards the dangers of capitalism and corporate corruption.”
One of the most powerful literary critiques of communism is now a farce, in which the pigs rebel against a billionaire corporate agribusiness mogul, the only kind of villain Hollywood is apparently capable of producing these days.
The plot sounds breathtakingly tedious.
Now, Orwell was no Milton Friedman — The Road to Wigan Pier details life in the industrial slums of northern England — but he was keenly aware of how socialism could slide into mass state corruption and tyranny. From D. J. Taylor’s biography:
“While he disagreed with the defence of the free market espoused by F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom – as classic a text in the canon of the post-war right as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were shortly to become for the left – he worried that its claim that collectivism was inherently undemocratic had a great deal of truth: by marshalling the whole of life beneath state control, socialism would necessarily transfer command to ‘an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to achieve it.’”
In the now-famous introduction originally intended for the first edition, Orwell warns that explicitly banning speech is not the only threat to a free nation. A society that self-censors unpopular opinions and slides into the moral morass of groupthink is also a danger. The author had an exceptionally difficult time getting Animal Farm published. Written during World War II, the Soviets were still fighting the common enemy, and Fellow Travellers and Stalin apologists littered the British publishing world. “At this moment, what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia,” Orwell noted.
WELCOME TO THE GLOBAL INTIFADA
We should be seeking truth in both journalism and literature. Yet, most of our cultural output these days is imbued with fake bravery, vapid moralizing, and postmodern gibberish. Perhaps the reviews and trailer misrepresent the final product. It’s quite likely, though, that Hollywood saw a book about anthropomorphized pigs and could not resist cashing in on the title and offering another inane cookie-cutter about greedy capitalists.
It’s all so extraordinarily boring and conformist. Two things Orwell was never.