Recent years have witnessed a worrisome trend in Hollywood and the movie industry in general: Filmmakers producing new versions of classic works of literature by modernizing the story with an eye toward contemporary relevance at the cost of historical authenticity or accuracy. Sometimes it works. The comedy Clueless (1995), written and directed by Amy Heckerling, was a brilliant retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma, with the plot and characters of 19th-century Regency England transplanted to late 20th-century Beverly Hills. A more recent example of this trend is Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Scheduled for release July 17, the Nolan version is promoted as a direct adaptation rather than a modernization, one in which Helen of Troy, the archetypal Greek beauty, is played by Lupita Nyong’o, a Kenyan-Mexican actress. (She is also cast in the role of Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra.) Classics scholars with a traditionalist outlook have objected that an adaptation—rather than “version” or “modernization”—should respect the source material. A verdict from the critics awaits the release of Nolan’s film.
We do not need to wait, however, for an assessment of Andy Serkis’s new film of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Regrettably, it is a misfire. Even if we call it a “version” or a “modernization,” explicitly ignoring claims by its promoters that it is an “adaptation” of Orwell’s allegorical satire of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, its changes to Orwell’s original are disappointing to say the very least.
The British actor-director Serkis, known for his standout performances as the motion-capture Gollum that distinguished the Lord of the Rings series, has decided to adopt features of both the Heckerling and Nolan strategies. The result is a hodgepodge. For instance, Serkis transports us from a farm in mid-20th-century England to the 21st century (presumably the USA, given that the animals speak American English and “Beasts of England,” the original animals’ hymn to revolutionary freedom, has been deleted). These changes are combined with “modernizing” decisions that include: changing Snowball into a sow and making the British farmer Pilkington into a boss babe, a high-powered female executive (voiced by Glenn Close, no less) eager to do deals, including double-dealing—with Napoleon (voiced by Seth Rogen).
The single chief alteration of Orwell’s fable is the invention of a new protagonist, whose significance in the Serkis adaptation partly displaces both Napoleon and Boxer (voiced by Woody Harrelson) from their central roles. Mr. Jones and Old Major (both voiced by Serkis) are completely marginalized. The star newcomer is a piglet named “Lucky,” whose perspective serves as a lens for the viewer to judge events. (In an interview, Serkis professed lifelong infatuation with Orwell’s Animal Farm but said that Orwell failed to “give the story a compelling point of view.” That “failure” prompted Serkis to create Lucky so that the story would have a narrative anchor. Lucky begins as Napoleon’s protégé (largely sidelining Squealer) and (spoiler alert!) winds up as the conspiratorial leader of a successful coup against the increasingly dictatorial Napoleon. The irony—and potential counterrevolutionary implications—of a new pig regime replacing the old one on “Animal” Farm seems lost on Serkis.
From Print to Celluloid: Animal Farm and the Early Postwar Era
Let us recall that Serkis was working with a story that has been celebrated since its original publication in August 1945 as a contemporary classic that stands comparison with the greatest works in the genre, ranging from Aesop through La Fontaine and Swift to Anatole France’s Penguin Island. Reaching print after a series of rejections and delays largely attributable to a mix of Cold War diplomatic sensitivities and outright hostility from left-wing Stalin-supporting editors, it did not appear until two weeks after Hiroshima and the end of World War II. (Some American editors rejected it for other reasons. Dial Press, for instance, declined politely—and apparently with full naiveté—that its market did not include animal stories.)
The timing did, however, prove auspicious, for it made Animal Farm seem like a prescient work just as the Cold War was dawning. If it had appeared soon after Orwell completed it, in early 1944, it might have disappeared, a victim of the growing solidarity between the Western Allies and “Uncle Joe” and his USSR. By August 1945, the climate was changing. Animal Farm was an immediate literary success, hailed repeatedly in the British press as a satirical masterpiece on a par with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
When it reached American shores exactly one year later, in August 1946, the alliance with the Soviets was showing large fault lines, and the satire’s entry helped detonate the earthquake that erupted in a full-blown Cold War within the year, starting with the Soviet-dictated establishment of a communist “People’s Republic” in Bulgaria two weeks later, the rigged Polish elections in January 1947 in which Stalin’s handpicked Communist leaders swept to power, and Harry Truman’s announcement of the Marshall Plan in June. The following year witnessed the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the start of the Americans’ Berlin Airlift operation in response.
The fable ‘s polemical value was soon recognized by educational officials on both sides of the Atlantic. During the next decade Animal Farm found its way into school curricula. For many young people, it represented their first exposure in literary form to the evils of Stalinism that had been rationalized or repressed by the Anglo-American intelligentsia for almost four decades.
Unfortunately, this new level of exposure to both the American and British public coincided with (and was partly owed to) the rise of McCarthyism, the anti-Communist campaign led by Senator Joseph McCarthy during 1950–54. Thus a cartoon version, with financial backing from Cold War front organizations supported by the CIA, appeared in December 1954.
The Animal Allegory That Isn’t
Ironically, in hindsight, despite the McCarthy-era slant, the 1954 film comes across today as a relatively faithful and sophisticated adaptation of Orwell’s fable. The plot, characters, and setting largely correspond to Orwell’s original. Although I criticized it sharply when I [Rodden] showed it to high school and college students in the 1970s and ’80s, it is nevertheless a far superior work of satiric art to Serkis’s version. The Cold War version does waffle; it tacks on a “happy ending” in which the animals overthrow the pigs (the Communists)—but this is less a distortion than Serkis’s pig-led revolution against Napoleon. (It is notable that the 1999 adaptation—which features “animatronics,” an early version of talking animals—presents a mix of American and British voices and also includes an upbeat ending.)
If Serkis’s changes were merely concessions to current politically correct sensitivities—such as the obeisance to feminist orthodoxies (yielding to the anachronistic piety that you can’t have a classic without a few female leaders)—it would be merely regrettable. (Inexplicably, he also makes Benjamin into a female donkey, voiced by Kathleen Turner, yet keeps the male name, which adds to the confusion experienced by many viewers.) Historically, beyond the absurdity of making Snowball-Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army, into a sow and combining the figures of Pilkington and Frederick into a sleek, fast-talking, pants-suited female with a seductive Southern drawl and a Pixie cut, Serkis adds another female character, “Puff.” She is Lucky’s romantic interest. Yet Puff herself is the real hero – or heroine—of Serkis’s Animal Farm. She is the one who shames Lucky when he bleats in sheep-like fashion Napoleon’s slogans and defends his opinions. It is Puff who encourages Lucky to betray Napoleon—a move that luckily wins Lucky her admiration and love despite all his previously luckless attempts, attributable to obtuse coaching from Napoleon. Amid all this, however, the feminist angle is torn with contradiction when we turn to Napoleon’s own femme fatale “love interest.” Now that “Freida Pilkington” is a woman, a rich capitalist who drives a Tesla and envies Napoleon’s success, Serkis can’t resist making her employ her (feminine) wiles to corrupt him.
While all this is regrettable, it need not have been disastrous. If the changes had been limited to a series of isolated obfuscations and interpolations, they might be forgivable. Added to other, similar changes, however, the consequences of such alterations are ultimately calamitous, adding up to far greater losses in the aggregate.
What alterations? First, a fundamental transformation of Animal Farm from an allegory to no more than a loose satire on the cliché “Power corrupts” (a misreading of Lord Acton’s original “power tends to corrupt”). That tiresome platitude represents a distortion that completely robs the film of its moorings in history and utterly obscures the fact that its plot and characters represent exact correspondences with the fateful march of Soviet history between 1917 (or even the failed Russian revolution of 1905) and 1943 (the Allies’ wartime summit meeting, the Teheran Conference that November). Bleaching the story of its ingenious allegorical correspondences facilitates Serkis’s second alteration, whereby he turns a satire that is first and foremost a critique of Stalinism (i.e., state socialism) and (more broadly) totalitarianism into a full-blast denunciation of capitalism (above all, Western and specifically American consumerism).
Orwell’s Napoleon is shrewd, cruel, and manipulative—just as Stalin was. In Serkis’s retelling, however, he is neither that figure nor the Western propagandists’ wartime image of their avuncular ally, but rather merely a slimeball. Napoleon invites Lucky to call him “Dad,” claiming that they have a father-son relationship, which can only be described as creepy. The film indulges in juvenile (“piggish”) vulgarity, supposedly justified as a shot against the Free World and the free market. “You want freedom?” Napoleon declares. “Ah, THAT is freedom!” he exclaims as he lets out a loud, stinking fart. This is supposedly a critique of the consumerist indulgence run amok to which the unregulated free market is prone. One imagines that Serkis is taking a shot at conservative / libertarian free-market followers of Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. (Or equally likely: Friedrich Hayek’s market capitalism. That would conveniently ignore the fact that Orwell was a strong, if worried and ambivalent, admirer of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.)
Some ARE More Equal Than Others
What does all this add up to? Sadly, I [Rodden] quizzed three high school students of my acquaintance—who were grandchildren of colleagues—about the film. I asked a few simple questions. They already knew that Animal Farm was a satire of Stalin’s Russia. Still, even with that key, they did hardly better at interpreting the film than the editors at Dial Press who misread the original fable as a mere “animal story.” They could not spot the Hitler-Stalin pact, didn’t know that the windmill (or Serkis’s “water mill”) referenced Stalin’s Five Year Plan, had no idea that “Freida Pilkington” represented a composite of the U.K. and Nazi Germany, had no idea that the female Snowball corresponded to Leon Trotsky, and assumed that Lucky and Puff possessed genuine historical analogues.
Their bewilderment is revealing, for their misunderstandings had chiefly to do with Serkis’s muddled “modernization,” not the students’ ignorance. Certainly adults with hazy memories of reading the fable decades ago as schoolchildren themselves will be equally perplexed. The film consciously and deliberately destroys the historical foundations of the film and distorts it into a diatribe against capitalism and “Americana.” Serkis sends history “down the memory hole”—to cite another famous work by his allegedly beloved, if maladroit, author.
Alas, some imaginative artists are more equal than others. A few months after Animal Farm achieved bestseller status in the U.S. thanks to its adoption by the Book of the Month Club and mostly glowing reviews, Orwell wrote in “Why I Write” (1946) that his lifelong aspiration had been to “turn political writing into an art” and that he believed, with Animal Farm, he had done it. He was right.
In the end, Andy Serkis’s Animal Farm has little in common with George Orwell’s, except for the broad outline of a plot and the identities of several characters. Serkis thinks he knows better than Orwell how to tell the fable. Rather than serve Orwell’s classic, he thinks he can outdo him.
That attitude is visible everywhere in this film and attests to the filmmaker’s Napoleonic ambition. That is why this film flops. A magnificent actor with relatively little directorial experience, Serkis overreached. His star cast notwithstanding, their voices cannot compensate for the litany of poor directorial choices. No longer is Animal Farm an ingenious work of historical satire and an acrid broadside against what Orwell called “the Soviet myth—the myth that Russia is a socialist country.” Stalin’s Russia was no more “socialist” in Orwell’s view than was Nazi Germany: Stalin’s “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” was little better than Hitler’s “National Socialism.”
All great literature transcends its time and place. Like the aforementioned immortal works to which critics have compared it, Orwell’s Animal Farm was written for his age and for the ages. Animal Farm is more than a fable; it is a parable. Its moral lesson is even more compelling than its political warning: When men become beasts, “animalistic” behavior follows, in the form of slave empires, tyrannical oppression, and even state-sanctioned mass murder. That is a road to serfdom to which all “isms” that seize power are susceptible. That is what occurred in the two worst totalitarian regimes whose unconscionable, horrific crimes Orwell witnessed at a distance and condemned with a fury.
It does not undermine the valid claim that Orwell’s artistic achievement in Animal Farm transcends its historical moment and ideological target—even 80 years into the future. Though Animal Farm excoriates a specific regime and manifestation of tyranny that the democratic socialist George Orwell relentlessly and outspokenly castigated throughout his entire adult life, it is also a warning for us today. That is fundamental—and the kids didn’t get it and won’t get it. Adults with vague recollections of reading (or watching) Animal Farm decades ago in school won’t either.
I fear Serkis’s Animal Farm may also leave you … clueless.
