assignment #3: animal farm.

Recently, I decided upon a paper topic for my International Representing Politics course. One of the topics on our class blog covered American propaganda tools used through Hollywood movies. It’s something that I’ve always suspected, but apparently, the government recently made it pretty blatant that they’re running the show (in some aspects).

 

One of my favorite books from my younger years would be Animal Farm by George Orwell. He’s gifted at really identifying a political concept and manifesting it in different settings as he also did with 1984. In the novella, the animals of an abusive and neglectful farmer decide to revolt under the created principles of Animalism by Old Major, a wise pig on the farm. Shortly after his death and the revolution, Animalism begins to change as different pigs take charge and interpret its principles. This follows until the one moralistic pig, Snowball, is exiled from the farm by his political opponent, Napoleon, who transform Animalism and the Animal Farm into a totalitarian regime under his rule. I highly recommend the novella as it’s short, but powerful. I cried, but that’s probably because I’m an emotional person in general.

The book is a commentary on the Soviet Union’s form of Communism though when I read it, I felt it was very anti-American. Perhaps I was just young and impressionable.

Animal Farm was subsequently made into a cartoon movie, which was the first British release of an animated film. I recently watched the movie on Youtube, finding it to be very anti-Soviet. And I’ll need to read the book again, but I don’t remember there ever being communication between the animals of Animal Farm and those of other farms. It was just between the Animal Farm pigs and humans, no? That seemed to be a major distinction between the book and film. There was this sense that Animalism could easily influence AND spread to the weak and disenfranchised. 

But this should come as no surprise as it has since been discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency, aka the CIA was a covert investor in the film though it was British. Why? Because the CIA wanted to promote anti-Communistic art. Interesting, no? Further investigations must be had. In contrast to the book’s ending, the film ends with animals from across farms joining together in a second revolution to defeat Napoleon. I suppose this was also a call for humans to join together to defeat Soviet Russia! 


The second Animal Farm was a live action film made in 1999. I also watched that film recently, and I must say, they did great work on recreating the pig body of Old Major. Even though he had about five minutes of talking before he was shot and hurled himself out of a barn window, those five minutes were glorious. The film does try to stay true to the book. As opposed to the animal noise singing of the “Beast of England” anthem of the former cartoon, this movie had the animals singing all songs. It’s not really polite to have children singing pro-Communism songs at the dinner table is it?

There was also less an emphasis on the spreading of Animalism to other farms. And at the end, Animal Farm merely was a crumbling relic as was this case during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Though I’ll need to do more research, I suppose that there was less of a need to combat a Communistic threat, and the filmmakers were freer to operate and construct the story as they wished.

I’m excited to write this paper as I always like digging up a bit of dirt. But not with my snout. I’m not a pig.