Animal Farm (1999 TV Movie)
5/10
Animal Farm is NOT a children's film
27 July 2012
I really do wish people would get that into their heads. Just because it's about barnyard animals with no sex or adult language, doesn't mean that's necessarily for kids. It's, as many people well know, a metaphor for the atrocities of the Soviet Union under Stalin. It's bleak, nasty and upsetting, but it speaks the truth on the hypocrisy of leaderships, corruption and fascism.

And yet they decide to portray the story as though it's a children's film, with live action talking animals, with a special lighting to make it look child-like and family friendly. No! This is not what George Orwell's tale is about. The book is extremely depressing, but in this film, and especially the ending, they made it look like the things that happened were no big deal.

It's true that in real life, Stalin's regime collapsed on itself, "a victim of its own malice" in the end, but it would have been better if it wasn't depicted in the movie. Jesse, the sheepdog, serves as a narrator, and seems to predict and see through the evils of Napoleon, and yet does nothing about it. All the animals in the book apart from the pigs could not see what was going on due their myopia and little intelligence. And the violence was also very subdued.

If another adaptation should be done, it should be more gritty and truer to the novel, and to get the point the Orwell was intending point out.
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