Appreciating Animal Farm in the new millennium.

WITH THE APPROACH of the centennial of George Orwell's birth in June 2003, much attention is already turning to reassessments of his life and to the ongoing relevance in the new millennium of his masterwork, Nineteen Eighly-Four (1949). (1) Easily neglected amid the hoopla is the magnificent little beast fable of totalitarianism which launched Orwell's fame and which he often called his "favorite" book, Animal Farm (1945). This essay looks at how changing historical conditions have altered the reception of Animal Farm in the last decade--since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in December 1991. My focus is on how differently Orwell's allegory is being encountered by new generations in the twenty-first century--who are not even old enough to remember the existence of the Soviet Union. Extended consideration is devoted to a representative example of these changes and their implications: the remarkable film adaptation of Animal Farm and how its technological marvels are transforming young viewers' experience of Orwel l's allegory.

The Wonders of Animatronics 

In October 1999, Turner Network Television broadcast its $24 million adaptation of Orwell's Animal Farm, which was co-produced by Robert Halmi, Sr., and Hallmark Entertainment. The film is partly animated, with great British Shakespearean voice actors such as Patrick Stewart (Napoleon) and Peter Ustinov (Old Major) providing the animal voices. (2)

A refugee from Soviet-occupied Hungary during the early postwar era--and a man who also spent World War II in Budapest under Nazi rule--Halmisaid that he intended to do Animal Farm for decades, but that the technology was not available for a sophisticated animated version. Jim Henson's Creature Shop, a cutting-edge voice-tech firm, helped provide the combination live-action and animated effects that the movie incorporates. (3)

The new adaptation of Animal Farm-- the first since the 1955 British version by the husband-wife team of John Halas and Joy Batcheler--occurred as the news media were commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, originally published in June 1949. As a result, Orwell's Aesopian fable was lost in the long shadow of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It may take longer to watch Halmi's two-hour adaptation of Animal Farm than to read Orwell's little allegory of revolution and totalitarianism. Given the entertainment preferences in the age of the mass media, however, it is likely that many people in the future--especially school-age youth--will encounter Animal Farm first or exclusively through this spectacular new video version. The new adaptation merges computer graphics, humans and animals, and what is now termed in the animated film industry "animatronics"--animal robot "doubles" who possess human voices. Halmi used a dozen electronically controlled animal-like robots, developed by the wondrous animated technology of Henson's Creature Shop (the industry leader in "animatronics"). While such high-tech puppetry and computer effects had already been used to stunning effect in Babe: Pig in the City (1998), the adventures of a civic-minded pig, Hens on takes them further in Animal Farm. And it is these technological innovations that make the new Animal Farm a breakthrough film: the special effects are amazing. This is no simple "Mr. Ed" production: instead one would swear that the animals are talking.

Henson's feat accounts for why this new Animal Farm has recently appeared: the technology has made it possible. Although the 1955 animated version of Animal Farm was followed by adaptations of the fable into a play (in 1964) and musical (in 1984), it remained best known in its literary version. Even the Halas-Batcheler film did not supplant the preference for the reading experience. Certainly this is a testimony to the beauty and power of Orwell's writing.

But another reason for the adjunct role played by the 1955 film adaptation, says Halmi, is that the Halas-Batcheler film could not have an impact dramatic enough to compete with readers' imaginations of the fable. Before animatronics, nothing substantially new on a technical (and imaginative) level could be done with Animal Farm. Once animatronics became highly sophisticated, it seemed timely to the producers to re-film Orwell's parable. Moviemakers finally had the technology to bring a cinematic Animal Farm fully to life. Added to animatronics for this production has been computer imaging--a technology used not just in Babe but also in Dr. Doolittle (1997)--which has allowed the animal images to appear utterly lifelike. The production shifts from film shots of the actual barnyard animals to the computer-image replicas, but it is practically impossible to tell the difference. The adaptation involves more than 100 real animals--pigs, donkeys, horses, ducks--as well as 15 animatronic creations. (4) Every anima l character in the film has three different versions: live, animatronic, and computer-generated. (5)

As Halmi's long-term desire to produce Animal Farm suggests, however, he also had compelling personal--and political-reasons for aiming to bring Orwell's allegory to the big screen. Although Halmi had previously adapted The Odyssey, Gulliver's Travels, and Alice in Wonderland for television--he is quite experienced in working on literary adaptations--he said in a 1999 interview that the work he has always most wanted to produce has been Animal Farm.

When Orwell published the British edition of Animal Farm in August 1945, Halmi was a young anti-Communist resistance fighter, battling Stalinism in his native Hungary.

"I was hungry...and surrounded by barbed wires and the so-called Iron Curtain," he recalls, stressing how inspirational Animal Farm was to him growing up. "We were completely isolated. You thought, 'Nobody knows about us, nobody knows what communism is, nobody knows what terror is.' And all of a sudden, Animal Farm was published and was smuggled into Hungary. It became my bible."

When Halmi was able to flee Hungary, he took Animal Farm with him. "I have lived with this book for more than 50 years," he says. As his career flourished, he frequently thought about producing AnimalFarm. But a live-action adaptation remained a seemingly impossible dream. Finally, by the mid-1990s, the science of movie-making caught up with Halmi's ambition to make pigs talk like commissars. (6)

Updating Orwell for the Screen

Of course, one could argue that if Halmi felt so reverent about AnimalFarm as his "bible," he would not have taken such liberties in altering elements of characterization and plot. Working closely with Halmi, screenwriters Alan Janes and Martyn Burke made numerous changes to Orwell's book. (7)

Some of the alterations are minor and add nothing to the plot. For instance, during Snowball and Napoleon's argument about building a windmill, Orwell does not include Napoleon urinating on the plans and Snowball saying, "You pig." Other changes may have unexpected implications for the viewing audience. For example, Janes and Burke add a fleeting sex scene of Farmer Jones and the wife of another farmer in bed together. The change is minor--presumably, it is meant to suggest Jones's moral corruption. But unfortunately, as the TV critic for the Los Angeles Times lamented, it might deter parents from watching the adaptation with their ten-year-old child.

Still other revisions seek to update Animal Farm by cleverly linking it to topics such as animal rights and vivisection. For instance, Stalin's purges and show trials during 1936-1938 are justified by the pigs as a violation of the "Crimes Against Animalism" code, an obvious allusion to the "crimes against the People" statutes of Stalin-era Communist regimes. Unlike Babe, the charming fable about a gallant piglet that herds sheep and helps a kindly farmer--or its darker sequel, Babe: Pig in the City--the Animal Farm adaptation features numerous scenes of animal abuse and oppression, perpetrated not only by the humans but also by the pigs. For instance, the film highlights barbarous torture scenes (including a grislyscene of an old hog being chopped up) and the cruel indifference to animals' fates after their productive years (especially the powerful, tragic scene of aged Boxer, the noble yet gullible cart horse, being sent to the glue factory). The effect of these scenes is to promote an anti-vivisectionist animal rights agenda--something approaching PETA propaganda.

Janes and Burke have also added a narrator: the sheep dog Jessie, who is played by a beautiful border collie. Following Orwell's plot and characterization, the logical candidate for such a role would have been Benjamin the donkey, an intelligent skeptic and wry observer of events on Animal Farm, the character often regarded as a stand-in for Orwell himself. But the adapters obviously sought an animal with whom viewers would have a natural sympathy: a collie was an unsurprising and reasonable choice. Making Jessie the narrator gives the story a consistent, sympathetic voice.

Another successful decision was to move the story's time line into the mid-1950s (Orwell ends the allegory with the 1943 Teheran Conference), which makes it possible to put a television in the barn, where it becomes a powerful propaganda device. Used by the pigs to distract the other animals, who instantly become mesmerized by its black-and-white images of pretty actresses and modern appliances, television is a more powerful opiate of the people than Marx ever dreamed of. Director John Stephenson uses vintage black-and-white newsreel footage as an example of the pigs' propaganda films. Drugged by TV, the rank-and-file animals are content to follow the Seven Commandments of Animalism painted on the barn by Squealer (the pig who symbolizes Pravda and the Soviet news agency TASS).

1 imagine that Orwell would have smiled with satisfaction at most of these changes. But it is also likely that he would have taken issue with the altered ending, a sort of epilogue that is meant to be more hopeful than his bitter final scene. (The 1955 Halas-Batcheler adaptation tried something similar: a barnyard rebellion to overthrow the tyranny of pig-rule, possibly inspired by the failed uprising against the Communist dictatorship in East Germany in June 1953.)

As Jessie remarks in a voice-over at the end of the film: "The walls have now fallen, the scars have now healed, and life goes on." These words give way to the strains of "Blueberry Hill," sung by Fats Domino. The farm's new owners are arriving: a man and woman, and their children. Not drunkards like Jones, they look reassuringly bourgeois, upscale, and suburban. Halmi's revisionist postscript is evidently intended as an allusion to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But it undercuts the seriousness of the film and bleaches it of its historical relevance to the early Cold War era and the specter of Stalinism crushing democracy throughout East Europe--thereby making it seem as if the recent passage from Communist tyranny to liberal democracy was as easy as walking up the driveway of the family farm.

AnimalFarm is "more about repression than Stalinism," director John Stephenson has remarked in defense of his Animal Farm ending. "You can see the characters in any organization, in any human group. They're typical of the human race." Stephenson added that Animal Farm has "become an anti-dictatorship book. It applies to Kosovo today as much as it applied to Hungary then."

Certainly the satiric scope of Orwell's fable is universal, but it needs remembering that Animal Farm is also an allegory, whose plot and characters have a specific correspondence to events in the U.S.S.R. from 1917 to 1943. The adapters' commercial "revisionism" is undeniably more innocent than the Communist sort, but it is nonetheless worrisome. By altering Orwell's allegory into a general diatribe against "repression," the adapters rob Orwell's fable of its historical moorings and risk misleading them about the events that it satirizes, especially since younger viewers (and even younger teachers) may be shaky on (or quite ignorant of) historical events of the first half of the twentieth century.

Moreover, younger viewers may approach Animal Farm as if it were just a dress rehearsal for Orwell's themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the fact is that, despite their similarity as "didactic fantasies," in the phrase of Alex Zwerdling, AnimalFarm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are notably different in their satirical techniques and targets. (8) Nineteen Eighty-Four satirizes not only the Soviet Union and Stalinism but also elements of Nazi Germany, American capitalism, and the British welfare state. Animal Farm, on the other hand, is an allegory of the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, with numerous one-to-one correspondences with key events in the U.S.S.R. But that totalitarian system collapsed almost a decade ago, making its history even more distant to a potential international viewing audience numbering in the hundreds of millions, including adolescents now encountering Animal Farm who were not even of school age when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. In light of these facts, a closer look at the fable's multivalent meaning, political significance, and historical context is warranted in this essay.

The misunderstandings of the new AnimalFarm film are not so different from the misunderstandings that have haunted young readers' experience of the book, and a detailed examination of the latter may assist the millions of young viewers who will soon encounter AnimalFarm on the screen (and perhaps never read the book). Having taught Animal Farm since the late 1970s both to high school and to university students, 1 have noticed how Orwell's fable engages and (inadvertently) misleads present-day readers. Thus the remainder of this essay explores the causes and consequences of the frequent misunderstandings that younger (or historically uninformed) readers of Animal Farm suffer. It is crucial not to approach Animal Farm merely as "great literature" that "transcends" its time and place, as one might do, say, with some of the poetry of the great modernist writers. Instead we need also to appreciate the specific historical and ideological conditions of World War II and the early postwar era, for both shaped Orwell' s conception of Animal Farm and how its original audience received it.

Orwell's "Animallegory": Genre, Context, Controversy

When George Orwell submitted Animal Farm in 1945 to Dial Press in New York, it was rejected with the explanation that "it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA." (9) The anecdote is comical in hindsight, but the editors at Dial Press were not the only readers of Animal Farm to make this mistake. British readers did so, too. Indeed, some British booksellers erroneously placed it in the "Children's Section" of their shops. (Orwell himself had to scurry around London to switch it to the "adult fiction" shelves). Indeed, many early readers of Orwell's little masterpiece apparently did not realize that it was a brilliant work of political satire. They read the book much as did the young son of the art critic Herbert Read, one of Orwell's friends at the BBC, who reported that his boy "insisted on my reading it, chapter by chapter...and he enjoys it innocently as much as I enjoy it maliciously." (10)

It does seem absurd to the knowledgeable present-day reader that the literary public of the 1940s could have read AnimalFarm "innocently," only on the literal level. We think: How could editors and publishers misjudge a sophisticated classic for a children's tale? How could they confuse an ingenious attack targeting the betrayal of revolution in general and the Soviet Union in particular for a simple animal story?

I find that today's college students are liable to make the same error, and the key to understanding their confusions has to do with the language and form of Animal Farm. In a certain sense, AnimalFarm has been victimized by its astonishing success as a political satire. Orwell's "simple" little book is quite "sophisticated"--and liable to deceive readers into taking it too lightly if they are inattentive to the parallels between the story and Soviet history. And these historical issues are themselves anything but "simple."

The fact is that AnimalFarm works so beautifully on its literal, surface level as an animal story that it may lull the unwary reader into staying on the surface, thereby misleading him or her into missing its underlying political and historical references. Ironically, then, it is a measure of Animal Farm's artistic excellence that it "fools" some readers into taking it for an animal story. The plain language, straightforward plot, and one-dimensional characters mask the complex subject matter and context. Animal Farm is simple on the surface and quite subtle beneath it. All readers--like the publishers of the 1940s who rejected the book-- think in terms of book categories when they read. We classify books as fiction or nonfiction, biographies or autobiographies--or, to refer to the present example: adult novels or children's tales, serious fiction or animal stories. Thus, the essential error of some readers "fooled" by AnimalFarm has been what Gilbert Ryle termed a "category mistake": they mistake its genre. They see only its surface message, misreading it as nothing more than a children's tale or animal story.

Indeed, Orwell's little book is both of these--on the surface. But that is not, first and foremost, what it is. As historically informed and artistically alert readers have long appreciated, Animal Farm is far more than an uncontroversial little children's book.

First, it is a political allegory of the history of the U.S.S.R.--sometimes jokingly referred to as an "animallegory." Traditionally, an allegory is a symbolic tale that treats a spiritual subject under the guise of a worldly one, such as Langland's Piers Plowman and Bunyan's Pilgrim 's Progress.

Secondly, Animal Farm is an allegory written in the form of a beast fable, in which the misadventures of animals expose human follies. Orwell draws on our cultural stereotypes of animals: Pigs have a bad name for selfishness and gluttony. Horses are slow-witted, strong, gentle, and loyal. Sheep are brainless and behave as a flock without individual initiative. Orwell's point of departure for the fable was a statement from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: "The worker in his human functions no longer feels himself to be anything but animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal."

Orwell adapts the literary forms of the allegory and beast fable for his own purposes. "The business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle," he once wrote, "is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it." (11) Orwell's symbolic tale takes a political subject and treats it under the guise of an innocent animal story. But Animal Farm also has a stinging moral warning against the abuse of power.

Like most allegories, Animal Farm operates by framing one-to-one correspondences between the literal and symbolic levels. Its events and characters function as a simple story on the literal level. But they also operate on a symbolic level for readers who know the "code." In this case, the key code is the history of Soviet Communism. Orwell subtitled Animal Farm as "a fairy story," but the subtitle was an ironic joke. He meant that his beast fable was no mere "fairy story," but that it was happening in Stalin's Russia, and that it could happen anywhere.

Parts of Orwell's "code" are easy to "crack." For instance, the pigs represent the Communist Party. The pig leader Napoleon and his rival Snowball symbolize the dictator Stalin and the Communist leader Leon Trotsky. Old Major is a composite of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the major theorist and the key revolutionary leader of Communism, respectively. "Beasts of England" is a parody of the Internationale, the Communist Party hymn. The animals' rebellion in Chapter 2 represents the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The battle of the Cowshed in Chapter 4 depicts the subsequent civil war. Mr. Jones and the farmers are the loyalist Russians and foreign forces who tried but failed to dislodge the Bolsheviks, the revolutionaries led by Lenin. The animals' false confessions in Chapter 7 represent the purge trials of the late 1930s. Frederick's stratagem to exchange banknotes for corn recalls Hitler's betrayal of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact in June 1941. The first demolition of the windmill, which Napoleon bl ames on his pig rival, Snowball, symbolizes the failure of the first Five-Year Plan, an industrial plan to coordinate the Soviet economy in the 1920s that did not bring prosperity. The second destruction of the windmill by Frederick's men corresponds to the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. The meeting of pigs and humans at the end of the story represents the November 1943 wartime conference in Teheran, which Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill attended.

If a reader misses such allegorical correspondences, he or she may completely misread the book. Moreover, an allegory can work on different levels. These two difficulties account for much of the confusion and controversy about Animal Farm. Readers who naively take it as merely an "animal story" miss the allegorical correspondences altogether. Readers who take Animal Farm merely as crude propaganda--as a vulgar diatribe against communism (or socialism)--fail to grasp the various levels on which Orwell's allegory is working.

The fact is that Animal Farm functions as an allegory on four levels. On the immediate verbal level, it is a children's story about an animal rebellion on a farm. As an animal story, the work invites the reader to respond compassionately to the sufferings of vulnerable beasts. We readers identify with the suffering and oppression of the poor animals.

Indeed, Orwell once explained that a scene of a suffering horse (who later became the model for Boxer) inspired him to conceive Animal Farm:

The actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became a ware of their strength, we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyze Marx's theory from the animals' point of view. (12)

Orwell's last line makes clear the larger purpose of his story. And it suggests the other levels on which the fable functions.

Beyond an explicit, literal level, then, are three symbolic levels on which Animal Farm operates. First, it is a historical satire of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet dictatorship, in which the precision of Orwell's allegory covers exact historical correspondences between the events of Animal Farm and Soviet history up to 1943.

Second, Animal Farm is a political treatise that suggests larger lessons about power, tyranny, and revolution in general. On this level, Orwell's book has a much broader historical and political message, one that is not limited to criticism of the Soviet Union.

Third, Animal Farm is a fable, or a "fairy tale," as Orwell termed it. It carries a universal moral about the "animality" of human nature. For instance, by the conclusion of Animal Farm, some of the pigs are walking upright and wearing human clothes: they are little different from corrupt human beings. Animal Farm mirrors our human world, which is sometimes referred to as "the human circus" because the various types of human personality can be compared to the character types of animals. Some humans are like pigs, others resemble sheep, still others can be compared to dogs, and so forth. On this level, Orwell's "fable" about human nature transcends both history and particular political events. We see how the fundamental characters of animals do not change. The animals behave consistently, whether in a noble or selfish spirit, through all the changes in the story from the feudal, aristocratic, conservative farm run by Mr. Jones to the modern, progressive, radical "animal farm" ruled by Napoleon.

If the young son of Herbert Read thought that Animal Farm was just an animal story, the reaction of the son of the poet William Empson also suggests the opposite tendency. Empson reported that his boy, a supporter of Britain's Conservative Party, was "delighted" with Animal Farm and considered it "very strong Tory [Conservative] propaganda." Empson concluded his letter about Animal Farm:

I read it with great excitement. And then, thinking it over, and especially on showing it to other people, one realizes that the danger of this kind of perfection is that it means very different things to different readers.... I certainly don't mean that that is a fault in the allegory.... But I thought it worth warning you (while thanking you very heartily) that you must expect to be "misunderstood" on a large scale about this book; it is a form that inherently means more than the author means, when it is handled sufficiently well. (13)

Thus, the allegorical form, as well as the complexities of international politics, contributed to misunderstandings about Animal Farm. Then and later, Orwell's book came to mean many different things to different people.

But some other editors of the 1940s, who saw quite clearly the political dimension of Animal Farm, also rejected it precisely for that reason. Indeed that was the major reason why Animal Farm was turned down by two dozen British and American publishers before gaining acceptance for publication. (T he scarcity of newsprint during wartime was another reason for its rejection by publishers.).

Given the wartime alliance among the Allies, some publishers deemed Animal Farm far too controversial to be published. Loyal to the united war effort, four British editors rejected Animal Farm because they did not want to risk offending the Soviet Union by publishing such a harsh assault on its history. In the U. S., numerous editors turned it down because they were Soviet sympathizers who considered Orwell's attack on the U.S.S.R. unbalanced and exaggerated.

And yet, public opinion in Britain and America changed toward the U.S.S.R. in 1945-1 946. As the need for wartime solidarity with the U.S.S.R. ended with the defeat of Germany and Japan, and as Stalin's armies aggressively occupied much of Eastern Europe, the West's cordial attitude toward the U.S.S.R. cooled. Publishers became more and more willing to criticize Stalin, who had been affectionately dubbed "Uncle Joe" during World War II. Now, with the war over, British and American policymakers judged the U.S.S.R. to be their greatest threat.

Ironically, Animal Farm now seemed to be a prophetic book, ahead of its time. Orwell seemed to have predicted the collapse of the Allied alliance and unveiled the Soviet dictatorship as the new enemy of Western democracy. Animal Farm seemed to forecast the upcoming international face-off: the Cold War between the democratic West and the Communist nations led by the U.S.S.R.

Another twist of ironic fate was at hand for Animal Farm. A book that had, just months earlier, been rejected by publishers as either an unmarketable "animal story" or a dangerous political book, became a runaway best-seller.

At the Millennium:

New Readers, New Misunderstandings

This short overview of the historical and literary issues pertinent to the composition and early reception of Animal Farm has contemporary relevance. No less than the early readers of Orwell's book, we today--film viewers as well as readers-- are prone to make similar errors about Animal Farm. Indeed we are probably far more likely to miss the political dimension of Animal Farm or, at minimum, to misunderstand the complex political situation of the 1940s that it directly addresses. For the historical context of Animal Farm, which covers a quarter-century ranging from the Russian Revolution (1917) to the Allies' wartime conference in Teheran (1943), is far removed from current issues in American international relations. Lenin and Stalin are little more than names to many young Americans today. Even World War II feels like a vague and distant episode to many Americans, a storybook event that American high school students study about in their textbooks.

My experience is that many young Americans do not even know that the U.S.S.R. ever existed or that it was dissolved a decade ago. Nor are they aware that the former republics of the Soviet Union are now separate, independent nations, with Russia constituting just one of 15 states of a loose confederation of nations known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. When I have taught Animal Farm to high school students and college undergraduates, my challenge has been to bridge the historical gulf between the current American scene and those events in the first half of the twentieth century that constitute the political background of Animal Farm.

Probably more so than with most twentieth-century works, it is vital to approach Animal Farm with an awareness of this context. As we have seen, the meaning and even the genre of the book are easily misunderstood without a rich appreciation of this context. And that context is rapidly receding now that the twentieth century has passed and we live in the post-Communist era of the so-called New World Order. So anti-Communism as a major political issue in the Western nations is virtually dead.

To appreciate Animal Farm today we need to understand how in the first half of the century Communism and anti-Communism were among the most significant issues in American and British political affairs. And to do this, we need to understand the original political background of that period, against which Orwell wrote his book. Although our increasing historical distance makes all that ever more difficult, we also possess the advantage of observing this period from a broader temporal perspective. Now that the Soviet Union has receded into history, the beginning decades of its development are easier to examine in light of new archival materials and apart from the political controversies that earlier generations had to confront.

Orwell's fable is even more valuable for young readers than ever before. Animal Farm may promote understanding of the history and international politics of the twentieth century, stimulate classroom discussion of distant historical events, and help explain (albeit in greatly simplified terms) the causes of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Viewers, as well as readers, will find that Animal Farm captures both the hope and the tragedy of the Russian Revolution, and that it provides an introduction to a few of the major figures in the history of Communism. Animal Farm is a fable that offers simple, valuable political lessons. Among them are the following: power corrupts; revolutions tend to come full circle and devour their peoples; and even good, decent people not only hunger for power, but also worship powerful leaders.

Animal Farm will continue, therefore, to serve as an aid to grasping twentieth-century history, both Russian and Western, and for understanding biographical and political issues related to the nature of socialism, the Russian Revolution, Marxist theory, and the abuse of language.

Conclusion

Animal Farm emerged from and has generated political controversy, but it has also sometimes been naively misjudged as unpolitical. Why has it been mired in historical controversy? Why has it been judged to be completely innocent politically? By examining in detail the historical and political context of Orwell's fable, students will better comprehend how and why such extremely opposed views of the book have arisen and will continue to arise (or even increase) with the new film adaptation.

But let us also not forget that George Orwell was a supremely gifted writer who judged Animal Farm as his literary masterpiece. As Orwell declared in his essay, "Why I Write": "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." (14)

(1.) For instance, the recent Orwell biography by Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Conscience of a Generation (New York, 2000), has received wide notice. So too has the recent essay collection, Orwell and Politics, edited and introduced by Timothy Garton Ash (London, 2000).

(2.) The star cast of actors furnishing the animal voices includes: Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Mollie the mare), Julia Ormond (Jesse the sheepdog), and Kelsey Grammer (Snowball). Peter Postlethwaite is featured as Farmer Jones.

(3.) As Halmi explained in a post-production interview: Another animated version, before the advent of animatronics, "just wouldn't have had the proper impact. Animation was done because live action could not produce the reality. I could not do it the way I wanted to do it, to be honest to the book, until I had the technology."

(4.) These and other technical details of the production are explained in "Secrets and Mysteries of Animal Farm," a half-hour documentary produced by Turner Network Television on the Henson Creature Shop and its animatronic livestock. Like the Animal Farm adaptation, the documentary also had its premiere in October 1999.

(5.) Halmi was not only meticulous about the special effects. He and his crew also created a magnificent backdrop for the movie by building an entire farm in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland, where the animals for the production were housed. He exercised particular care in his choice of the animals for the leading roles. "The most difficult part was casting the movie," Halmi said in one interview. "I went from farm to farm looking at pigs and horses to cast the characters. And then I had to use their babies--I had to mate them to have three or four piglets of the same kind to make the movie." For example, Halmi decided to use boars-uglier and nastier versions of their pig cousins-to portray Napoleon (Stalin), Squealer (the propagandist), and other members of the porcine leadership. He selected a dignified older workhorse to play Boxer, the dray-horse who represents the working class.

(6.) "Everything came together a couple of years ago, when the technology was not quite there," Halmi has stated. He notes that he and Henson's Creature Shop took advantage of existing technology to introduce new technical innovations in their Animal Farm adaptation, including an incredible animatronic hog for the starring role of Napoleon.

(7.) Nor has Halmi been reluctant to rewrite the Bible itself, as he showed in his version of Noah's Ark, which includes a band of pirates on the high seas who raid Noah's ship.

(8.) Alex Zwerdling, Orwell and the Left (Berkeley, 1974).

(9.) George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journals, and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London, 1968), Vol. 4,122. Hereafter referred to as CEJL.

(10.) Quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London, 1980), 344.

(11.) CEJL, Vol. 3, 222.

(12.) Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, quoted in CEJL, Vol. 4, 111.

(13.) Quoted in Crick, 444.

(14.) CEJL, Vol. 4, 56.

JOHN RODDEN is the author most recently of Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995 (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the forthcoming George Orwell: Scenes from an Afterlife (ISI Books, 2003).