Yesterday evening, I saw the 1999 American version of Animal Farm on TV which I hadn’t watched yet, and it provoked extremely mixed emotions, mostly due to the ending. And no, I don’t mean that they added a “downfall of the regime” moment; that’s what they did in the cartoon, too, and I never expected this version to actually keep Orwell’s ending, with the pigs victorious and still in power.

However. Animal Farm, despite a more universal appliance, is very obviously a satire on the Russian Revolution and Stalinism. (Snowball as Trotzky, Napoleon as Stalin, etc.) And the 1999 movie kept these parallels much more than the cartoon had done. So the end, not a counterrevolution, but a breakdown complete with the arrival of new owners, a smiling, waving human family (blond to boot), which per voiceover gets defined as true freedom, pretty much ruined the film for me which until then I felt mostly positive about. Because Orwell? Wouldn’t have thought being taken over by new capitalists had anything to do with freedom. Better than Stalinist tyranny, yes. A free state of being? No.

The confusing thing is that until this point, the humans were presented as rotten, the film drawing the pigs/humans parallel long before the other animals did. Other new elements, such as TV being used as opium for the (animal) masses to keep them from protesting against the work conditions and the pigs taking more and more privileges, were well-thought of, either. So why the ending? Why not leave us with the breakdown, and the return of the exiled animals, or go, as the cartoon version did, for a counterrevolution, if you think Orwell’s ending is too depressing?

On that disgruntled note, happy new year, everyone.