![]() The film, by the studio of the British animation husband-wife team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor, features beautiful scenes but also grim ones. That does not invalidate the movie, because it sticks close to Orwell’s narrative. The CIA, it is now evident, financed the 1954 film. That turned into outright persecution when the Soviet-backed Reds accused the POUM of being “fascist.” He and his wife Eileen, who had joined him, escaped back to England, and the Reds convicted him in absentia of “Trotskyism.” His Animal Farm reflected much of what all this had taught him. The Englishman Orwell – Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950 – considered himself a “democratic socialist.” Traveling to Spain to fight for the Left in the Civil War there, in 1937 he joined the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), only to run into the factional disputes that plagued the leftist side. ![]() ![]() The movies do so, of course, via Orwell’s device of a story of farm animals who revolt against their human masters. Neither film is for children these are stark tales that, like the novel, well depict the brutality, terror, lies, violations of conscience, and disregard for life that murderous Communist Party regimes always inflict upon their enslaved subjects. ![]() The two movie retellings of George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm – the animated version from 1954 and the live-action-and-animatronics one from 1999 – each follow the author’s allegory about Soviet Communism, the 1999 film a little more so. ![]()
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