Whitewashing the Farm

By James Poniewozik

More than 50 years ago, George Orwell wrote a simple beast fable about a revolution devolving from idealism ("All animals are equal") to oppression ("...but some animals are more equal than others"). It's a sign of Animal Farm's power that it has never been wholly palatable. During World War II, the manuscript--painting Stalin as the (literally) piggish dictator who co-opts a barnyard revolution against humans--spooked publishers because the Soviets were allies against the Nazis. By the time an animated film was made, in 1955, the tale wasn't anti-pinko enough, so a propagandistic anti-swine uprising was added. The cold war over, Orwell's dark parable is now up against an older ideology--the tyranny of the happy ending.

But before this adaptation sullies the story with a new, supposedly upbeat epilogue, the animagicians of Jim Henson's Creature Shop use the technology that gave us Babe and countless taco commercials to create a stunning live-action version (TNT, Oct. 3, 8 p.m.). The challenge in bringing Animal Farm to life is not creating verisimilitude--there never will be a realistic talking donkey--but giving cuddly animals noble and historic heft. The film does so with a wisely chosen cast of voices (Ian Holm stands out as smarmy pig propagandist Squealer) and eerie visuals, from the crudely painted ANIMAL FARM sign at the commune's entrance to the pigs' grisly show trials. You'll have a hard time setting a rattrap after seeing a scapegoated (scape-ratted?) rodent swinging from a gallows. The film retains both the Russian Revolution parallels and Orwell's timeless warnings against slippery language and manipulation; in a clever if heavy-handed addition, pigs salvage a TV set from the farmhouse to keep the animals docile. And the filmmakers use ingenious images to dramatize how image control is essential to tyrants. When the hog Napoleon (voiced by Patrick Stewart) becomes absolute dictator, his apotheosis is celebrated by a martial chorus of foot-stomping ducks in a perfect and hilarious imitation of a Stalinist propaganda musical.

If you don't want to know the new ending of the tale, stop reading. In fact, this would be a good point for its fans to stop watching. In the post-Soviet-era conclusion, a group of dissident critters escapes the farm and lives to witness its collapse and Napoleon's fall. We flash forward to see order and peace restored--by a handsome blond family of new human farmers. It's a tiny change, a couple of minutes in all, but a baffling one that squares with neither history nor Orwell's vision. Who are these interlopers? The Czars? Boris Yeltsin? The IMF? It's not clear. But surely the implication--that the masses' self-rule was a foolish aberration--is not one the author, who nearly died fighting for democracy in the Spanish Civil War, would have considered a feel-good send-off.

--By James Poniewozik