Posted on 05/01/2026 6:05:53 AM PDT by Red Badger
Today, Angel Studios releases an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in theaters across the country. Conservative parents have a far better option that costs nothing more than a library card and an afternoon of their time. Read the book to your children instead. The novella runs roughly 30,000 words and takes the average reader about two hours to finish. With a child asking questions along the way, you have a three-hour education in the nature of power, the seductions of utopian rhetoric, and the bitter arithmetic of revolution. The film offers something else entirely. The film offers a lie wearing Orwell’s name.
The deception begins with the premise. Orwell’s 1945 novella was a surgical attack on Soviet collectivism, written by a man who had personally watched Stalinist factions in Spain hunt and disappear his fellow soldiers. The book ends in calculated horror — the pigs walking on two legs, indistinguishable from the humans they replaced, the animals beneath them no freer than they were under Mr. Jones. There is no rescue. There is no triumphant reformer.
Director Andy Serkis, in his own words at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, decided audiences needed something different. “We wanted some hope,” he explained. So the new film grants the animals a successful second uprising against Napoleon, a brighter future, and a freshly minted villain — a billionaire businesswoman named Freida Pilkington, voiced by Glenn Close, who reportedly drives something resembling a Tesla Cybertruck.
Orwell did not write a story about capitalist greed corrupting an honest revolution. He wrote a story about the revolution itself being the corruption. The pigs were always going to become the farmers. That was the thesis. Replacing it with a tale about how collectivism would have worked just fine if not for an outside capitalist meddler is not adaptation. It is inversion.
What Orwell Actually Wrote
The substance of the book matters here, because the entire scandal of the film depends on understanding what is being replaced. Animals on Manor Farm overthrow the drunken, neglectful Mr. Jones. The pigs, the cleverest of the lot, assume leadership. Seven Commandments of Animalism are painted on the barn. Equality is declared. And then the slow, grinding work of betrayal begins.
Each commandment is rewritten. Each promise is hollowed out. Boxer the loyal workhorse is sold to the knacker once his usefulness expires. The pigs move into the farmhouse, sleep in beds, drink whiskey, and eventually walk upright. The book closes with the animals staring through a window at pigs and humans playing cards together, unable to tell which is which.
That ending is not a creative misstep Serkis was correcting. It is the entire moral argument. Orwell’s claim was that the seizure of power, regardless of who does the seizing, contains the seeds of its own corruption. There is no purified vanguard. There is no incorruptible leader who will deliver the equality the slogans promised. The structure itself is the trap. To remove that ending is to remove Orwell.
The Inversion Is the Tell
In a Washington Examiner op-ed defending his film, Serkis wrote that his characters “enthusiastically embrace capitalism” and rebel only against corruption. Read that sentence again. Orwell’s animals were not rebelling against capitalism. They were rebelling against a man. The pigs that took power afterward were not capitalists. They were communists who became indistinguishable from the men they replaced — Stalin’s Soviet Union shaking hands with the very Western powers it had once denounced. Serkis has not added a new theme to Orwell. He has surgically removed Orwell’s actual theme and stitched in its opposite.
One viewer summarized the film’s apparent message on X with brutal economy: “It’s 2025. And Animal Farm is a movie about communism working, and being ruined by capitalism.” The reaction was not paranoid. It was descriptive. When the new villain is a businesswoman in a Cybertruck, when Napoleon (voiced by Seth Rogen, of all people) is played for slapstick and flatulence jokes, when the slaughterhouse van that hauls Boxer to his death is rendered as a visual pun where the “S” is hidden so the sign reads “laughterhouse” — these are not the choices of artists honoring a difficult text. These are the choices of an industry that cannot conceive of a villain who is not a corporation, or of a corruption that does not have a capitalist address.
The Read-Aloud Alternative
Parents have an option that the film cannot match at any budget. Buy a copy of the book, or download it free from any number of public domain repositories. Sit on the couch with your children. Read a chapter a night, or take a Saturday afternoon and read straight through. Stop when something needs explaining. The questions will come — about Old Major, about the windmill, about why the sheep keep bleating slogans, about what happens to Boxer. Each question is a door into a conversation about ideology, propaganda, the manipulation of language, and the tendency of revolutionary movements to devour their own. There is no streaming subscription on earth that delivers that kind of formation.
Children old enough to handle Animal Farm are old enough to handle a sad ending. In fact, they need them. The reason Serkis felt the need to insert hope is the same reason a generation of parents has been told to shield children from any narrative without redemption. But Orwell’s bleakness was a kindness. He was telling readers, including young ones, that the world contains real evils that cannot be solved by the right slogan or the right leader. That lesson matters more, not less, in an age of utopian political rhetoric. The book gives you a vocabulary for recognizing manipulation that no animated feature with a cheerful third act ever could.
The Influencer Problem
Then there is the matter of the conservative commentators who took Angel Studios’ money to promote the film. The disclosures are not the issue. Posts tagged #AnimalFarmPartner are doing what the Federal Trade Commission requires. Disclosure is the floor of ethics in paid promotion, not the ceiling. The real question is what an endorsement is supposed to mean coming from someone who built an audience on conservative principles and Christian conviction.
Sponsorship is a legitimate business arrangement. Plenty of honest commentators, this writer included, run sponsorships and promote products they actually believe in. The line is simple. A sponsorship is an endorsement. An endorsement is a statement of belief. When a commentator who has spent years warning audiences about cultural manipulation by Hollywood accepts payment to recommend a film that inverts an anti-collectivist classic into anti-capitalist messaging for children, the disclosure tag does not redeem the act. It documents it. The audience is not paying attention to a commentator because they want to know what that commentator has been paid to say.
They are paying attention because they assume a baseline of trustworthy judgment behind the words. That trust is not a renewable resource.
Tim Pool, to his credit, publicly refused Angel Studios’ advertising buy. His public statement was direct — the film is shockingly offensive, pro-communist, anti-capitalist, with pro-leftist terrorism elements. Whether one agrees with every word, the principle is correct. There are checks one writes that should not be cashed, regardless of the dollar amount printed in the corner. Other conservative voices took the money anyway and now find themselves in the awkward position of having recommended a movie that argues precisely the opposite of what their audiences trust them to argue.
What Angel Studios Owed Its Audience
Angel Studios built its reputation on The Chosen, on Sound of Freedom, on a deliberate appeal to Christian families and conservative investors who were tired of being condescended to by Hollywood. The studio’s defense, that it is the distributor and not the producer of Animal Farm, falls apart on the simplest examination.
Distribution is a choice. The Angel logo is on the poster. The marketing budget is being spent. The hashtag campaign exists. A studio whose entire pitch is that it serves audiences other studios ignore cannot now hide behind the fact that someone else made the film. The decision to release this particular film, with this particular politics, on this particular date — the international communist holiday of May Day, no less — is a decision Angel Studios owns.
The deeper warning is the same warning Orwell built his whole novella around. Movements lose their way not in a single act of betrayal but in a thousand small accommodations to the prevailing pressures. Each accommodation is defensible on its own. Each comes with a reasonable explanation. The cumulative result is a rebellion against Mr. Jones that ends with new pigs sitting at his table.
Read the Book
Skip the theater. Pick up the novella. Spend the afternoon with your children. Let them sit in the discomfort of an ending that refuses to lie to them. They will remember the experience long after every animated frame Angel Studios releases this year has faded from memory.
The pigs in the book are always already walking on two legs. The tragedy is that the animals never notice when it happens. The greater tragedy would be raising a generation of children who never learn to notice either.
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Why would Angel Studios make such a terrible movie?
Animal Farm is presented as greedy pigs replacing the humans but in Collectivism, the farm animals would never see those who were ultimately pulling the strings. The pigs are just the bureacrats, living in the house, eating better food, etc. Who would be those behind the curtain controlling them?
Vultures and/or crows might be candidates for the role. Vultures or crows could fly away if necessary and repeat the same on another farm.
What's also missing is that while the animals bleated along blindly because they were stupid, some of those animals would have been smart enough to know what's going on and getting paid to facilitate it; a 'Judas Goat', rewarded for leading the others to slaughter. And not just a dumb animal who did it because of rewards, but one smart enough to know what they were doing and willingly betray the others for their own gain - the animal that knew it would never be one of the pigs, and maybe didn't care to be, and so wasn't doing it for power, but was doing it for its own self-serving interest.
These people who are promoting the new gaslighting version of Animal Farm are Judas Goats. Some are ignorant but some are very shrewd whores.
I understand the point you make, but I think it is less about actual authoritarian rule than it is (due to human behavior) the innate dishonest betrayal that always takes place of the people who support a change with good intentions that takes place in collectivist movements. (I pinged Samurai_Jack on this, as I think he and I may see it the same way)
I have often observed that one of the key cleavage points between Leftists (collectivists) and Conservatives (individualists) is a fundamental view of human nature.
Leftists believe human beings are innately good and clean, but are corrupted by things such as Poverty, Ignorance, and Disease (referred to collectively as "PID") and if those things can be remedied by collective solutions (from government) then we can achieve a utopian state of existence where no conflict, crime, or evil exists.
Conservatives believe (as did the Founders, and the framers of the Constitution) that potential evil exists in all men (a predominantly Christian view) and will manifest itself in an inexorable trend towards despotism in the government of other people and must be unsleepingly guarded against. This is exemplified in the famous quote from Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
It is this dynamic that is exemplified in Orwell's "Animal Farm", and in "1984" he illustrates what the inevitable end game is if a society takes the unchecked collectivist approach of the Left, instead of the watchful, restrictive approach of Conservatism.
Excellent post...I suspect Orwell might agree.
I could see for myself that Animal Farm the Movie was going to be an abomination when I saw the trailer one time. The animated animals were too cutesy cutesy for a story of such a serious nature. They probably don’t include the horse who works himself to death and then has his carcass sold to the renderers. I won’t be going to see it or watching it on a streaming service. I predict it will be a flop anyway because the target audience is children and they would have to market a line of toys.
I have one complaint about the article which is that if conservative “influencers” are promoting it, who are they? Shouldn’t they give some examples if they are trying to sell that particular story?
I am baffled by this as well. Could it be that the concept of bastardizing this fantastic work by Orwell in order to appeal to a segment of the modern Day population that believes that corporations are evil in order to get more money was the driving force?
It really bothers me. Could they have not seen (from an ostensibly conservative entity that Angel Studios purported to be) exactly how much of a betrayal of conservative principles that they supposedly held would be if they produced this movie in this fashion?
It is a bit depressing to consider.
The movie is Orwellian and anti-Orwellian at the same time.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.” — George Orwell, “1984”
If we keep going down the paths we are going down in this country, there may become a time where you will find yourself strapped to an interrogation table in the Ministry of Love, and an interrogator will be holding up a copy of Orwell’s original animal farm that you owned and telling you that you are guilty of “Wrongthink” and your attempt to hold onto it to validate your conclusion you have been systematically lied to is all in your head.
Much the same way that O’Brien told Winston that the little clip of newspaper that he held onto which constituted a solid source of truth to him, was simply a figment of his imagination.
All this, of course, right before they put your face inside the rat cage for owning that vintage hard-copy of “Animal Farm”!
In other words, Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania.
Hobbs v. Hume, with a little Locke for flavor.
SON: (stares blankly in confusion but says nothing)
SON'S FRIEND: YOU'RE A SPY! AN ENEMY! I AM GOING TO USE MY GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IPHONE APPLICATION TO REPORT YOU TO THE THOUGHT POLICE!
Or, a Hobbes with a little Rousseau for flavor v. Hume with a little Locke for flavor!
Exactly. It is distressing to consider.
There is the British animated film version from the 1950s
Sounds like what Roger Waters did on PF’s “Animals” album.
I have more contempt for fake conservative influencers than the big mouth progressives. The Libs dont hide who they really are.
“”Cautionary in a time where we see conservatism rising.””
***
And... in a time when the push from the radical left is increasing the possibility of a second Civil War... the unnerving question is...
“what if” the Deep State ghouls, supposedly on the anti-communist side, end up ruling it all? From the frying pan into the fire?
My point in citing them is that these philosophers formed the bases for debate in the Federal Convention. There wasn’t much Rousseau in there at the time.
Because they are run by socialist Mormons and other assorted heretics?
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