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.
Thanks for that clarification-I get your point...there wasn’t much discussion of Rousseau there at the Federal Convention, no doubt. It is interesting that Rousseau and Hume were once kind of friends, and there was animosity that grew over the years to where they became enemies, as their opposing views would drive them.
I have never watched it...if you have seen it (produced at a time when socialism was on the rise in England) what did you think of it?
I don’t like what the movie did, but Orwell did leave open the possibility that Snowball (Trotsky) was not corrupt and might have meant what he said, but was chased off as Napoleon consolidated power.
The pigs were in a tough position. The horses, dogs, cat and donkey did real work. The cows and goats provided real food. The pigs have no purpose but to be slaughtered and butchered. Maybe fed to the dogs. I am not even sure why Farmer Jones let Old Major become Old in the first place.
Yes...could happen...but, maybe not
Still, this new Animal Farm take is pretty shocking. Taking the exact opposite of the author, turning it on its head, is a full betrayal of truth. The kind of betrayal that Angel Studios will have to account for.
Angel Studios.....Whose ‘angel’?.................
Worse yet, “what if” our ‘side’ should prevail in such a conflict and having acquired the levers of power proceed to be corrupted by it. Tolkien taught us. There is only one safe outcome for the ring of power. It must be destroyed.
Well...guess some of us will have to be Revolutionaries, won’t we?
Angel’s angle: Baloney. (That may be a rhyme hint to answer your question.)
Of course...I was trying to be ironic about holding on to something that is being changed over time to suit and ideology so that you have physical proof that the change is a lie, and that attempt to do so would be held out as a crime by someone in the future!
“”Worse yet, “what if” our ‘side’ should prevail in such a conflict and having acquired the levers of power proceed to be corrupted by it. Tolkien taught us. There is only one safe outcome for the ring of power. It must be destroyed.””
***
Exactly my point. We have seen first-hand how corrupt our Deep State (RINOs) are. How weak they are while pretending to fight against the radical left. They are no better than the radical leftist Democrats running the nation into the ground. If we don’t have STRONG leaders that have morals, ethics and American traditional values... we’ve got nothing but guaranteed destruction.
That is major theme in literature beyond the political -isms found in Animal Farm.
I'm thinking Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street which is also a book I read fifty years ago.
In the sixties and seventies it was popular to crap on Lewis's Nobel prize.
On this forum Lewis's politics will be pointed out after he wrote the book.
As someone who grew up in the rural Midwest, I thought Main Street was a book which deserved its reputation.
Whether the "road to hell is paved with good intentions" has a Christian origin is not known.
But as Christian I accept it as profound as I would accept it if it had indeed originated in the Book of Proverbs.
It is ironic that both Orwell and Lewis would point out where good intentions most often lead although both were confirmed atheists.
“”Whether the “road to hell is paved with good intentions” has a Christian origin is not known.””
***
Not known for certain, but we’ve seen ample evidence that sublime stupidity coupled with ‘good intentions’ has had and probably always will have disastrous results.
Prime current example, the Democrats always claim (pretend) to have good intentions... while they further destroy the country by claiming their policies are for the children, or for the poor or for the homeless.... while enacting policies that further harm the children, the poor, the homeless AND the middle class.
Hope you’re having a good day.
Exactly,
The bureaucratic state is our ‘Ring of Power.’ It replaces traditional American values with cold, administrative diktats—like the way unelected agencies now bypass Congress to redefine everything from your private property rights to the energy you use in your own home. If we don’t have the courage to destroy the ring and return power to the people, we are just waiting for the next ‘Dark Lord’ to pick it up and use it against us. This is the lesson that Tolkien taught in his writings and it cannot be ignored. The bureaucratic state must be dismantled and destroyed.
“”The bureaucratic state must be dismantled and destroyed.””
***
And, considering the current ‘state of the world’...
that, my friend, is probably just a nice dream. It’s the corruption causing the problems. Corruption caused by the evil afflicting mankind. And the evil that has been with us from Day One in that infamous Garden...
will be with us, sadly, until Jesus returns on that final day.
Such is life on planet Earth.
Why? Ka-ching!
Excellent question.
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