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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That’s correct!
The Epstein Files fiasco — was it Bolshevism? No. But it’s a reminder that at the end of the day…power is power. Power corrupts. You become the very thing you went in claiming to hate.
“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Harvey Dent - The Dark Knight
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.............
the Ministry of Truth just corrected a few incorrect thoughts, sweeping the crumbs into the Memory Hole.
Animal Farm is a story about how communism sells itself on big lies and then betrays its followers once in power. Any other spin is a lie. How did the producer get permission to use the name? Orwell is spinning in his grave.
The fact that conservative reviewers or on-line “influencers” took some benefit to give a positive review of the movie is par for the course these days. It probably wasn’t a blatant cash for a good review. It was probably what all other studios do - fly the conservative online influencers out to the studio. Put them up in nice hotels. Wine and dine them. Take them to nice events. Give them exclusive access to A-list stars and directors. Give them exclusive first looks at the movie and other product. And make sure the unsaid threat is there that if the review isn’t good, it won’t happen again.
“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.............”
It’s why we have checks & balances. George Washington blessed us with term limits. No king, but King Jesus as the saying goes.
Because all fall short of the glory of God. Even the best of us, at the end of the day, are nothing but lowly sinners.
And so you have people criticizing one kind of slave market so they can tout the supposed benefits of their own preferred slave market scheme. The better solution is always a return to a free market.
Orwell’s claim was that the seizure of power, regardless of who does the seizing, contains the seeds of its own corruption.
Cautionary in a time where we see conservatism rising.
It's what one would expect out of Hollywood today. But WHO were the "conservatives" that did this to the story? I get that it's problematic that Angel Studios are distributing it and deserves this misapprobation, but the title implies that it was conservatives who took liberal license to create this distorted narrative. I want to know who the writers, producers, and director were so that I can judge whether this was ever a conservative product in the first place. That would go a long way to explaining how Angel Studios might have been persuaded to release it.
Absolutely right.
Wow, I didn’t realize what a piece of sh*t Andy Serkis is.
It’s been around fifty years since I read Animal Farm.
I say that with a bit of guilt as I do a lot of rereading, particularly in this new milennium.
My take then and would still be now that the book was not so much about -isms but authoritarian rule.
In my view Our Free Republic got a first hand reminder what authoritarian rule is during the autopen presidency.
Any student graduating HS and college who hasn’t read Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 really can’t claim having much of an education.
This development was one of the saddest things I have read.
One of the first books that framed collectivism in a way that my young brain readily deciphered and understood was “Animal Farm” (I read it before I read “1984”) and it was one of the first books I ever actually purchased. I had a tattered paperback copy for years.
I was an anti-communist from an early age, but it was because I grew up in the Cold War, and communism was a real enemy...I understood why our nation considered it anathema to the type of Republic we grew up in, but it crystallized with a new clarity when I read “Animal Farm” for the first time.
As a young man, it made me see for the first time that dynamic of human behavior (that is the love and pursuit of power) that will inevitably drive people to betray any principled move for societal change. In other words, no matter how lofty the goals of a “revolution” it is only by the deliberate protections that our founders built into the US Constitution that can protect the citizens of a government from the predations of those whose goal is both money and power. When I read F.A. Hayek’s “The Road To Serfdom” the need to protect citizens from the siren song of collectivist ideologies was clarified and sharpened even further.
In that light, it shows just how disappointing it was to me to see that this abominable inversion of the point of Orwell’s work was perpetrated by Angel Studios, because I was nearly shocked with pleasure at just how good I thought “The Chosen” series is from a Christian point of view.
In their new version of “Animal Farm”, Orwell’s incisive, instructional, and brutally transparent criticism of Communism has been turned into a not-so-subtle support of Communism.
Orwell himself would have classified this treatment of his work as “Orwellian”.
The irony of it.
In five or ten years, an Internet search for “Animal Farm” will yield the first ten pages of returns that discuss the Angel Studio production of “Animal Farm” and in 20 years, only “old people” will remember that there was an original work by Orwell that the film was based on that would be in stark and opposing contrast to the film that rejected Communism as opposed to the film that supports it.
Apparently, gone, for at least two generations, are the days when high schoolers actually read the book. Ignorant parents will gleefully take their kids to see this warped version, which, of course, the kids (and their parents) will internalize.
The Republic has failed because the electorate has been captured by what the Founders warned against; Factionalism (what we call parties).
The vast majority of us vote for whomever has a D or R next to their name and say that the candidate is the lessor of two evils.
The lessor of two evils is still evil. And we send that evil back to Washington term after term. And afterword we gripe about how evil Washington has become.
You will see on a chart on this page that all most every state sent back to Washington 100% of their Federal officials and most sent back 90%+ of their state officials.
https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Incumbent_win_rates_by_state
Amen!
This is one reason why I started collecting old books
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