Animal Farm Movie

As I said last week, I will be discussing the Animal Farm Movie. It may come as a surprise to some book lovers, but a movie can be better than a book. They tend to each have their advantages. Sometimes make detail issues when adapting the book; however this one met is purpose, in my opinion.

I find one real change that was bad, but it didn’t affect my opinion of the movie much. Mollie did not run off with a different human in this one. In the book, as stated, she grew disappointed at the lack of benefits that used to be around when humans were there, so she ran off. In this, they minimized her character and she only said that she liked bows, not much else happened.

Now, there’s Moses. Moses is a tame raven kept by Jones, the farmer. He is supposed to represent Orwell’s view of the church. He seems far more irritating in the movie; he was just there in the book. He also seemed to ally himself with Napoleon more visibly here. I know that ravens should be smarter than that. Eventually, Napoleon gets tired of him and sticks him on the flagpole to show his true maniacal nature.

I will also talk about the humans. They seem to be somewhat important. I think that Jones is portrayed similarly, but slightly more sympathetically. In the movie he has a wife. She didn’t seem to do anything wrong, but was still forced out along with her husband. Now, Frederickson is bad, in the movie anyway. Once he discovered that the pigs could talk, he started trading with them and gave them whiskey. When he brought his wife over, it seemed to me like she was flirting with Napoleon.

Now, my favorite change was definitely the better characterization of Jessie. Earlier, she was just the dog who gave birth to the puppies that Napoleon took. Now, she is the only main character that is not a pig, excluding Boxer. I think making the dog a more important character increases the emotional nature of this. In the novel, it is bad when Napoleon takes the puppies and “educates” them. Now, imagine that those were your puppies that it happened to. You would feel desperation as your puppies were his servants and no longer recognized you as a parent.

Also, the modernization of the story was helpful. With cars, Boxer’s fate seems more plausible. In the book, he is taken away by horse carriage. If you ask me, I find it hard to believe that the horses wouldn’t hear the animals yelling, or they had become so used to it that they just sadly went forward. In addition, the addition of “the box where humans watch humans,” aka television, seemed to increase Napoleon’s rule as they became transfixed on the screen.

The final good change was the ending. It is nice to know that Napoleon’s reign was brought to an end, but it was even nicer when there were new owners. It changes the meaning of the movie to a slightly more optimistic view. The book seems to say that humans were the enemy in general and that utopian societies can not exist due to sin. This new ending seems to say, “Humans weren’t the enemy at all, the problem was who was in charge.”