The family-friendly movie scene of my childhood was dominated by Disney, with stories of mermaids, lions, and Greek myths. The specifics changed, but the formula was fairly predictable: The heroes win, even after a great struggle, and the villains get their just deserts. But elsewhere, producers were making a very different breed of family film, movies in which tragedy and darkness interlace with stories of heroism: The Secret of Nimh, The Land Before Time, The Last Unicorn. Say what you will about these unlikely and brooding classics, like The Dark Crystal, but they did children a great service by teaching two things at once:that good things and virtue matter, and that the world is not a safe place and is sometimes horrific.
The question of how to present a horrific world to children is one that haunts the most recent version of Animal Farm, the directorial debut by venerable actor Andy Serkis. And truth be told, it does not answer that question particularly well. On the surface, we could not have asked for a pedigree for this latest offering from Angel Studios. Hollywood’s luminaries such as Seth Rogen, Kieran Culkin, Gaten Matarazzo, and Glenn Close make George Orwell’s characters come alive. Woody Harrelson’s turn as the doomed workhorse Boxer was particularly touching.
The film remains faithful to most of the plot points in the source material, a staple of high school classrooms across America. Animal Farm the novella begins with an uprising against farmer Mr. Jones by his animals. Two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, quickly assume leadership and direct the animals in creating a farm in which all of them are equals. But quickly things go awry: Snowball is run off, leaving Napolean to assume tighter control over the farm. What begins in a dream of equality ends with the pigs firmly in control and colluding with the humans to benefit the pigs alone. The pigs, in the end, are indistinguishable from the humans they have overthrown.
It may have been a minute since you read Animal Farm in high school, so a brief refresher is in order. Orwell’s work, published in 1945, was written to satirize the way in which the totalitarian drives of the Soviet empire undid Russian dreams of social equality. Following the overthrow of the czar in 1917, Russia did away with the old system of nobility and peasants, only to have that replaced by the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin.
The new film diverges from its source material, however, in two significant ways. The first way is that it leaves behind the original conflict of Animal Farm (socialism versus communism) while retaining many of the characters and plot points. In the film, on one side, you have the farm animals seeking to be free. But they no longer resemble disciplined socialists so much as anarchists. More than once, they emphasize that they freely cooperate, but not because a rule or a law is telling them to do so.
On the other side, we have the pigs, now no longer Communists but gluttonous capitalists, seeking to enrich themselves at every turn. In the film, human collaborators—including billionaire Freida Pilkington (voiced by Glenn Close)—make sure we know the new villain is unrestrained capitalism, seeking to destroy the farm for pure profit. Even if the conflict Serkis presents is an important one for us to see, we cannot lose sight of the original message of how revolutionary movements, if rooted in power, corrupt just as much as any other well-intended movement.
To be sure, the world of Stalin and Russian communism is now many decades removed from living history, so we can have some sympathy with Serkis’s decision to update the conflict. And arguably, Orwell might not disagree with the update, as he was a dedicated socialist. His opposition to the Communists was not because he was a free-market capitalist but because he believed in the possibility of a world in which everyone could have what they needed for living. Freedom for Orwell meant not individualist anarchy, morally or economically, but the use of goods for the common good.
Here we come to the film’s second (and greater) deviation from Orwell’s work: the choice to present Animal Farm as a family-friendly kids’ movie. The original novella may use cute farm animals as the main characters, but the topic he is addressing is deadly serious. And it is a work without anything like a happy ending: The pigs win, full stop, having established an allegiance with the humans they ran off at the beginning.
Because Orwell tells such serious subject matter as a fable, Animal Farm has been a notoriously difficult work to put on film—because who is most likely to see a movie with animals as the leads? Children. But trying to make this plot into a story for children has been anything but easy. The 1954 cartoon version of the film remains true to the original script but changes the ending to include an overthrow of Napoleon. The 1999 version, a live-action film, likewise changes the ending, having a remnant of the farm escape and be welcomed back by new owners of the farm after Napoleon’s death. Without spoiling the details of the newest offering, it too falls into the trap, changing the dismal ending of the book to a cheerier one for the film.
But long before the ending, Serkis’s version leans hard into Animal Farm as a story for children and becomes a true mess in terms of tone. On the one hand, it wants to deliver a serious message about greed and destruction. But on the other hand, Napoleon is more of a fart-joke king than a manipulative overlord. Montages of pigs driving luxury cars into swimming pools, drunk animals, and bug-eyed roosters avoiding explosions paint a thick coat of goofiness over the film that ultimately distracts from any morally serious message it might want to offer.
Serkis is certainly not alone in altering dark endings of source material for a children’s audience. Disney is the true generational villain on this count, telling stories about mermaids who marry princes instead of dissolving into the sea or Native American princesses who live happily ever after instead of dying far from family in England. But in Serkis’s film, the problems go deeper than adding a happy ending to Orwell’s original work, in which the pigs remain firmly in power. The rapid shifts between silliness and seriousness are often jarring, making for a film which seems confused as to what it wants to be: entertainment or education, whimsical or warning.
Christians know that, often, the salvation of God is not far from such horrors. The Scriptures frequently lay bare the atrocities of the world, with little need to gloss over or sanitize them. In the Bible, we find stories of people lying to the Holy Spirit and falling dead, of apostles murdered, of Israel torn down completely and dragged off into captivity. These are true horrors: dark stories which do not easily resolve into happy endings.
And yet our instinct when speaking of Scripture with children is frequently the same as Serkis’s instinct with Animal Farm. When we tell the story of Noah in church, do we talk about only the rainbow, omitting the destruction of all living creatures? When we talk about Moses crossing the Red Sea, do we mention the dead Egyptians in the water? Or perhaps most problematically, when we talk about Jesus, do we display him dead on the cross or only show him comforting children? The Cross, after all, is the greatest of horrors: God having been killed by his own creation for their sake. It is in the cross—in its full horror—that we see the very heart of God for us.
Theologian Marilyn McCord Adams, in Christ and Horrors, makes the provocative case that two things belong together: Christ’s full embrace of a world, and a world in which horrors routinely happen. If we do not acknowledge the horrors of the world—that sometimes the pigs win—we mute the full nature of Christ’s redemption. In shielding our faces, we turn Christ’s work into that which saves us from safe things, not the worst things creation has to offer. We unwittingly say Christ’s work addresses lighter fare—pain, minor sins, inconveniences. It is only when we can, with the psalmist, ask whether God has in fact abandoned us to the world’s horrors that we understand Christ came not just for the safe evils but for the devastating ones.
The lesson that sometimes the villains win and that God might yet be present is an important one for children to hear. But to do that requires not cheating the ending.
This task is not impossible: We have models for introducing children to hard and even horrible things. Literary works such as Watership Down, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, and The Giver all give us examples of how to display in age-appropriate ways a world in which horrors happen.
What we cannot do is wish away the horrors or, worse, tell wish-filled stories in which the villains do not win. Doing so reinforces for children a world that we wish was true but that Scripture knows is often not. Sometimes the Assyrians destroy Israel; sometimes tens of millions of Russians die at the hands of their own government. It does us no good to add a happy turn to soften these stories. For as Adams reminds us, when we do, we may very well be denying the depth of God’s love for us and his presence even when the Romans, Assyrians, and pigs win.
Myles Werntz is the author of Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
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