Animal Farm

        As animation is often used as a medium for children, it can be used to make a difficult or challenging subject more accessible.

        In Animal Farm George Orwell disguised a scathing political parable behind the façade of a farmyard tale, just as Halas and Batchelor's animated adaptation ostensibly appears to be a children's cartoon, yet becomes something much darker.

 

 

 

        The use of a Disneyesque animation style by Halas and Batchelor perpetuates a sense of innocence, even as the communist and Stalinist comparisons become more apparent. This discrepancy between style and substance brings the film to a wider audience, although as many of these viewers would be unsuspecting children it is disputable how much of the political message would be received.

 

As the film progresses, the political themes become unmistakable.

 

        Yet maybe the choice of style has a greater purpose than to draw in a younger audience. As totalitarian regimes are often borne out of desperation and the promise of a perfect solution, before revealing oppression and extremism, perhaps the familiar animation style reflects the false security at the birth of the pigs' regime.