Animal Farm

A.k.a. Manor Farm. This story... I've just read it for the first time. And I found it very interesting, and surprisingly nuanced. From Popcultural Osmosis, one would think that its only message was "Soviet Union baaad" (the phrase "tremendous bleating" comes to mind), but its message is a lot more interesting and far-reaching than that.

I believe it comes down to "Attempts at equalizing society will fail because you need the smarties to manage and design and lead stuff, but the problem is that, being smarter than everyone else, there's nothing stopping them from arguing and, if it comes to it, lying and murdering their way into more and more power, eventually leaving society just as unequal as before; being too dumb to stop them, you can only pray that they will keep each other in check."

Which is a bit of a Space Whale Aesop, because while the farm had animals incapable of learning the alphabet and incapable of memorizing more than one sentence, humans are, overall and by and large, fully capable of grasping complex political notions, so long as you give them the leisure and the incentive to. After all, the difference between that and the everyday "drama" that is the subject of common "gossip" is, I believe, mostly a matter of scale.

Also, I find that the ending is a "Funny Aneurysm" Moment; to me, it looks a lot more like The Great Politics Messup (mass privatization of everything to be owned de jure by the high-ranking officials of the Party, when, before that, it had only been a de facto ownership and they were still pretending that everything belonged to The People, and otherwise dropping all pretense that the system was any better for the lower classes than those of their neighbors, hence Perestroika, transparency), than like the later stages of Stalin's Regime, which kept up the charade with intensity and gusto.

In response to these posts from the Arab Spring thread:

It's kinda sorta definitely and absolutely not "kid friendly" in the modern sense, although I believe it would do a good job as a Scare 'Em Straight story even for kids who are unfamiliar with what the story refers to. Although they might take the Family-Unfriendly Aesop that "if you're smart enough you can talk people into toppling the current power, only to gradually talk your way into getting it all for yourself again, playing them all for suckers and completely getting away with it" or even "smart people are not to be trusted; [[Useful Notes/Cambodia kill them", or, as Shakespeare put it, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

edited 17th Nov '13 10:16:06 AM by TheHandle

And yet some people STILL don't understand the issues. The alphabet is a metaphor for people blindly following a political credo without bothering to learn its underlying principles or look at the other side.

Yeah, but that's hardly class-specific. Plenty of highly intelligent and learned people expend remarkable amounts of wit and brainpower in justifying and rationalizing their own positions and actions, rather than attempting to learn from reality. At any rate, it's a matter of misguidedness or willful pigheadedness (heh), rather than one of inherent intelligence, and, therefore, it is solvable.

I haven't seen the films, but it appears that in one of them the animals rebel, and in the other they emigrate. What led to these different outcomes?

edited 17th Nov '13 10:50:31 AM by TheHandle

Actually, considering the education gap being what it is, the poor generally don't get the education they need, whereas the rich get it whether they deserve it or not (and by deserve, I refer to the people who have their parents pay their way through college while they party away and get kicked out).

For the second point, I imagine it was whatever the director preferred.

I meant in-universe. And yeah, in the US education requires money, and good education requires a crapload of money; a pretty effective way of perpetuating the class divide.

Nerial, developer of Reigns, is working with the Orwell Estate to develop a Video Game Adaptation for PC and mobile called Orwells Animal Farm

Now I bet you didn't see that coming

I heard rumors about Andy Serkis developing a Motion Capture film adaptation of the book. Any news about that? Considering how human expressions on a bear, a panther or a tiger fell into the Uncanny Valley in Serkis's last project, it would look even more wrong on the faces of pigs and horses...

Admittedly, the pigs looking Uncanny Valley would work since the pigs are by and large not meant to be sympathetic.

Also, them looking Uncanny Valley would resonate well with the scene where they suddenly look unsettlingly human.