1. Orwell's Animal Farm Music Video
2. Animal Farm Online Pdf
3. Animal Farm Chapter 1
4. Orwell Animal Farm Characters
5. Orwell's Animal Farm Cartoon

'Animal Farm' is an allegorical novella by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude that was critically shaped. May 30, 2019 George Orwell's influential, allegorical novel Animal Farm was published in 1945. In the novel, the overworked and mistreated animals on a farm all begin to follow the precepts of Animalism, rise up against the humans, take over the farm, and rename the place: Animal Farm. Animal Farm had particular resonance in the post-war climate and its worldwide success made Orwell a sought-after figure. For the next four years, Orwell mixed journalistic work—mainly for Tribune, The Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines —with. Get free homework help on George Orwell's Animal Farm: book summary, chapter summary and analysis, quotes, essays, and character analysis courtesy of CliffsNotes. Animal Farm is George Orwell's satire on equality, where all barnyard animals live free from their human masters' tyranny. Inspired to rebel by Major, an old boar, animals on Mr. Jones' Manor Farm embrace Animalism and stage a. By Dr Oliver Tearle. Animal Farm is, after Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s most famous book.Published in 1945, the novella (at under 100 pages, it’s too short to be called a full-blown ‘novel’) tells the story of how a group of animals on a farm overthrow the farmer who puts them to work, and set up an equal society where all animals work and share the fruits of their labours.

By Dr Oliver Tearle

Animal Farm is, after Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s most famous book. Published in 1945, the novella (at under 100 pages, it’s too short to be called a full-blown ‘novel’) tells the story of how a group of animals on a farm overthrow the farmer who puts them to work, and set up an equal society where all animals work and share the fruits of their labours. However, as time goes on, it becomes clear that the society the animals have constructed is not equal at all. It’s well-known that the novella is an allegory for Communist Russia under Josef Stalin, who was leader of the Soviet Union when Orwell wrote the book. Before we dig deeper into the context and meaning of Animal Farm with some words of analysis, it might be worth refreshing our memories with a brief summary of the novella’s plot.

Animal Farm: plot summary

The novel opens with an old pig, named Major, addressing his fellow animals on Manor Farm. Major criticises Mr Jones, the farmer who owns Manor Farm, because he controls the animals, takes their produce (the hens’ eggs, the cows’ milk), but gives them little in return. Major tells the other animals that man, who walks on two feet unlike the animals who walk on four, is their enemy. They sing a rousing song in favour of animals, ‘Beasts of England’. Old Major dies a few days later, but the other animals have been inspired by his message.

Two pigs in particular, Snowball and Napoleon, rouse the other animals to take action against Mr Jones and seize the farm for themselves. They draw up seven commandments which all animals should abide by: among other things, these commandments forbid an animal to kill another animal, and include the mantra ‘four legs good, two legs bad’, because animals (who walk on four legs) are their friends while their two-legged human overlords are evil.

The animals lead a rebellion against Mr Jones, whom they drive from the farm. They rename Manor Farm ‘Animal Farm’, and set about running things themselves, along the lines laid out in their seven commandments, where every animal is equal. But before long, it becomes clear that the pigs – especially Napoleon and Snowball – consider themselves special, requiring special treatment, as the leaders of the animals. Nevertheless, when Mr Jones and some of the other farmers lead a raid to try to reclaim the farm, the animals work together to defend the farm and see off the men. A young farmhand is knocked unconscious, and initially feared dead.

Things begin to fall apart: Napoleon’s windmill, which he has instructed the animals to build, is vandalised and he accuses Snowball of sabotaging it. Snowball is banished from the farm. During winter, many of the animals are on the brink of starvation. Napoleon engineers it so that when Mr Whymper, a man from a neighbouring farm with whom the pigs have started to trade (so the animals can acquire the materials they need to build the windmill), visits the farm, he overhears the animals giving a positive account of life on Animal Farm.

Without consulting the hens first, Napoleon organises a deal with Mr Whymper which involves giving him many of the hens’ eggs. They rebel against him, but he starves them into submission, although not before nine hens have died. Napoleon then announces that Snowball has been visiting the farm at night and destroying things.

Napoleon also claims that Snowball has been in league with Mr Jones all the time, and that even at the Battle of the Cowshed (as the animals are now referring to the farmers’ unsuccessful raid on the farm) Snowball was trying to sabotage the fight so that Jones won. The animals are sceptical about this, because they all saw Snowball bravely fighting alongside them. Napoleon declares he has discovered ‘secret documents’ which prove Snowball was in league with their enemy.

Life on Animal Farm becomes harder for the animals, and Boxer, while labouring hard to complete the windmill, falls and injures his lung. The pigs arrange for him to be taken away and treated, but when the van arrives and takes him away, they realise too late that the van belongs to a man who slaughters horses, and that Napoleon has arranged for Boxer to be taken away to the knacker’s yard and killed.

Squealer lies to the animals, though, and when he announces Boxer’s death two days later, he pretends that the van had been bought by a veterinary surgeon who hadn’t yet painted over the old sign on the side of the van. The pigs take to wearing green ribbons and order in another crate of whisky for them to drink; they don’t share this with the other animals.

A few years pass, and some of the animals die, Napoleon and Squealer get fatter, and none of the animals is allowed to retire, as previously promised. The farm gets bigger and richer, but the luxuries the animals had been promised never materialised: they are told that the real pleasure is derived from hard work and frugal living. Then, one day, the animals see Squealer up on his hind legs, walking on two legs like a human instead of on four like an animal.

Orwell's Animal Farm Music Video

The other pigs follow; and Clover and Benjamin discover that the seven commandments written on the barn wall have been rubbed off, to be replace by one single commandment: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ The pigs start installing radio and a telephone in the farmhouse, and subscribe to newspapers.

Finally, the pigs invite humans into the farm to drink with them, and announce a new partnership between the pigs and humans. Napoleon announces to his human guests that the name of the farm is reverting from Animal Farm to the original name, Manor Farm. The other animals from the farm, observing this through the window, can no longer tell which are the pigs and which are the men, because Napoleon and the other pigs are behaving so much like men now.

Things have gone full circle: the pigs are no different from Mr Jones (indeed, are worse).

Animal Farm: analysis

First, a very brief history lesson, by way of context for Animal Farm. In 1917, the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was overthrown by Communist revolutionaries. These revolutionaries replaced the aristocratic rule which had been a feature of Russian society for centuries with a new political system: Communism, whereby everyone was equal. Everyone works, but everyone benefits equally from the results of that work. Josef Stalin became leader of Communist Russia, or the Soviet Union, in the early 1920s.

However, it soon became apparent that Stalin’s Communist regime wasn’t working: huge swathes of the population were working hard, but didn’t have enough food to survive. They were starving to death. But Stalin and his politicians, who themselves were well-off, did nothing to combat this problem, and indeed actively contributed to it. But they told the people that things were much better since the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar, than things had been before, under Nicholas II. The parallels with Orwell’s Animal Farm are crystal-clear.

Animal Farm is an allegory for the Russian Revolution and the formation of a Communist regime in Russia (as the Soviet Union). We offer a fuller definition of allegory in a separate post, but the key thing is that, although it was subtitled A Fairy Story, Orwell’s novella is far from being a straightforward tale for children. It’s also political allegory, and even satire. The cleverness of Orwell’s approach is that he manages to infuse his story with this political meaning while also telling an engaging tale about greed, corruption, and ‘society’ in a more general sense.

One of the commonest techniques used in both Stalinist Russia and in Animal Farm is what’s known as ‘gaslighting’ (meaning to manipulate someone by psychological means so they begin to doubt their own sanity; the term is derived from the film adaptation of Gaslight, a play by Patrick Hamilton). For instance, when Napoleon and the other pigs take to eating their meals and sleeping in the beds in the house at Animal Farm, Clover is convinced this goes against one of the seven commandments the animals drew up at the beginning of their revolution.

But one of the pigs has altered the commandment (‘No animal shall sleep in a bed’), adding the words ‘with sheets’ to the end of it. Napoleon and the other pigs have rewritten history, but they then convince Clover that she is the one who is mistaken, and that she’s misremembered what the wording of the commandment was.

Another example of this technique – which is a prominent feature of many totalitarian regimes, namely keep the masses ignorant as they’re easier to manipulate that way – is when Napoleon claims that Snowball has been in league with Mr Jones all along. When the animals question this, based on all of the evidence to the contrary, Napoleon and Squealer declare they have ‘secret documents’ which prove it. But the other animals can’t read them, so they have to take his word for it. Squealer’s lie about the van that comes to take Boxer away (he claims it’s going to the vet, but it’s clear that Boxer is really being taken away to be slaughtered) is another such example.

Much as Stalin did in Communist Russia, Napoleon actively rewrites history, and manages to convince the animals that certain things never happened or that they are mistaken about something. This is a feature that has become more and more prominent in political society, even in non-totalitarian ones: witness our modern era of ‘fake news’ and media spin where it becomes difficult to ascertain what is true any more.

The pigs also convince the other animals that they deserve to eat the apples themselves because they work so hard to keep things running, and that they will have an extra hour in bed in the mornings. In other words, they begin to become the very thing they sought to overthrow: they become like man.

They also undo the mantra that ‘all animals are equal’, since the pigs clearly think they’re not like the other animals and deserve special treatment. Whenever the other animals question them, one question always succeeds in putting an end to further questioning: do they want to see Jones back running the farm? As the obvious answer is ‘no’, the pigs continue to get away with doing what they want.

Squealer is Napoleon’s propagandist, ensuring that the decisions Napoleon makes are ‘spun’ so that the other animals will accept them and carry on working hard.

And we can draw a pretty clear line between many of the major characters in Animal Farm and key figures of the Russian Revolution and Stalinist Russia. Napoleon, the leader of the animals, is Joseph Stalin; Old Major, whose speech rouses the animals to revolution, represents Vladimir Lenin, who spearheaded the Russian Revolution of 1917; Snowball, who falls out with Napoleon and is banished from the farm, represents Leon Trotsky, who was involved in the Revolution but later went to live in exile in Mexico. Squealer is based on Molotov (after whom the Molotov cocktail was named); Molotov was Stalin’s protégé, much as Squealer is encouraged by Napoleon to serve as Napoleon’s right-hand (or right-hoof?) man (pig).

Animal Farm very nearly didn’t make it into print at all. First, not long after Orwell completed the first draft in February 1944, his flat on Mortimer Crescent in London was bombed in June, and he feared the typescript had been destroyed. Orwell later found it in the rubble. Then, Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher. T. S. Eliot, at Faber and Faber, rejected it because he feared that it was the wrong sort of political message for the time (you can read Eliot’s letter to Orwell here). The novella was eventually published the following year, in 1945, and its relevance – as political satire, as animal fable, and as one of Orwell’s two great works of fiction – shows no signs of abating.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.

Image: via Wikimedia Commons.

Spoiler Alert: If you’ve not read Orwell’s Animal Farm, there are going to be spoilers ahead, but also what have you been doing? Well, now that you’re here, perhaps you don’t need to read it, perhaps you could just play it instead? The Finger Guns Review:

Twenty years ago I was in secondary school. In English literature every student was required to read a modern classic novel out of a small shortlist. You didn’t get to choose; it was just assigned to your class. In my school that meant being forced through Lord of the Flies, To Kill A Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, or Animal Farm. At that age those types of books are full of meaning that you don’t understand and teachers teaching you enough to pass the test. And then you forget it all. It means they end up being thought of as boring and dreary reads. You remember, being asked to read aloud for a page or so before handing over to the next kid, or that you had to read a particular chapter at home before class the next day. It was excruciating going through a novel at a snail’s pace and pouring over every section the teacher wants to draw your attention to.

As you might have guessed, my class read Animal Farm by George Orwell. Chapter by plodding chapter, over more than an entire term (which is a long time for such a short book). This meant that for a good portion of my young adult life, I both hated, and didn’t really get the big deal behind George Orwell’s seminal work.

As an adult, I read Animal Farm (and 1984) again and found it pretty revelatory. By your thirties, you’ve absorbed some of the history and it’s meaning through osmosis. I knew more about Communism and the Russian Revolution from other sources. I understood more of the cultural history that Animal Farm adapts and allegorises. Seeing these things allegorised, and understanding what events are alluded to from history, well it makes the read far more engaging.

Now combining reading and gaming, my two favourite hobbies, into one package, Nerial has adapted Orwell’s work into Orwell’s Animal Farm; half visual novel and half management game, where you get to determine if the farm fails or thrives. A book millions have read all across the world, a tale whose political allegory is as important in today’s climate as it was 80 years ago. Have they bitten off more than they can chew, or is it a revelation?

For those who didn’t study it as a kid or read it since, Orwell’s Animal Farm is the story of a farm where the animals decide they’ve had enough and overthrow their human master, chasing him off. They then set about trying to run the farm themselves. They introduce animalism, a series of rules by which the farm will be run, which say that all animals are equal now, there are no masters. Of course, the pigs, with their superior brain power, take charge, organise meetings and work crews, and generally try to run the place. The other animals try to work, and try to live and abide by their new creed.

The novel follows the events of the Russian Revolution with two of the pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, representing Stalin and Trotsky, and their differing ideas on how things should happen. I won’t spell out the whole novel, but things escalate as they do in a good narrative and eventually come to a head.

In a novel everything ends as the author intends, in one particular way. But Orwell’s Animal Farm is an adaptation as a game, and here you can affect the running of the farm and the events of the novel in ways that never happened in the book. The adaptation keeps much of the tone and the allegories intact, but with eight different endings and many leading paths that divert from the source material and pose what-if questions, it’s very possible to veer far from Orwell’s novel.

The game adaptation loses something in allowing its story to verge in different ways. The novel has a purpose, a warning to impart. If you go down any of the other seven routes, that meaning is subverted, washed away, and you are left with an overall less allegorical and meaningful outcome.

As far as flow and scene by scene progress go, I also got a very disconnected feeling a lot of the time. Things just seem to happen arbitrarily, scenes and problems are strung together with little regard for showing causality or plot. The novel is also a little like this, so its not entirely the game at fault, but in places you will feel like a plot point or moment has come from nowhere.

If you follow the novel’s plot as you play, the allegory stays intact and an interesting story unfolds even if scene by scene the flow seems choppy. The animals make scapegoats, disseminate propaganda, rewrite history, and of course, let absolute power corrupt them.

Orwell’s Animal Farm presents a pastel coloured world for the farm itself, and tells the story through both voiced narration, and unvoiced text-based conversations. It’s comprised of a series of screens, depicting the landscape of the farm where you can assign tasks to animals, or the barn interior for meetings. There aren’t many of them, most of the game feeling like it takes place in maybe half a dozen screens.

Gameplay is also pretty simple. It’s a mix of a few resource management tasks, like keeping the fields tilled and planted and then harvested, sharing out food and repairing buildings or making defences. I regularly found I wasn’t given the options to manage the farm the way I wanted. Even though it is possible to make the farm thrive, I never really felt in control. Day to day challenges felt arbitrary, and that I was constantly fighting fires that the game presented me with, rather than being able to plan. If I’m meant to be able to take control, I need more control. This felt like scripted control which is probably not surprising.

The management parts feel like they need to gamified further. I needed a clearer menu of options; how many animals do I actually have to do the work, which ones are good at which things, mood meters so I can know when to let the chickens rest or the cows keep their milk, the option to do the harvest on time (it always seemed to be late on my farm), and to plant both fields if I want to. You don’t really feel in control of any of this. This is not Orwell’s Stardew Valley.

Repairing the farm buildings was only an option at certain pre-determined times, I need the option there constantly. Because of the gamification that does exist, you feel like you should be able to succeed at these things to a far greater extent than you can. But however much I felt this way, things are not predetermined. It is possible with luck and some guesswork, to make Animal Farm thrive.

I found the narration disjointed and mechanical. There are all the appropriate sounds on the farm, but none of the animals are voiced, and the music is there, but you’ll rarely notice it. The drawings are nice enough, pastoral in feel, but it’s rare that anything will stand out. There have been far more interesting and eye-catching designs for the characters in Animal Farm over the last 70 years.

So is Orwell’s Animal Farm a good teaching tool, for those who don’t want to haven’t read the book? Well, no. It’s interesting to be able to play through the narrative of Animal Farm, to experience that world but have the plot turn out in different ways. I can imagine it could spark some lively debate in English Lit class about how things could have gone had certain events not happened in the book. However the kid who plays this instead of reading the book is going to be shit out of luck come exam time, because it only follows the plot if you know the basic events of the plot in the first place. If there were an option to lock the events to the novel version, this could become a kind of fun interactive Cliff notes edition.

So, is it a good management game with choice and ramifications and control over the farm’s destiny? Well, no, it’s not that either. There’s far too little in the way of controls and menus to actually see what you are doing. I found it frustrating to just be set one-note challenges each sunrise, and find supplies dwindling, without tangible ways to make them last. Those who like management games will find the lack of control frustrating, and the scripted aspects trying.

Animal Farm Online Pdf

The game adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm tells a disjointed story, without the kind of buildup and nuance that makes it a classic novel. As a game, it lacks the kind of options and menus necessary to make you feel like you’re ever in control of your farm.

Orwell’s Animal Farm is available now on PC via Steam (review platform).

Animal Farm Chapter 1

Developer: Nerial
Publisher: The Dairymen

Orwell Animal Farm Characters

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we received a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

Orwell's Animal Farm Cartoon

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