Animal Farm

Saw Animal Farm -- the cartoon -- the other day. (A friend of mine had a traumatic experience watching this as a kid. He's thinking it's a cute cartoon show and all of a sudden the animals are killing each other and there's blood on the snow. Wait a minute. That's not very funny...) And now I finally saw it. It's extremely well done, but what I didn't realize...

They changed the ending.

Orwell's book had the pig overlords getting together with human farmers; the animals outside the conference looked from one to another, couldn't tell the difference. The film had the animals acting like the old bad farmer. The animals outside saw them turn into that guy -- but only in their minds...

And all the animals outside rose up against the bad old pigs in a pure hokem cornball close.

I guess it was the cold war era -- and the filmmakers didn't feel safe to say "Communist pigs are no better than Capitalist pigs" because of that implied oink, oink, oink...