Four legs phat! Two legs pweened!

Recently I finished George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I’d read it before, but have been familiar with the story for a long time. When I was a kid, cable television was brand new. Most of the channels were wanting for content, so they repeated what they had, over and over again. I remember that Channel 5 would endlessly repeat three cartoon movies based on classic literature: Watership Down, Gulliver’s Travels, and Animal Farm. Being a kid, I watched them again and again and again. Watership down was particularly vivid (I also eventually read and loved that book), but so was Animal Farm.
There are certain images from that 1954 cartoon that stuck in my mind, like the sheep bleating “Two legs bad! Four legs good!”, and when the horse Boxer was sold to the glue factory for a crate of booze that the pigs kept for themselves. The book is even better, though I think that the cartoon and book ended differently. In the book, the pigs turn to humans and the other animals just watch. But I seem to remember the animals in the cartoon freaking out after they see the pigs’ transformation, eventually working themselves up into another frenzied revolt. But I can’t remember for sure.
Animal Farm’s straightforward symbolism and allusion seem to make it a favorite subject for for high school lit classes and books on Intellectual Snobbery for Dummies. In fact, Orwell’s messages are so opaque that engaging in any kind of discussion of the book’s meaning seems almost trivial. It would be akin to opening up the Sunday newspaper circular for Wal-Mart and saying “See, what the author is trying to tell us here is that they have low prices every day, guaranteed.”
So I don’t much see the point. But if you’re interested, the guy from Book-A-Minute offers two great summaries –one snobby and one entertaining. Take your pick.

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3 thoughts on “Four legs phat! Two legs pweened!

  1. Jamie,
    1. Don’t you mean Gulliver’s Travels? Or perhaps you have gleaned somewhere that Gulliver plans on starting up a 24-hour Lilliputian TV network? 😉
    2. Opaque means cloudy, and hard to see through. If you are saying that Animal Farm’s symbols and meanings are so easy to figure out that an in-depth discussion of the text is moot, I think you have used the wrong word. :-p
    In fact, you’re right. The book is quite easy to dissect as far as meaning is concerned. I propose that we relgate the school’s texts to the dust bin and replace them with copies of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Roger Waters can become Orwell 2.0.
    -G

  2. “Don’t you mean Gulliver’s Travels?”
    Whoops! Yeah, that was a typo. Fixed it in the OP. Thanks! 🙂
    “Opaque means cloudy, and hard to see through.”
    I’m using “opaque” to mean “not difficult to see”. The opposite of transparent. So I think it’s allowable in this context.
    “I propose that we relgate the school’s texts to the dust bin and replace them with copies of Pink Floyd’s Animals.”
    Heh. Or just the Cliff Notes version. I actually drafted a post about Animal Farm where I discussed the meaning, symbols, and messages, but it seemed a bit pompous and condescending. That might have been a shortcoming on my part, but what here we are.
    I also started listening to 1984 on audiobook today, and am quite into it. The book seems to have a place in pop culture, but I had never read it before. So far it seems to have a lot of the same themes and conventions as Animal Farm, but I’m finding it more compelling.

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