Film Vs Animal Farm

Should you ever completely trust someone? This is a question that explains the lives of many, as people tend to get betrayed by trusting a person too much. This lesson is important to learn as it helps keep people safe from deception and manipulation. Animal Farm, a novel and film adaptation portrays the idea of trust in an amazing way. This is due to the blind trust of the characters. The main plot of both works is about animals of a farm living free from the oppression of humans. The leader of all these animals is a pig called Napoleon who is greedy, selfish and obnoxious. When one examines George Orwell’s Animal Farm and John Stephenson’s 1999 film adaptation, both novel and film do an excellent job at showing the harm blind trust in authority

has on individuals and society. This is evident by looking at the manipulation techniques, the effect on a society a tyrannical leader has and the results of being an uneducated individual.

To begin with, both George Orwell’s Animal Farm and John Stephenson’s 1999 film adaptation contain the aspect of manipulation. The two works show how manipulation can be used to obtain power, money, and trust. Squealer a pig that is the king of manipulation uses his skills to make the animals of the farm believe that the animals are benefiting from the decisions of the pigs. A little while after the executions of the traitors, the animals were forced to work on the windmill to rebuild it. Squealer was also given a new responsibility as he is in charge of explaining the production rates which is stated in the novel “On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred percent, three hundred percent, or five hundred percent, as the case may be. The animals saw no reason to disbelieve him…” (Orwell 99).