Movie-a-Day 150: Animal Farm (1999)

[Mr.Dibbs]

Sorry it's late fellas. First week back from Spring Break and my office has been full of evil children.

I picked the 1999 version of Orwell's Animal Farm for two reasons. One, it stays fairly true to the book, and two, the puppets are awesome and were created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

The novel was probably the first book I actually didn't mind reading in high school, and the movie does a great job using symbolism to portay the abuse of power while still achieving Orwell's take on the Russian Revolution and the inability for communism to work.

The voices of the animals are done by an elite voice cast, including Peter Ustinov, Patrick Stewart, Pete Postlethwaite, Julia Ormond, Kelsey Grammer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Paul Scofield, and Ian Holm.

This is really a great film, and you can watch it with your class or your kids. My students actually enjoy it, and now I'm trying to get them to read 1984.

Again, I'm sorry for dropping the ball this week...

 

[mdamien13]

Never saw this one. I absolutely love the book, though. My fear when I saw the commercials for this was that they were going to concentrate on the puppets too much and lose the tone of the book. Glad to hear it remained faithful.

 

[Chaplin]

Oran,

I wanted to let you know I modified your title a little bit (but nothing else).

As to the movie, I have also never seen it, but I also loved the book.

Hmm, is this the first TV-movie we've had on Movie-A-Day? I think it is.

 

[Brandon_Webb]

I've had to read this book over and over for school this year and we talked about it for so long in LA class..I'm pretty sick of it sadly but a good book anyway

 

[AZCB34]

This movie has been consistently in rotational play on Cinemax lately and I saw it about a week ago. Pretty good flick.

 

[Mr.Dibbs]

I was going to do "Leon: The Professional", but I didn't have time to watch it again. One of my teachers has been out all week, so I had to cover her class and we watched Animal Farm yesterday. I forgot how much I actually liked the movie, so I wrote about it instead of The Professional.