Orwell’s Animal Farm has inspired music. Coldplay’s 2020 “Trouble in Town” music video shows a homeless person in a deer mask reading Animal Farm. “Piggies,” which George Harrison wrote for the Beatles’ 1968 White Album, was partially inspired by Orwell’s novel, and Pink Floyd’s 1977 album “Animals”, whose cover features a flying pig, is also based loosely on the book. [1]
The novella, Animal Farm, first published in England on 17 August 1945, is an anti-utopian satire written by George Orwell.
It tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, the animals work together to create a society of progress, justice, and equality. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed, and the tyranny of the farmer is replaced with another kind of control under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
One of Orwell’s finest works, Animal Farm is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. Imagined only as Orwell could, this powerful tale is instilled with humour and an underlying urgency that makes this one of the most prophetic warnings ever written. It made Orwell’s name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life.
In his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write,’ Orwell wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole”.
Animal Farm has been adapted to film twice (both differ from the novel and have been accused of taking significant liberties), stage productions, radio dramatisations, and even a comic strip.