Animal Farm

Plot summary

The animal populace of Manor Farm near Willingdon, England, is neglected at the hands of the irresponsible and alcoholic farmer Mr. Jones. One night, the exalted boar Old Major holds a conference, at which he calls for the overthrow of humans and teaches the animals a revolutionary song called "Beasts of England". When Old Major dies, two young adult boars, Snowball and Napoleon, assume command and stage a revolt, driving out Mr. Jones and renaming the property "Animal Farm". The animals adopt the Seven Commandments of Animalism, a condensed version of Old Major's teachings, the most important of which is "All animals are equal". These rules are painted in large letters on one side of the barn. Snowball teaches the animals to read and write, while Napoleon educates young puppies on the principles of Animalism separately from the rest of the farm. To commemorate the start of Animal Farm, Snowball raises a flag with a white hoof and horn symbol made from Mrs. Jones' green tablecloth. Food is plentiful, and the farm runs smoothly. The pigs elevate themselves to positions of leadership and set aside special food items, ostensibly for their health. Following an unsuccessful attempt by Mr. Jones and his associates to retake the farm, henceforth referred to by the animals as the "Battle of the Cowshed", Snowball announces his plans to modernise the farm by building a windmill. Napoleon disputes this idea, and matters come to a head, which culminates in Napoleon's dogs chasing Snowball away and Napoleon effectively assuming supreme command.

Napoleon enacts changes to the political structure of the farm, replacing meetings with a committee of governing pigs. Old Major's skull is also exhumed and put on display. Through a diminutive boar named Squealer, who is a skilled orator, Napoleon claims credit for the idea of building the windmill, claiming that Snowball was only trying to win animals to his side. The animals work harder with the promise of easier lives with the windmill. When the windmill collapses after a violent storm due to its thin walls, Napoleon and Squealer persuade the animals that Snowball is trying to sabotage their project, and begin to purge the farm of animals accused by Napoleon of consorting with his old rival. When some animals recall the Battle of the Cowshed, Napoleon, who was not present during the battle, gradually smears Snowball to the point of saying he is a collaborator of Mr. Jones while falsely representing himself as the main hero of the battle. "Beasts of England" is banned, while an anthem glorifying Napoleon ("Comrade Napoleon") is composed and sung. Napoleon then conducts a second purge, during which many animals who are alleged to be helping Snowball in plots are executed by Napoleon's dogs, which troubles the rest of the animals. Despite their hardships, the animals are easily pacified by Squealer's retort that they are better off than they were under Mr. Jones (along with his accompanying false data), as well as by the sheep's continual bleating of "four legs good, two legs bad". As Napoleon, Squealer, and the other pigs gradually adopt a human-like lifestyle and repeatedly break the Seven Commandments, they secretly rewrite the laws to avoid facing resistance.

Characters

Pigs

Old Major – An aged prize Middle White boar who provides the inspiration that fuels the rebellion. He is also called Willingdon Beauty when showing. He is an allegorical combination of Karl Marx, one of the creators of communism, and Vladimir Lenin, the communist leader of the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet nation, in that he draws up the principles of the revolution. His skull being put on revered public display recalls Lenin, whose embalmed body was left in indefinite repose at Lenin's Mausoleum. By the end of the book, the skull is reburied.

Napoleon – An intimidating, manipulative Berkshire boar who becomes the leader of Animal Farm after driving out Snowball and gradually starts living like a human. Despite his name, he is an allegory of Joseph Stalin.

Snowball – A boar and Napoleon's rival, who initially leads the farm after Jones's overthrow. His life parallels that of Leon Trotsky; although there is no reference to Snowball having been murdered (as Trotsky was), he is exiled from the farm and subsequently becomes an image of evil. He may also combine some elements from Lenin.

Squealer – A small, stout boar who serves as Napoleon's second-in-command and minister of propaganda, is a collective portrait of the Soviet nomenklatura and journalists, such as of the national daily Pravda (The Truth), able to justify every twist and turn in Stalin's policy.

Minimus – A poetic pig who writes the second national anthem of Animal Farm after the singing of "Beasts of England" is banned; later he composes a poem "Comrade Napoleon". Literary theorist John Rodden compares him to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who eulogised Lenin and the Soviet Union, although Mayakovsky neither wrote anthems nor praised Stalin in his poems.

The piglets – Hinted to be the children of Napoleon and are the first generation of animals subjugated to his idea of animal inequality.

The young pigs – Four pigs who complain about Napoleon's takeover of the farm but are quickly silenced and later executed, the first kind of animals killed in Napoleon's farm purge. Probably based on the Great Purge of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Alexei Rykov.

Humans

Mr. Jones – A heavy drinker who is the original owner of Manor Farm, a farm in disrepair with farmhands who often loaf on the job. He is an allegory of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who was forced to abdicate following the February Revolution of 1917 and was executed, along with the rest of his family, by the Bolsheviks on 17 July 1918. The animals revolt after Jones goes on a drinking binge, returns hungover the following day and neglects them completely. Jones is married, but his wife plays no active role in the book. She seems to live with her husband's drunkenness, going to bed while he stays up drinking until late into the night. In her only other appearance, she hastily throws a few things into a travel bag and flees when she sees that the animals are revolting. Towards the end of the book, Napoleon's "favourite sow" wears her old Sunday dress.

Mr. Frederick – The tough owner of Pinchfield Farm, a small but well-kept neighbouring farm, who briefly allies with Napoleon. Animal Farm shares land boundaries with Pinchfield on one side and Foxwood on another, making Animal Farm a "buffer zone" between the two bickering farmers. The animals of Animal Farm are terrified of Frederick, as rumours abound of him abusing his animals and entertaining himself with cockfighting. Napoleon allies with Frederick to sell surplus timber that Pilkington also sought, but is enraged to learn Frederick paid him in counterfeit money. Shortly after the swindling, Frederick and his men invade Animal Farm, killing many animals and destroying the windmill. The brief alliance and subsequent invasion may allude to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and Operation Barbarossa.

Mr. Pilkington – The easy-going but crafty and well-to-do owner of Foxwood Farm, a large neighbouring farm overgrown with weeds. Pilkington is wealthier than Frederick and owns more land, but his farm needs care as opposed to Frederick's smaller but more efficiently run farm. Although on bad terms with Frederick, Pilkington is also concerned about the animal revolution that deposed Jones and is worried that this could also happen to him.

Mr. Whymper – A man hired by Napoleon to act as the liaison between Animal Farm and human society. At first, he acquires necessities that cannot be produced on the farm, such as dog biscuits and paraffin wax, but later he procures luxuries like alcohol for the pigs.

Equines

Boxer – A loyal, kind, dedicated, powerful, hard-working, and respectable cart-shire horse, although quite naive and gullible. Boxer does a large share of the physical labour on the farm. He is shown to believe that "Napoleon is always right." At one point, he questions Squealer's statement that Snowball was always against the welfare of the farm, causing him to be attacked by Napoleon's dogs; however, Boxer's immense strength repels the attack, worrying the pigs that their authority can be challenged. Boxer has been compared to Alexey Stakhanov, a diligent and enthusiastic role model of the Stakhanovite movement. He has been described as "faithful and strong"; he believes any problem can be solved if he works harder. When Boxer is injured, Napoleon sells him to a local knacker to buy himself whisky, and Squealer gives a moving account, falsifying the circumstances of Boxer's death.

Mollie – A self-centred, self-indulgent, and vain young white mare who quickly leaves for another farm after the revolution, like those who left Russia after the fall of the Tsar. She is only once mentioned again, and has an affinity for hair ribbons and sugar cubes.

Clover – A gentle, caring mare who shows concern, especially for Boxer, who often pushes himself too hard. Clover can read all the letters of the alphabet, but cannot form words with them.

Benjamin – A donkey, one of the oldest, wisest animals on the farm, and one of the few who can read properly. He is sceptical, temperamental and cynical: his most frequent remark is, "Life will go on as it has always gone on – that is, badly". Academic Morris Dickstein has suggested there is "a touch of Orwell himself in this creature's timeless scepticism" and indeed, friends called Orwell "Donkey George", "after his grumbling donkey Benjamin, in Animal Farm ". Benjamin evades the purges and survives despite the threat he potentially poses given his knowledge, his age, and his equivocal, albeit apolitical, positions.

Other animals

Muriel – A goat who is another of the oldest, wisest animals on the farm and friends with all of the animals on the farm. Similar to Benjamin, Muriel is one of the few animals on the farm who is not a pig but can read. She survives, as does Benjamin, by eschewing politics.

The puppies – Offspring of Jessie and Bluebell, the puppies were taken away at birth by Napoleon and raised by him to serve as his powerful security force.

Moses – A charismatic raven and personal pet of Mr. Jones with a natural talent for storytelling. Initially following Mrs. Jones into exile, he reappears several years later and resumes his role of talking but not working. He regales Animal Farm's denizens with tales of a wondrous place beyond the clouds called "Sugarcandy Mountain, that happy country where we poor animals shall rest forever from our labours!" Orwell portrays institutionalised religion as "the black raven of priestcraft – promising pie in the sky when you die, and faithfully serving whoever happens to be in power". His preaching to the animals heartens them, and Napoleon allows Moses to reside at the farm "with an allowance of a gill of beer daily", akin to how Stalin brought back the Russian Orthodox Church during the Second World War.

The sheep – They are not given individual names or personalities. They show limited understanding of Animalism and the political atmosphere of the farm, yet nonetheless, they are the voice of blind conformity as they bleat their support of Napoleon's ideals with jingles during his speeches and meetings with Snowball. Their constant bleating of "Four legs good, two legs bad!" is used as a device to drown out any opposition or alternative views from Snowball, much as Stalin used hysterical crowds to drown out Trotsky. Towards the end of the book, Squealer, the propagandist, trains the sheep to alter their slogan to "Four legs good, two legs better!", which they dutifully do.

The hens – The hens are promised following the rebellion that they will get to keep their eggs, which are stolen from them under Mr. Jones; however, their eggs are soon taken from them under the premise of buying goods from outside the farm. The hens are among the first to rebel, albeit unsuccessfully, against Napoleon, being brutally suppressed through starvation. They represent the Ukrainian victims of the Holodomor.

Genre and style

George Orwell's Animal Farm is an example of a political satire and an allegory that was intended to have a "wider application", according to Orwell himself, in terms of its relevance. Stylistically, the work shares many similarities with some of Orwell's other works, most notably Nineteen Eighty-Four, as both have been considered works of Swiftian satire. Furthermore, these two prominent works seem to suggest Orwell's bleak view of the future for humanity; he seems to stress the potential/current threat of dystopias similar to those in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. In these kinds of works, Orwell distinctly references the disarray and traumatic conditions of Europe following the Second World War. Orwell's style and writing philosophy as a whole were very concerned with the pursuit of truth in writing.

Orwell was committed to communicating straightforwardly, given the way that he felt words were commonly used in politics to deceive and confuse. For this reason, he is careful, in Animal Farm, to make sure the narrator speaks in an unbiased and uncomplicated fashion making the words easier to understand. The difference is seen in the way that the animals speak and interact, as the general moral animals seem to speak their minds clearly, while the wicked animals on the farm, such as Napoleon, twist language in such a way that it meets their insidious desires. This style reflects Orwell's proximity to the issues facing Europe at the time and his determination to comment critically on Stalin's Soviet Russia.

Background

Origin and writing

Orwell may have been inspired by the Polish Nobel prize laureate Wladyslaw Reymont's 1924 book Bunt ("Revolt"), a story very similar to Animal Farm about a revolt by animals which take over their farm with plans to introduce equality.

George Orwell wrote the manuscript between November 1943 and February 1944 after his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in Homage to Catalonia (1938). In the preface of a 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, he explained how escaping the communist purges in Spain taught him "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries". This motivated Orwell to expose and strongly condemn what he saw as the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals. Homage to Catalonia sold poorly; after seeing Arthur Koestler's best-selling Darkness at Noon about the Moscow Trials, Orwell decided that fiction would be the best way to describe totalitarianism.

Immediately before writing the book, Orwell quit the BBC. He was also upset about a booklet for propagandists the Ministry of Information had put out. The booklet included instructions on how to quell ideological fears of the Soviet Union, such as directions to claim that the Red Terror was a figment of Nazi imagination.

In the preface, Orwell described the source of the idea of setting the book on a farm:

I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.

In a 2025 article in The Guardian, Orwell's adopted son Richard Blair stated that his adoptive mother Eileen Blair, Orwell's first wife, helped to plan Animal Farm and described the book as "my parents' teamwork".

In June 1944, the manuscript was almost lost when a German V-1 flying bomb destroyed his London flat in Mortimer Crescent, Kilburn. Orwell spent hours sifting through the rubble to find the pages intact. Writing to T. S. Eliot at his publisher, Orwell noted that the enclosed manuscript had been "blitzed" and was in "slightly crumpled condition, but it is not damaged in any way".

Publication

Publishing

Orwell initially encountered difficulty getting the manuscript published, largely due to fears that the book might upset the western wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. Four publishers refused to publish Animal Farm, yet one had initially accepted the work but declined it after consulting the Ministry of Information. Eventually, Secker & Warburg in London published the first edition on 17 August 1945.

During World War II, it became clear to Orwell that anti-Soviet literature was not something which most major publishing houses in Britain and America would touch – including his regular publisher Gollancz. He also submitted the manuscript to Faber and Faber, where the poet T. S. Eliot (who was a director of the firm) rejected it; Eliot wrote back to Orwell praising the book's "good writing" and "fundamental integrity", but declared that they would only accept it for publication if they had some sympathy for the viewpoint "which I take to be generally Trotskyite". Eliot said he found the view "not convincing", and contended that the pigs were made out to be the best to run the farm; he posited that someone might argue "what was needed ... was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs". Orwell let André Deutsch, who was working for Nicholson & Watson in 1944, read the typescript, and Deutsch was convinced that Nicholson & Watson would want to publish it; however, they did not, and "lectured Orwell on what they perceived to be errors in Animal Farm". In his London Letter on 17 April 1944 for Partisan Review, Orwell wrote that it was "now next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed. Anti-Russian books do appear, but mostly from Catholic publishing firms and always from a religious or frankly reactionary angle". In 2025, Orwell's son Richard Blair wrote:

There was a deep-rooted institutional reluctance to allow any criticism of Soviet Russia while it was a British ally leading the destruction of Nazi Germany. This attitude was compounded by relentless Soviet government lobbying and the comprehensive infiltration of British institutions by Soviet agents. Peter Smollett (AKA Smolka, Soviet agent codename ABO) was head of Soviet relations at the Ministry of Information and the now notorious Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a BBC producer.

The publisher Jonathan Cape, who had initially accepted Animal Farm, subsequently rejected the book after an official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off – although the civil servant who it is assumed gave the order was later found to be a Soviet spy. Writing to Leonard Moore, a partner in the literary agency of Christy & Moore, publisher Jonathan Cape explained that the decision had been taken on the advice of a senior official in the Ministry of Information. Such flagrant anti-Soviet bias was unacceptable, and the choice of pigs as the dominant class was thought to be especially offensive. It may reasonably be assumed that the "important official" was an Austrian-born man named Peter Smollett (born Hans Peter Smolka), who was later unmasked as a Soviet agent. Orwell was suspicious of Smollett/Smolka, who had come to Britain in 1933 as an NKVD agent codenamed "ABO", and he would be one of the names Orwell included in his list of Crypto-Communists and Fellow-Travellers sent to the Information Research Department in 1949. The publisher wrote to Orwell, saying:

Preface

Orwell originally wrote a preface complaining about British self-censorship and how the British people were suppressing criticism of the USSR, their World War II ally:

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary ... Things are kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervenes but because of a general tacit agreement that "it wouldn't do" to mention that particular fact.

What is disquieting is that where the USSR and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from Liberal writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed.

Although the first edition allowed space for the preface in the author's proof, it was not included, and the page numbers had to be renumbered at the last minute.

In 1972, Ian Angus found the original typescript titled "The Freedom of the Press", and Bernard Crick published it, together with his introduction, in The Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972 as "How the essay came to be written". Orwell's essay criticised British self-censorship by the press, specifically the suppression of unflattering descriptions of Stalin and the Soviet government, and believed that this was a symptom of the weakening of the western liberal tradition.

Reception

Contemporary reviews of the work were not universally positive. Writing in the American New Republic magazine, George Soule expressed his disappointment in the book, writing that it "puzzled and saddened me. It seemed on the whole dull. The allegory turned out to be a creaking machine for saying in a clumsy way things that have been said better directly." Soule believed that the animals were not consistent enough with their real-world inspirations, and said, "It seems to me that the failure of this book (commercially it is already assured of tremendous success) arises from the fact that the satire deals not with something the author has experienced, but rather with stereotyped ideas about a country which he probably does not know very well."

The Guardian on 24 August 1945 called Animal Farm "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in Tribune on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in Tribune at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years perhaps, Animal Farm may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point". Animal Farm has been subject to much comment in the decades since these early remarks.

Between 1952 and 1957, the CIA, in an operation codenamed Aedinosaur, sent millions of balloons carrying copies of the novel into Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, whose air forces tried to shoot the balloons down. The Information Research Department, a secret Cold War propaganda agency of the British government, translated the book into various languages such as Arabic.

Time magazine chose Animal Farm as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005); it also featured at number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996 and is included in the Great Books of the Western World selection.

Popular reading in schools, Animal Farm was ranked the United Kingdom's favourite book from school in a 2016 poll.

Analysis

Animalism

After the revolution, Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer adapt Old Major's ideas into "a complete system of thought", which they formally name Animalism, an allegoric reference to Communism, not to be confused with the philosophy of Animalism. Soon after, Napoleon and Squealer partake in activities associated with humans that the Seven Commandments had explicitly prohibited. They also engage in trade, one of Old Major's proposed forbidden activities not directly included in the commandments (the other two being living in houses and smoking tobacco). Squealer is employed to alter the commandments to account for this humanisation, an allusion to the Soviet government's revising of history to exercise control of the people's beliefs about themselves and their society.

The original commandments are:

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.

Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

No animal shall wear clothes.

No animal shall sleep in a bed.

No animal shall drink alcohol.

No animal shall kill any other animal.

All animals are equal.

These commandments are also distilled into the maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad!" which is primarily used by the sheep on the farm, often to disrupt discussions and disagreements between animals on the nature of Animalism.

Later, Napoleon and his pigs secretly revise some commandments to clear themselves of accusations of law-breaking. The changed commandments are as follows, with the changes bolded:

Eventually, only the seventh commandment remains, and the "legs" maxim is replaced by "Four legs good, two legs better!", as the pigs become more anthropomorphic. This is an ironic twist to the original purpose of the Seven Commandments, which was supposed to keep order within Animal Farm by uniting the animals together against the humans and preventing animals from following the humans' evil habits. Through the revision of the commandments, Orwell demonstrates how simply political dogma can be turned into malleable propaganda.

Significance and allegory

Orwell biographer Jeffrey Meyers has written, "virtually every detail has political significance in this allegory". While the novella is often interpreted as a direct satire of specific historical events, some readings emphasize that its broader message extends beyond a single ideology, illustrating how systems of power—whether emerging from revolutionary, liberal, conservative, or mixed political traditions—can produce authoritarian outcomes under certain conditions. Orwell himself wrote in 1946, "Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution ... [and] that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters [–] revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert". This observation has been interpreted by some commentators as suggesting a more universal warning about political complacency and the concentration of power, rather than a critique confined to a single party or ideology. In contemporary discourse, this perspective has been contrasted with more partisan interpretations that attribute authoritarian tendencies primarily to specific modern political groups, with critics arguing that such readings risk oversimplifying the dynamics Orwell sought to portray.

In a preface for a 1947 Ukrainian edition, Orwell stated, "for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement". However, the narrative has also been read as a study of how political myths and charismatic leadership can take hold in any society, particularly during periods of instability. As such, the work has been described as remaining relevant in modern contexts, where observers have noted parallels between the behavior of fictional leaders and that of various contemporary political figures across different countries, regardless of ideological alignment.

The revolt of the animals against Farmer Jones is Orwell's analogy with the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Battle of the Cowshed has been said to represent the allied invasion of Soviet Russia in 1918, and the defeat of the White Russians in the Russian Civil War. The pigs' rise to preeminence mirrors the rise of a Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, just as Napoleon's emergence as the farm's sole leader reflects Stalin's emergence. At the same time, broader interpretations suggest that the mechanisms depicted—propaganda, fear, gradual erosion of norms, and the personalization of power—are not unique to one historical regime but can develop in varied political environments when institutional checks weaken.

Adaptations

Stage productions

A theatrical version, with music by Richard Peaslee and lyrics by Adrian Mitchell, was staged at the National Theatre London on 25 April 1984, directed by Peter Hall. It toured nine cities in 1985.

A solo version, adapted and performed by Guy Masterson, premiered at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh in January 1995 and has toured worldwide since.

In 2021, during pandemic restrictions, the National Youth Theatre toured a stage version of Animal Farm; this run included outdoor performances on a farm at Soulton Hall.

A new adaptation written and directed by Robert Icke, designed by Bunny Christie with puppetry designed and directed by Toby Olié opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in January 2022 before touring the UK.

The Russian composer Alexander Raskatov has written an opera based on the book. Its premiere took place on 4 March 2023 in Amsterdam as part of Dutch National Opera's 2022/2023 season.

Films

Animal Farm has been adapted to film three times.

Animal Farm (1954) is an animated film, in which Napoleon is eventually overthrown in a second revolution. In 1974, E. Howard Hunt revealed that he had been sent by the CIA's Psychological Warfare department to obtain the film rights from Orwell's widow, and the resulting 1954 animation was funded by the agency.

Animal Farm (1999) is a live-action TV version that shows Napoleon's regime collapsing in on itself, with the farm having new human owners, reflecting the collapse of Soviet communism.

Animal Farm (2025) is an animated film, directed by Andy Serkis, with an alternative plot serving as an allegory for business corruption in the 21st century and features new characters such as a piglet named Lucky, who serves as the audience surrogate. It also depicts Snowball as female.

Radio dramatisations

A BBC radio version, produced by Rayner Heppenstall, was broadcast in January 1947. Orwell listened to the production at his home in Canonbury Square, London, with Hugh Gordon Porteous, amongst others. Orwell later wrote to Heppenstall that Porteous, "who had not read the book, grasped what was happening after a few minutes".

In January 2013, a second radio production was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, using Orwell's own dramatisation of his book, directed by Alison Hindell and narrated by Tamsin Greig. The cast included Nicky Henson as Napoleon, Toby Jones as the propagandist Squealer, Patrick Brennan as Snowball, Liza Sadovy as Clover, and Ralph Ineson as Boxer.

Comic strip

In 1950, Norman Pett and his writing partner Don Freeman were secretly hired by the Information Research Department, a secret department of the Foreign Office, to adapt Animal Farm into a comic strip. This comic was not published in the United Kingdom but ran in Brazilian and Burmese newspapers.

Video game

Orwell's Animal Farm is a video game based on the book, developed by Nerial and The Dairymen and released in 2020, with permission from the Orwell Estate. The game is available on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.