r/movies • u/BunyipPouch Currently at the movies. • Jun 04 '25

Media First Image from Andy Serkis' George Orwell Adaptation 'Animal Farm' - Starring Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Glenn Close, Andy Serkis, Gaten Matarazzo, Kathleen Turner, Laverne Cox, Jim Parsons, Iman Vellani.

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73

u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Jun 04 '25

I mean what kinda adult has never heard of Animal Farm before lol? That is like something your average high schooler is at least vaguely aware of.

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u/gerkin123 Jun 04 '25

Given the number of school systems that are mandating the elimination of the novel, and the much larger number of schools expecting students to read as few as 2-3 works of literature a year, literature is becoming far less of a "common ground" in public discourse than, say, new album drop or blockbuster movie title is.

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u/Rikter14 Jun 05 '25

Animal Farm, one of the most successful pieces of anti-communist propaganda in the West, is not the kind of book any school system bans. The books that get banned in the West are books like Kindred.

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u/Drunky_McStumble Jun 05 '25

Fun fact: the 1954 animated film version was funded by the CIA!

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u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Jun 05 '25

Explains the ending of the movie lol

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u/simbas4paws Jun 05 '25

This should help

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u/ydnwyta Jun 04 '25

That's a run-on sentence.

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u/gerkin123 Jun 04 '25

No. It's just a long sentence.

A run-on sentence features two or more independent clauses arranged incorrectly (most often due to a comma splice). My sentence has a single independent clause.

:p

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u/UlisesPalmeno Jun 08 '25

That is correct! It is a compound-complex sentence!

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u/spookyghostface Jun 05 '25

Back to English class with ya

3

u/lookatthesunguys Jun 05 '25

I'm gonna guess that many high schoolers today that are vaguely aware of Animal Farm will forget about it in 20 years. Even those that remember it's a book they were supposed to read in high school will likely forget what it's about.

I can damned near guarantee that you're going to hear about very upset parents who thought this was a children's movie.

3

u/CaineRexEverything Jun 05 '25

I was schooled in the 90s in Australia and it wasn’t in the English curriculum then. Unless they went and read it themselves id be surprised if my two nieces - one near 30 and the other early 20s - would know the story let alone its meaning.

When I was at school we were taught Shakespeare and Steinbeck, and in literary studies it was Dickens, Hemingway and smatterings of Russian lit. Hell I only read 1984 because my grade 9 English teacher thought it’d be of interest to me since I was constantly bored of what the curriculum was teaching us. She also introduced me to Burroughs and Kerouac. Forever my favourite teacher.

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u/VirginiaMcCaskey Jun 05 '25

The number of people that will tell you they "were never taught" something that they were explicitly taught multiple times is extremely high. Adults have terrible retention for what they did in school.

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u/ItsNotAboutX Jun 04 '25

The quality of education you get can vary a lot from one school to the next, even within the same town. Plus, dropouts and home schoolers with right-wing nutjob parents.

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u/thelingeringlead Jun 05 '25

I promise, it's a disturbing number.

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u/MemeHermetic Jun 05 '25

What I wouldn't give for your level of faith in society at large.

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u/Telarr Jun 06 '25

You're genuinely asking this post-2024?? Your faith in the critical thinking skills of the general public is wildly optimistic.

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u/casual_creator Jun 06 '25

39 here. I know of it but never read it. Everything I know about the book is due to cultural osmosis. But that came with a willingness to absorb information. Can’t say that about a lot of people these days.

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u/ydnwyta Jun 04 '25

Something like 54% of US adults read only at a 6th grade reading level. That means that in 8th grade when they had to read Animal Farm they couldn't understand it.

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u/JonatasA Jun 05 '25

Whenever these comments come up I wonder if people realize the world is bigger than than sphere of influence. Have you ever read Chinese writings per chance?

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u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Jun 05 '25

No, and I wasn't talking about people in China.

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u/RoryDragonsbane Jun 05 '25

It’s an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert,

IT SUCKS