Seventy-two minutes of hand-drawn animation, released in 1954, Animal Farm is a British feature that puts a political fable on screen in cartoon form. The catalogue files it under Animation and Drama at once, and both labels do real work here.
What is Animal Farm about?
The story opens on an English farm where the animals live under long hours, short rations and indifference from the man who owns them. One night an elderly pig gathers the others and puts a plain proposition to them: the place would run better without him. When the moment arrives, the animals drive the farmer out and take the buildings, the fields and the machinery for themselves. Rules go up on the barn wall, labour is shared, and the first harvest belongs to the ones who cut it. What follows is the slower work of actually running a farm, with meetings, disagreements, hard winters, and decisions gathering steadily into fewer and fewer hooves, until the painted rules no longer read quite the way they did on the morning they were written.
About the cast
The voice credits list Gordon Heath and Maurice Denham. It is a small vocal cast by any measure, and the performances carry the picture through shifts of register rather than a crowded roll of names. K-Time lists the two performers in the order the catalogue records them.
Context & significance
John Halas and Joy Batchelor are credited as directors, and the production is British. At seventy-two minutes the film is compact, and the animation is hand-drawn throughout in the manner of its period. The political material sits inside the fable rather than on top of it: the farm is a closed world with its own rules, its own economy and its own arguments, and events are allowed to speak without commentary from outside the yard. That is why the barnyard setting carries the whole weight of the story.
Watching Animal Farm on Ktime
Animal Farm streams on K-Time with a free account login, while the write-up on this page stays readable without one. Both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles are available for this title, so it can be watched either way, which helps in a household where one viewer prefers Farsi audio and another wants the original track with subtitles. The interface is built in Farsi for viewers across the diaspora.