Start this lesson with some basic economic facts. Movies are born and live only when three urges are satisfied.
You need a reason to exist. Movies have become a being with its own existence in this regard. So if anyone just thinks about making a movie there are a collection of templates and economic channels to support the supposition. Usually, they all depend on the notion of entertainment, which everyone accepts but no one seems to able to understand.
You need forces that pull creative talent into the thing. Sure, the economic channels will draw some people. Money will draw some to any enterprise. But most of the essential people involved are there because of the art of the thing. Or what they think the rewards of what they think art is.
And you need in final mix, forces that draw audiences. Now that's where this movie can teach us something unless you think it is unique.
Think those three forces above, first in terms of the book. It is poorly written. It is allegorical like hundreds of its brethren of the times and no more insightful. What gave it traction in society was that (like 1984) we had a cold war. We had an industrialized educational system that wanted to fight that war by introducing political notions in ways that children would understand. So this became required reading, a boon to the publisher and the talentless author.
So we have both a film and a book seemingly driven by this educational need. The pull of simplifying complex human flows into simple narratives.
You know, before the cold war educational initiative, the wisdom was that schools should teach the real stuff: history, how people think, ethics and morals. Then they could grow into complex political issues. Before the McCarthy era, no one would have dreamed of schoolyard propaganda. But in 1954, a besieged film industry subsidized films of "Animal Farm" and "1984."
The result was as planned, we have two full generations of Americans who get their political views prepackaged, and of course obsolete.
Watch this film. It is a remake of the 1954 animated version of the book.
Watch it and try to put yourself in the context it was intended to illustrate: Soviet-style communism. Now watch it again in the current context. Still fits.
Take your pick:
-- We'll take any prepackaged political allegory and apply it to our own world regardless of fit.
-- Today (say the US) really is as threatening as the USSR was.
or
-- This political allegory and perhaps all juvenile ones are useless -- only kept alive by a bankrupt educational system.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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