‘Animal Farm’ and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

    I’m sorry, fellow conservatives. I just can’t throw tantrums over this stuff anymore. I prefer to build alternatives. 

    The trailer for a new cartoon adaptation of George Orwell’s anti-Communist classic Animal Farm was just released, and people note right are angry. The feature-length movie moves the focus away from Orwell’s 1945 critique of Soviet-style authoritarianism to indict corporate greed, introducing a rich antagonist not present in the original book.

    Of course, conservatives went crazy. British historian Rafe Heydel-Mankoo was blunt: “Animal Farm as imagined by woke Hollywood is as appalling as you might imagine. The objectionable Americanisation aside, this cringeworthy trailer suggests a complete perversion of the book. A critique of Stalinist Russia, the betrayal of revolutionary ideals, and how ideological regimes can devolve into totalitarianism appears to have been turned into a – sadly predictable – attack on capitalism. Bizarre and depressing. But what can one expect from a progressive Hollywood that openly embraces socialism? Animal Farm‘s themes and warnings have arguably never been more pertinent to the West than today.”

    I’ve moved past the point where I throw fits over Hollywood socialism. As I have been writing about all year on Hot Air, next year I am planning an Anti-Communist Film Festival in Washington, D.C. It is long past the time where we give ourselves ulcers fighting the left. It’s time to provide an alternative. When I saw the trailer for Animal Farm I was indeed annoyed, but then a strange calm came over me. We now have the Anti-Communist Film Festival. It’s time to throw our own party. 

    I love my fellow righties, but I just can’t give in to another minute of helpless griping. It’s time to build something.

    Right around the time the Animal Farm trailer was released, I was attending the European Union Film Showcase at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater just outside of D.C. I had just seen two films. One, Two Prosecutors, is an indictment of Stalin’s bloody system of “justice.” The other is the new German film Köln 75, a film that celebrates jazz and freedom in West Germany at a time, 1975, when the East German Stasi were suppressing all kinds of music.  Koln 75 is the story of when a teenager named Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) convinces jazz master pianist Keith Jarrett (John Magaro) to play a solo concert in Koln, West Germany. It’s based on a true story, and the concert recording, The Koln Concert, has become a classic and one of the best-selling jazz recordings of all time. 

    Koln 75 is hugely entertaining, as Vera bluffs and begs and hustles her way through putting on concerts when she has no experience as a promoter, just love to burn as a jazz fan. She races around town, wheels and deals money from parents, and breaks the fourth wall by occasionally losing directly to the camera to correct some historic fact – like telling jazz club owners she was twenty-one when she was really sixteen. It’s a perfect film to showcase at the Anti-Communist Film Festival.

    Look, I get it. Decades of abuse at the hands of Hollywood have habituated conservatives to a certain reaction when we are met with a disgrace like the new Animal Farm movie. We feel helpless against people with so much money and power. We go one social media and gripe. We throw tantrums. We melt down.

    These are understandable reactions, but frankly, I just can’t do it anymore. Like the punk rock I loved in the 1980s, it’s time we host our own movies, make our own music, throw our own party, demand and take equal time and space on the paying field. We are launching an event that will be an annual gathering that attracts freedom-loving filmmakers, critical thinkers, angry liberals, and inoculates young people against totalitarianism. 

         Animal Farm isn’t even on my radar. In 2026 we claim what’s ours.

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