While watching this just-released, kid-targeted film on May Day — a day which socialists since 1886 have celebrated as "International Workers Day" — I knew already from promotional material that it would "flip the script" on George Orwell's 1945 satirical allegorical novella. The approach was soft-pedaled by the movie's distributor, Angel Studios (founded by Mormons in 2014), a Utah-based firm specializing in faith-based, Christian-themed content. Perhaps Angel Studios hopes parents will take the revised theme on sheer faith.

This movie recklessly inverts Orwell's original theme even beyond the public relations billing. Like his more famous, later work — the novel 1984 (which appeared in 1948) — Animal Farm is anti-authoritarian. It vilifies not capitalists, but communists. This movie effectively reverses Orwell's moral framework and vilifies not communists (or even collectivists) but capitalists.

When the animals arrive on the farm, they first sense fun upon seeing signage that reads "Laughterhouse," but they soon realize the full sign reads "Slaughterhouse." The antagonist is not the cruel and corrupt Napoleon, but a greedy billionaire and a corporation intent on shutting down the farm. It is a clever but not-too-subtle hint — carried throughout the film — that these animals, like workers, will not merely be corralled but exploited. Filmmaker Andy Serkis appears to view this as a good and peaceful message for kids.

Not only is the original (anti-communist) theme of Animal Farm clear to anyone who bothers to read it, but Orwell himself was clearer still in his 1947 preface to the Ukrainian version, that "its various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution." Orwell also knew, of course, that the 1917 revolt in Russia was not of workers against capitalists but of Bolsheviks and disgruntled (because unpaid) soldiers against the royalist-Czarist regime. Although Bolsheviks were inspired by Marxism and Marx was anti-capitalist, it didn't follow that the Bolshevik Revolution was an overturning of capitalism. Russia in 1917 was more feudal-agrarian than it was capitalist-industrial.

Other accounts of Animal Farm are clear about its meaning. Per Britannica, it's:

a political fable based on the events of Russia's Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own, based on the founding principle 'All animals are equal.' Eventually, the animals' intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution. Concluding that 'all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,' the pigs form a dictatorship even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters.