To Orwell Today,

Dear Sir/Madam,

Is there any truth in the rumour that some intelligence organisation (CIA maybe) bought the rights to Animal Farm and changed the ending?

Is the ending chapter 10 here on your website as Orwell wrote it?

Regards,
Lynn Eykamp

Greetings Lynn,

The book "Animal Farm" was published in Orwell's lifetime and so its ending was not changed, otherwise Orwell would have raised hell considering all the trouble he'd gone through. See ORWELL'S PUBLISHING PROBLEMS.

But after Orwell's death (seven months after publication of "1984"), the rights to his books were deviously manipulated out of his wife Sonia's hands and there were changes made to the first movie production of "Animal Farm" (and to subsequent productions). I discuss this in ORWELL A WRITER WRONGED and COMMUNIST CAPITALIST ORWELL MOVIES and ANIMAL FARM A BAD MOVIE and 1984 A BAD MOVIE:

"...Inevitably, the takeover of the film rights of Orwell's last two books produced movies tailored to ideological ends. In the cartoon version of Animal Farm the banquet at which the pigs become indistinguishable from their human oppressors was changed. Orwell's pessimistic intention was thereby obscured and the message that the tyrannical Stalinist pigs are no different from the cruel capitalist farmers was lost..."

Yes, the ending of "Animal Farm", on my website, is as Orwell wrote it, ie, Chapter 10, last paragraph:

"...Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

All the best,
Jackie Jura