Animal Farm

Slovenia’s best-known illustrator Damijan Stepančič opts for harsh and bloody imagery in this new comic-book interpretation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” of 1945, directly conveying the cruelty and perversion of the well-known parable on political rulership and the communist social system. The particular transformation of the pigs from “normal” animals to a power-hungry, ruling class with gluttonous, scheming apparatchiks is foregrounded especially well. One of the best-known and highly prized children’s book authors, as well as (children’s) poets of Slovenia, Andrej Rozman Roza, has masterfully transcribed Orwell’s text into dialogue and put it in the mouths of the animal protagonists. He thereby gives the story a new incisiveness and contouring in redux. This “Animal Farm” also occasionally warns that these events could have happened in Slovenia or anywhere else.