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“Old MacDonald had a …” Sorry. Wrong Recap. That’s because while the cast of George Orwell’s Animal Farm may be a bunch of pigs and sheep and horses and such, each of these animals is actually symbolic.

Video Transcription:

Pigs and sheep and horses and dogs. Sounds like the cast for an Old MacDonald music video, doesn’t it? But these aren’t just regular old farm animals. In George Orwell’s allegory, each one of them is a symbol.

Let’s start with those pigs. Sorry Stalin and Trotsky: You guys ended up as porkers.

Napoleon, the pig who grabs control after the Rebellion, uses military force to consolidate his power. That would be Stalin for you. He is seriously not a nice guy, er, pig.

Snowball is a pig who works by persuasion. He seems to win the animals’ hearts and to emerge as a leader, but he doesn’t prove wily enough to defeat Napoleon. Yes, Trotsky, that would be a commentary on your own failure as a leader.

Moving on to the horses, we’ve got a sympathetic but ultimately critical picture of the working class.

Boxer and Clover work hard and are intelligent enough to know that something funny is going on with the pigs. Unfortunately, their naïve trust in Napoleon’s good intentions makes them unable to recognize the way they’re being exploited.

The sheep live up to their name. They are, literally, sheep. Incapable of doing anything but blindly following. And our last blatantly allegorical character is Moses, the religion-spouting raven. He uses religion to pacify the oppressed—in much the same way Communism did.