Ashley Chang
Big red barns? An idyllic countryside? What about the terrified animals?
Picture it: Rolling green hills beneath a broad blue sky. Fields of wheat or corn swaying gently in the breeze. Black and white cows grazing in the pasture, their tails flicking every now and then. Pot-bellied pigs rolling in the mud. Chickens pecking at the dirt. A scruffy dog at his farmer’s feet. And the farmer himself in a pair of denim overalls, holding a pitchfork, wiping the sweat from his brow.
What we imagine when we imagine an animal farm comes from nursery rhymes and picture books, novels and advertisements, songs and sayings, and—of course—from the big screen.
Movies have given us the sights and sounds of farm life as it once might have been in some distant past—but, by and large, not as it’s actually been since the end of the Second World War. As Kenny Torrella reports for Vox, “Factory farming—the intensive confinement of chickens, pigs, and cows on a massive scale—developed in the second half of the 20th century to feed a growing, and increasingly prosperous, post-World War II America.” And the technologies that turned family farms into factory farms have “put an astonishing amount of meat on our plates—some 265 pounds annually per American in 2021, a 55 percent increase compared to the early 1900s.” There’s nothing romantic about animal agriculture today. But our collective nostalgia for quaint farmhouses and traditional values is as strong as ever.
Here are five movies that have shaped the public imagination when it comes to the farming—and killing—of animals.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Before Dorothy followed the yellow brick road all the way to Oz, she lived on her Uncle Henry and Auntie Em’s farm in rural Kansas. In the first scene of the film, Dorothy is desperate to tell them what their neighbor, Almira Gulch, has just done to her dog Toto. But Uncle Henry and Auntie Em are busy. “Don’t bother us now, honey,” he says. “This old incubator’s gone bad, and we’re likely to lose a lot of our chicks!” Meanwhile, Auntie Em is swiftly but gently sweeping the baby birds into her apron to safety. It’s a quick moment, but it suggests a lot about farm life: that farms are peaceful places, that farmers tend lovingly to their animals, that there are maybe dozens—rather than thousands—of animals under their care.
Oklahoma! (1955)
Directed by Fred Zinnemann, who previously directed the western High Noon (1952), Oklahoma! is based on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical of the same name, which opened on Broadway in 1943. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Oklahoma! is a love story that brings an idealized vision of farming to life. As The New York Times noted: “With his wide-angle cameras catching backgrounds of genu-wine cornfields and open plains, red barns, yellow farmhouses and the blue sky full of fleecy clouds, Mr. Zinnemann has brought into the foreground all the warm, lively characters that swarm through this tale of the Oklahoma Territory and sing and dance its songs.” The film opens with a cowboy riding into town on his horse, singing, “Oh, what a beautiful morning!”
But as filmmaker Adam Peditto makes clear in his documentary Common Enemy, the Oklahoma of the musical and the Oklahoma of today couldn’t be more different: “Born and raised on the East Coast, I believed Oklahoma to be the vast American heartland, with sprawling plains, rich with a culture of family farming. My perception came from growing up seeing the musical Oklahoma! and driving through the state. It’s clear that Oklahoma is a farming-proud state with no shortage of cowboy imagery, ranchers, and pro-farming billboards. Upon digging deeper, I learned these traits are becoming legends of the past as industrial animal agriculture has been taking hold of the land, the people, and the animals in Oklahoma.”
Charlotte's Web (1973)
Adapted from the 1952 children's book by E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web is the classic children’s story of a pig named Wilbur and a spider named Charlotte—who becomes his friend and ultimately saves him from being killed and turned into “some extra-good ham and bacon.” The film solves the painful reality of Wilbur’s death sentence with a miracle—a spider who can spin words into her web.
Babe (1995)
Babe gives us a picture-perfect farm with pigs, sheep, ducks, horses, cows, and dogs. It tells the heartwarming tale of a young pig who does whatever he can to avoid his fate of becoming Christmas dinner or taking the prize for ham at the county fair—even if it means learning how to herd sheep. Like Charlotte’s Web, the film finds a miraculous solution to Babe’s problem.
Of course, Babe isn’t the only animal turning to work in an effort to save his own life. The duck, Ferdinand, has taken up crowing like a rooster in order to prove his usefulness—and make the case that he shouldn’t be served for supper. In the world of Babe, animals are trapped in a world that condemns them to being eaten, unless they have the ingenuity to show what they’re capable of.
Chicken Run (2000) and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)
Chicken Run and its sequel are among the few films that move beyond pastoral nostalgia and approach something more akin to a critical exposé of farming practices. As writer Owen Walsh notes, “Through a fanciful and exaggerated lens, both Chicken Run films explore the realities of the food industry from the perspective of animals subjected to its horrors.”
Redefining animal farms
Movies often present idealized versions of farm life that become deeply embedded in our cultural memory, creating difficult-to-shake visions of red barns, rolling pastures, and happy animals that contrast sharply with the horrifying realities of modern-day agriculture. Advocates around the world are shining a light on those realities and rewriting the future for billions of animals trapped on factory farms.
But artists have a role to play, too, in rewiring our collective imagination—inviting audiences to confront uncomfortable truths about where their food comes from, and inspiring them to build a more and more compassionate food system.
