Reinterpret a masterpiece as “Rebelion on the farm” by George Orwell is not an easy task, but Xavier Dorison and Félix Delep have achieved it masterfully. In “The castle of the animals” There is no pig named Napoleon who rules, but the President of the Republic is a brave bull called Silvio (in reference to Berlusconi?), who is always escorted by a canine militia and who drinks champagne every day. Meanwhile, the rest of the animals in this castle converted into a farm work hard to keep the community barn full.
But soon a showbiz rat appears on the scene and explains Gandhi’s feat in India, a story that serves as a trigger for a peaceful rebellion (the daisy revolution) that will try to destabilize a dictatorial regime where a chicken can be cruelly executed by not wanting to contribute their eggs to the central reserves. “If animals are not well prepared, disobedience can turn into anarchy! Believe me, the madness of the masses is more fearsome than the madness of a despot, because it is more uncontrollable.” This is one of the teachings of this little ideologue in the form of a rodent.
This large-format album serves as a modest tribute to all those who showed that there was a path (narrow, dangerous, uncertain, but very real) to a better world. These are the words of screenwriter Xavier Dorison taken from the preamble; I dare to add that the tribute is sincere and not at all modest, since the result of this volume is spectacular. Every page you turn is one millimeter more that you open your mouth in surprise; As if that were not enough with the story itself, a complete dossier with storyboards, unpublished illustrations, sketches and physiognomic studies of some of the animals wonderfully drawn by Félix Delep is included at the end of this comprehensive edition.
There can be no faults with this work, we just have to wait for Norma to release the second volume of this comprehensive edition of “The castle of the animals” to find out how the story ends. We want to discover what role Boris, dog No. 2 of the dictator Silvio’s canine guard, will end up playing, since in this first part he shows a certain bipolarity in his behavior. I would also like to find my own answer to a question posed on the back cover of this album: What is the most effective way to change the unfair things in this life?