Andy Serkis’ Animal Farm, a new family-friendly adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel, is one of the most despicable movies ever made.
As a middle school English Language Arts teacher, I teach my 7th-grade students “Animal Farm” every year. We read, talk, brainstorm, create, debate, and write about propaganda, communism, the power of language, how absolute power corrupts absolutely, and how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Before we start the new unit, I look back on when I read the book as a pre-teen and thought, “This seems bigger than me and more than I can understand,” and I gave in before grasping it completely. I vow that none of my students will feel that way. I believe that, over the past seven years that I’ve been teaching the book, I’ve hooked a good majority of them. And that is largely because the book is basically bulletproof, one of the finer allegories of the recent past that never feels stale or dated.
Needless to say, I understand “Animal Farm.” To anticipate any and all student misunderstandings, I know the characters, motivations, motifs, and symbols better than most who read the novel a long time ago when they were kids. I certainly understand it more than Andy Serkis does. Or more than he cares to.
The book is usually about a group of farm animals who, after years of supposed abuse and mistreatment at the hands of their alcoholic farmer, decide to rebel and take capture of the property. After agreeing on the laws of the land — the Seven Commandments include “No animal shall wear clothes” and “No animal shall drink alcohol” — peace and prosperity reign…but only temporarily. It doesn’t take long for the pigs (get it, the pigs? I never said Orwell wasn’t occasionally obvious…) to seek out a disproportionate amount of power, as they believe themselves to be smarter than anyone else. One boar in particular, the stout Napoleon, assumes the duties of a dictatorship (get it, Napoleon? I never said Orwell wasn’t occasionally obvious…) and, in a grossly cyclical manner, the other animals find themselves again held in captivity.
Serkis does little of this (on purpose, at least), instead choosing to strip the piece for parts in his PG adaptation. Instead, it’s now the story of a plucky young pig named Lucky (a new creation for the film) who sees the injustice, fights for the little guy, and saves the day. It has a happy ending! That alone seems bad enough, until you consider the fart jokes, swapping of the word “alcohol” for “naughty juice,” and the rap rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” It is a confounding film, one that gets worse at regular intervals. It makes other anthropomorphic animal adventures, like Chicken Run (2000) and Barnyard (2006), look like “The Communist Manifesto.”
The all-star cast, unquestionably tantalized by a few easy days of work and a ridiculous paycheck, does it no favors. Seth Rogen plays Napoleon — please remember, the frighteningly grotesque dictator pig — and imbues him with nothing more than his iconic Seth Rogen laugh. Laverne Cox, playing the prematurely-exiting pig Snowball, who is banished from the farm early in the film for disagreeing with Napoleon, was probably done by lunch on her first day. And you can’t convince me that Kieran Culkin even thought about trying, probably realizing he was making another Foodfight! (2012).
It’s easy to see that Animal Farm has been distributed by Angel Studios, the Christian and conservative company behind Sound of Freedom (2023), Solo Mio (2026), and The King of Kings (2025), and blame their obvious misunderstanding of the material. There is no doubt in my mind that they don’t understand a lick of Orwell’s book, and that irony is not lost on me, but this is not their fault. They were just the ones stupid enough to buy the film for $30 million and think they could recoup their costs. I’m not defending their taste; I’m just clearing up a misconception.
No, the fault lies squarely with Serkis. When the film was announced nearly a decade ago, it seemed like the perfect project for the motion-capture king, a well-respected interpreter of great authors like Tolkien. I’m not sure exactly what happened in the depths of developmental hell (we may never know), but the decision to dumb down the material, leaning more toward toilet humor than Trump criticism, was, in an understated word, misguided.
Take one of the novel’s grossest scenes, for example. After the humans are run out, there’s no one left to milk the cows, whose udders painfully swell with overdue milk. The pigs, adept and adaptable, learn how to milk the cows by opposably using their trotters to squeeze hard. I have always found this — and my students tend to agree — a gruesome image. I mean, think about it. Yuck. In this version, Lucky, an adorable little boy, squeezes so hard the milk shoots him in the face like a fire hose. This was, apparently, funny. I heard children around me laughing. Good for them, I guess. But shame on their parents.
Serkis, in a promotional appearance for the film, recently appeared on The Late Show to gift Stephen Colbert a MAGA-red-hat-knockoff that states MAKE ANIMAL FARM FICTION AGAIN (official merch from Angel Studios, by the way), in a cheeky bit of poking and prodding at the current administration. I can only assume no one took his suggestions for hat ideas, which included MAKE ANIMAL FARM FARTY (FOR THE FIRST TIME), and MAKE ANIMAL FARM IDIOTIC (YES, APPARENTLY IT IS POSSIBLE), and MAKE ANGEL STUDIOS ENOUGH MONEY SO THEY CAN MAKE SOUND OF FREEDOM 2 AND SINGLE-HANDEDLY END CHILD SEX TRAFFICKING.
Review Courtesy of Patrick J. Regal
Feature Image Credit to Angel Studios