Review – Animal Farm ⭐️

At long last, we finally have our hands on Gollum actor and Venom 2 director Andy Serkis’ take on Animal Farm, featuring a star-studded cast including (but not limited to) Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Jim Parsons, Steve Buscemi and Woody Harrelson.

This 3D-animated flick seemed (at least as far as trailers were concerned) dead set on reimagining Orwell’s classic novella as a kid-friendly, gag-filled crash course on the cyclical nature of consumerism and revolution, hardly the easiest and best-matched of bedfellows when it comes to tone. 

‘They say that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And I say…whoever said that is a big, whiny loser!’

To an extent, though, this new iteration of Animal Farm feels like a blast from the past right out of the animated Noughties, something akin to throwing Shark Tale, Open Season and a dash of Home on the Range together with a dour and innately political Orwellian warning – ‘a cautionary tail’, if the tag-line is to be believed…

Despite the talent behind this (not, I must admit, on the director’s side – Serkis is a fine actor but something of a dud when it comes to calling the shots), that cocktail of fart-gag comedy and porcine corruption led to a frankly heinous teaser trailer and an online howl from fans of the source material.  Since that opening gambit went down like a lead balloon, Serkis and Co. seem to have all-but gone into hiding as far as this film is concerned. We all knew it would crop up at some point this year, like Casablanca said: ‘Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon’ and I was not looking forward to it finally appearing. I saw one trailer for it in the cinema several weeks ago with an unspecified release date and after it bombed critically and financially in its US release in May, the team have seemingly decided to just sneak this release in under the carpet. 

There’s barely anything out this week – with Nolan’s Odyssey still selling just about every seat in its second weekend, there’s no studio daring enough to throw down the gauntlet. To that end, I think it’s incredibly telling that Animal Farm has opened in the UK this weekend with as little fanfare as possible, more out of contractual obligation than anything else. The sooner this is all out of the way; the sooner Serkis can put all his eggs into his new Lord of the Rings Gollum-centric midquel set to release next Christmas and wash his hands of the whole muddy affair.

In a way, the film proper falls somewhat short of being the complete dumpster fire that one might be expecting, but even with my most charitable of critic glasses on, this really does feel like a bad idea done badly. As far as innovation goes, the hero of the piece is Lucky, a young pig with a helpful brown mark on his right eye which helps him stand out in a crowd. He’s voiced by Gaten Matarazzo, no doubt known for playing the adorable Dustin in Stranger Things, and he lends some naïveté that helps carry things along. 

It’s interesting to centre on a pig rather than the greater herd as a unit, as we effectively get to peek behind the gilded curtain and look in on the details of this new class’ porky uprising. The group’s leader (and Lucky’s surrogate father) Napoleon (played well by Seth Rogen, who practically has his famous chuckle ready to go on a soundboard) has commandeered the animals’ revolution as his own, resting on his laurels and swiftly becoming just as oppressive and unfair as the farmhouse’s previous residents: the humans. 

Rather than looking on in pure horror from a distance, we get to see Napoleon unravel through Lucky’s eyes, which would work, in theory, if the pair’s relationship had any kind of meat to it. Instead, their rapport is relegated to grisly displays of rampant consumerism, Lucky trying his best to resist the allure of tech, designer clothes and endless rounds of Candy Crush. As this plays, Rogen is saddled with a whole host of throwaway gags, none of which hit, which feels like such a waste of good talent when you could literally leave the screening room and slip into a showing of The Invite to see just how phenomenally funny he can be with the right material. 

These characters are unsettlingly rendered in the kind of 3D-animation that you can only muster up with the help of Angel Studios, the obscure production company behind last year’s uncannily right-wing Jesus movie. From the very first shot of a pig, I couldn’t help but think of The Beatles’ musings from their own take on pork-bellied mud-dwellers: ‘In their eyes, there’s something lacking, what they need’s a damn good whacking.’ Some animals are more equal than others (or so I hear) and that’s certainly reflected in the character designs, though for as much time as we spend with the pigs themselves, they tend to fare worst of all, especially once they’re up and about on their hind legs.

Tesla Cybertrucks, flashy tablets, silk clothes and late-night neon parties are just some of the earthly delights on offer if you sell your soul to the humans’ greed and profit off the back of your old comrades’ back-breaking work ethic. On paper, seeing the extent of that extravagance on offer could really show you why the characters feel so smitten with it and are unable to let it go – almost like a PG-rated version of The Wolf of Wall Street’s debauched lifestyle. 

In reality, though, changes in the narrative see Glenn Close’s human character, a seedy businesswoman with an eye for owning the farm, plant these ideas in their heads. In that sense, the whole story becomes one of human intervention tainting an otherwise unsuspecting and innocent populace rather than Orwell’s vision in which these structures and shortcomings manifest themselves solely through the act of assuming power over the other animals. In this version, outside forces oppress the upper echelons of the farm, who then oppress their own kind in turn, whereas Orwell told it as an insular community eating itself due to the innately corrupting powers of, well, power. The two angles might look similar, but the meanings are night and day. 

In a world where genuine strands of fascism seem to be creeping back into places we’d previously pruned, one would really hope that a 2026 adaptation of perhaps the quintessential anti-fascist, anti-capitalist work would manage to reflect the themes accordingly. Here, though, it’s more a tale of blue jeans and flashy tattoos than a tearing down of corrupt leaders who sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the masses by tampering with information. 

Yes, the pigs do play around with the farm’s own constitution (their seven commandments are scrawled on the side of a silo, often re-annotated accordingly to alter their original meanings) but when Jim Parsons’ wily sheep character cries out ‘Hey, that didn’t say that before!’ some of the delightful dubiousness of the original story gets lost along the way.

 Of course, with all of these things, you have to keep in mind that this is a kids movie first and foremost but that doesn’t mean things need to be spelled out quite so obliquely; some of my favourite films as a kid, the ones that I cherish now as an adult, were the type to trust even a young viewer’s ability to understand a deeper meaning. It’s always a shame to see a kids movie underestimate its target demographic.

While the film does occasionally flirt with the sad pathos of the original story – Woody Harrelson lends his voice to Boxer, the hard-working workhorse who gives his all to the cause – things are all too often spoiled by the same brand of humour that feels like an echo of some of the worst animated movies of the 2000s. In a lot of ways, this feels like an oddly starry version of something you’d find lining the bottom row of a Blockbuster (if you don’t know what Blockbuster was, then call upon your local elder, probably with an offering of a goat or at least a packet of pink wafers). 

 For a film that’s that proud to show off its voice talent, there’s a fantastic irony to be found in the fact that virtually none of them have turned out to plug this movie in any way. By all accounts, Animal Farm seems to have been an embarrassing little blip in their filmographies that they’d rather went unseen, and as someone who went to the pain of seeing it today, I’d wager that’d be no bad thing…

BBFC: Rated PG for mild threat, violence, rude humour, upsetting scenes.

Animal Farm is in cinemas now.