‘Animal Farm’ Review: Andy Serkis’ Smooth-Brained, CG-Animated Bastardization of Orwell’s Classic
When I was in middle school, George Orwell's Animal Farm was one of our "baby's first totalitarianism via Brit" required texts, right next to William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Granted, I preferred the latter because Darwinism was more interesting to me then. But if you were reading that in your English or social studies classes, you were definitely watching the 1954 anti-communist propaganda, CIA-partially funded (no, seriously) 2D animated feature adaptation right after. I faintly remember it being solid enough before its "Oh yeah, the government!" turn. Besides, Lord of the Flies and the Peter Brook adaptation stuck with me more than Animal Farm ever did.
I don't know if kids are still required to read Animal Farm in schools these days, during the bleak Trump administration era, let alone watch that movie. But if you're a teacher planning to teach the source material, please embrace tradition. I assure you, as state-sanctioned as the 1954 film was, it's far more faithful than Andy Serkis' long-gestating modern update – a smooth-brained, celebrity-filled CGI bastardization that's like taking the original text and giving it as many redactions as the government did to the Epstein files… brought to you by the good Republicans at Angel Studios.
Image copyright (©) Courtesy of Angel Studios
MPA Rating: PG (for thematic elements, some action/violence, rude humor and language.)
Runtime: 1 Hour and 34 Minutes
Language: English
Production Companies: Aniventure, Cinesite, The Imaginarium Studios
Distributor: Angel Studios
Director: Andy Serkis
Screenwriter: Nicholas Stoller
Cast: Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Jim Parsons, Andy Serkis, Kathleen Turner, Iman Vellani
U.S Release Date: May 1, 2026
When farmer Jones (Andy Serkis) loses his farm to foreclosure, his animals face slaughter. Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo), the only pig who can read and write thanks to leader Snowball (Laverne Cox), rallies them to rebel. They seize the farm and establish equality under Snowball's commandments, vowing never to become like humans. But power-hungry Napoleon (Seth Rogen) seizes control, prioritizing tech-driven modernism; pigs wear chic sportswear, use iPhones, and strike deals with tech mogul Freida Pilkington (Glenn Close). Democracy becomes a caste system, with Napoleon, his right-hand Squealer (Kieran Culkin), and the oblivious Lucky lording over the others. Now, Lucky must team up with Benjamin the donkey (Kathleen Turner), love interest Puff (Iman Vellani), Boxer the horse (Woody Harrelson), and others to take Napoleon down.
A strong voice cast does Animal Farm’s heavy lifting.
The voice cast is the film's best quality. Rogen isn't the ideal Napoleon – he's written as a man-cave dude-bro whose rise to fascism is filled with his signature chuckles and a few fart jokes. That said, he's good with the against-type material and sells this diluted version with effective line deliveries. As Snowball, Laverne Cox doesn't get much screentime but captivates with soft, stern, graceful leadership. Culkin's sniveling Squealer and Matarazzo's earnest naïveté as Lucky (who mostly sounds like Justin Briner at times) also stand out.
Animal Farm’s troubled production is reflected in every frame.
Serkis' Animal Farm – in development since Rise of the Planet of the Apes – spent 15 years in development hell. The motion capture maestro wanted to do it in his favorite form, but mocap is expensive and rare outside of Avatar these days. Netflix, which distributed its Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, dropped the project two years after acquiring it in 2018. He settled for 3D-CG animation at Aniventure's Cinesite, a studio known for cheaper, serviceable CGI. He could've easily taken the common CGI/live-action hybrid route without performance capture, but oh well.
I don't want to discredit the Cinesite animation team, but I really dislike the ugly, geometric, blatantly low-budget style of Animal Farm. You can see the cut corners thanks to low-rendered character designs and paintbrush textures on animals and backdrops, but this film never finds a good middle ground with visual quality. The generic animal designs and dead-eyed human characters render everything deeply unappealing and ugly. The cheap production is also visible in the stiff movement and the animals’ limited expressions.
Animal Farm marks the only time your boy will review an Angel Studios project. I've been rooting for this since it was announced, and it played at Annecy before the buyout. Nevertheless, it shocks me that after 15 years of development, Serkis – who played one of the most prolific animal liberators of all time (Caesar) – completely misunderstands the source text. Even his explanation for switching from performance capture to CG animation foreshadowed the disaster. He told The Wrap, “By definition, doing it as a live-action movie would have made it bleaker from the outset, darker, and the character designs that we were working on in the way that we were doing it were too heavy-handed.”
Orwell’s edge is lost to crass, dated humor.
The film's lack of polish and ugly design are the flies to the rotten meat of a narrative. Nicholas Stoller (Neighbors, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, Bros), a writer I genuinely think has range, either completely misunderstands Orwell or was assigned to water down the text until it vaguely resembled the source by character names, a few lines, and the commandments. The most enraging aspect is how he and Serkis diminish the challenging themes of fascism through a dumbed-down, kiddified, iPad-brained lens. Serkis and Stoller go ham on modernizing this text for today's youth: Napoleon losing his cunning and homicidal malfeasance, filling the scenery with postmodern tech imagery, pop tunes (a cringe Animal Farm rap at the top, and the only needle drops they could afford are The Price is Right theme and 2 Unlimited's "Get Ready for This"), and spoon-feeding the audience with a babified Woody Harrelson voiceover narration to fill story sections the production lacked money or courage to depict.
Because it's 2026 and we live in a world of pansies, the film won't say "no alcohol" but "naughty juice." Every story turn feels less like Orwell and more like a mid-2000s, post-Shrek 2 wannabe, with Stoller & Serkis resorting to crass humor and many attempts to make Animal Farm hip. It’s so 2000s coded it’s climax is cribbed from Revenge of the Sith, and pulls out the last remaining tooth it had with a hollow resolution saying kindness prevails. If they had more money, it would've ended in a big dance number with "Animal Farm is saved!" over a pop song cover.
Serkis aims to tackle modern fascism with standard plotting, down to making its antagonist a goofball-turned-despot for commercialization’s sake. The film overall generalizes, if not harmfully taints, the sources’ themes. Yes, fascism reinvents itself for each generation, becoming increasingly dumber, including current systems. I'll give the benefit of the doubt that this was in production before Trump 2.0. But the fact that a British production got permission from the Orwell Estate, features an incompetent boar, and was released by Angel Studios (which purports to be our incompetent tyrannical boar in power) adds insult to injury.
More Orwellian off-screen than anything in the film.
I went to the NY premiere. The atmosphere was eerily Republican: aggressively white country-coded attire, and every Black person there wearing a comically large cowboy hat (something I've never seen in real time). I saw Andy Serkis walk the red carpet in an Angel-made "Make Animal Farm Fiction Again" hat. Trailers then played for the ‘MERICA FUCK YEAH Angel-produced, Serkis-starring Young Washington and the Jeff Daniels Reagan drama The Brink of War. Then the kicker: at the Q&A, Laverne Cox spoke about her experience as a trans woman dealing with modern fascism, which was met with tepid, scattered applause. Angel Studios president Jordan Harmon didn't acknowledge her two-minute speech and moved straight to Gaten Matarazzo.
Somehow, this is both worse than the CIA-funded ‘50s cartoon and the most Orwellian thing to happen in real time. In terms of heavy-handed text diluted in a film adaptation for a commercialized family-oriented audience, Animal Farm is so horrendous that it makes me look back at Illumination’s The Lorax and say, “Perhaps I treated you too harshly.” At least that movie had “How Bad Can I Be?” and it birthed the Tumblr sexyman trend in The Once-ler. Animal Farm has Rogen’s Napoleon ripping wind to Lucky and saying, "This is what freedom sounds like.”
Screw Animal Farm, man. It’s the worst adaptation (and movie) I’ve seen this year. Congrats, Emerald Fennell. You’re off the hook. Take your kids to see something challenging like The Sheep Detectives, watch A Bug’s Life, or give them the actual book and read it to them at bedtime. It’s never too early to teach them anti-totalitarianism, and it starts with avoiding this.
FINAL STATEMENT
Better resembling the pig crap silo that destroyed Springfield than it does its source material, Andy Serkis’ Animal Farm is a shallow, commercialized waste of time, like it was made by Pig Brother to keep smooth-brained viewers under control.
