Animal Farm
Andy Serkis takes a classic text and gives it a chilling resonance in his daring update of George Orwell’s dystopian allegory.
Big Brother telling porkies
Image courtesy of Vue Entertainment.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Animal Farm wasn’t intended as a book for children. Equally, it’s hard to know which demographic the third film version of George Orwell’s novella is aimed at. It’s the second classical text to be given a dramatic makeover in a week. It also contains an unnerving sequence – as did Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – in which humans are transmogrified into swine, and vice versa. It was George Orwell who saw a future in which giant computerised corporations might, one day, hoard secret information about every man, woman and child on the planet. It was a grim if insightful prophecy.
For purist devotees of the 1945 original novella, this new version is likely to have them running for the nearest trough to empty their lunch. There’s now a drone called Moses, a jolly shopping spree to the nearest mall and a brand-new protagonist called Lucky, a piglet voiced by Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin in Stranger Things), who finds that his allegiance to the grown-up pigs Napoleon (Seth Rogen) and Snowball (Laverne Cox) is divided. When Napoleon once stepped in to save Lucky’s life, the piglet has since found himself indebted. But Snowball, who has taught herself to read and write and passes on her knowledge to Lucky, appears to be the more rational pig.
When Manor Farm is repossessed by the bank and the livestock is herded onto a truck bound for the slaughterhouse, Snowball encourages the animals to rebel and to seize the farm for themselves. But in order to thrive without the managerial expertise of Farmer Jones, Snowball – with the help of some agricultural literature read out loud by Lucky – sets up a cooperative with specific rules, notably stressing that all animals are equal and should never walk upon two feet, as the human enemy personifies avarice and cruelty. Snowball also has the wisdom to see into the future and insists that all the animals share their spoils and save the grain supply for winter. Napoleon, though, sees all this hard work as boring because, at heart, he is a lazy, greedy pig, albeit an enormously charismatic one who feeds off the popularity of his eat-now, starve-later philosophy and all of the other non-stop falsehoods he doles out.
What the producer-director Andy Serkis and his screenwriter Nicholas Stoller have done here is to introduce elements of Orwell’s 1984 and brought the whole thing into the present day, along with all the high-tech gadgetry that kids now accept as the norm. Furthermore, Serkis and co. seem unafraid to highlight the inhumanity of today’s corporate farming practices. And at the centre of the narrative is the animals’ new leader, Napoleon, an egotistical fat pig who prospers on the adoration of his subjects and feeds them interminable lies in order to serve his own ends and to satisfy his endless covetousness. It’s a nightmarish scenario that brings Orwell’s prophetic forewarning bang up to date, in which the environment suffers at the hands of corporate greed.
Among many notable moments (and there are many) is the scene when Lucky cries, “I – am – an – animal!”, rejecting his peers’ desire to be more human, while echoing the primal scream of John Hurt’s deformed John Merrick in The Elephant Man: “I – am – a – man!” And there’s Napoleon’s callous aside, when he sums up the heartbreaking sacrifice of the workhorse Boxer (voiced by Woody Harrelson): “Boxer was the glue that held us all together.” Few villains this year, animated or otherwise, have resonated so chillingly.
Voices of Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Jim Parsons, Andy Serkis, Kathleen Turner, Iman Vellani.
Dir Andy Serkis, Pro Andy Serkis, Adam Nagle, Dave Rosenbaum and Jonathan Cavendish, Ex Pro Woody Harrelson, Screenplay Nicholas Stoller, Pro Des Amos Sussigan, Ed Kevin Pavlovic, Music Heitor Pereira.
Aniventure/The Imaginarium Studios/Cinesite-Vue Entertainment.
94 mins. UK/USA/Canada. 2024. US Rel: 1 May 2026. UK Rel: 24 July 2026. Cert. PG.
