KYLE SMITH: Animal Farm Review: Mucking Up Orwell.
While the animals are initially excited to share the ownership and operation of the farm, dividing the bounty equally becomes a problem. Napoleon turns into a parody of Donald Trump who mocks and razzes his political rival, another pig named Snowball, who is voiced by Laverne Cox. Whatever wise good governance Snowball suggests—saving half the harvest for winter, installing a water mill to generate electricity—Napoleon (or, as he calls himself, “Na-po-po”) leads the crowd in mockery. “It just sounds pretty boring,” he says, and pushes a jeering mob of brainless sheep to repeat whatever he says. Before being forced into exile, a frustrated Snowball cries out, “You animals are all too stupid to understand.” Mr. Stoller and Mr. Serkis (the veteran actor who played Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise and Alfred in “The Batman”) consider this remark a sharp rejoinder to populism. Do you feel duly reprimanded, fools?
Much of this roams pretty far from Orwell’s vision, but that’s not the reason the film fails. It fails because it’s obvious, witless and dull. The animation is charmless and bland. The altered storyline, which is told from the point of view of a new character, a porcine young Everyman named Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo), and narrated by Orwell’s stand-in for the suffering proletariat, the ever-toiling workhorse Boxer (Woody Harrelson), builds to a conspiracy between the increasingly dictatorial Napoleon and a clumsily reworked version of Orwell’s Mr. Pilkington, a tech mogul (Glenn Close) who has nefarious designs on Animal Farm. Her company is both a snazzy creator of cool products and a mega-retailer—a sort of Applezon. The animals, who become more and more like humans as the story goes on, get dazzled by and addicted to her wares. People say things like, “I like the optics.” A pig has a back tattoo reading “Go pig or go home.” The strenuous attempts at hipness here are as antithetical to Orwell as any other element.
USA Today adds: Andy Serkis explains why he changed Orwell’s iconic ‘Animal Farm’ ending for new movie.
Andy Serkis has been trying to animate George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” for 15 years. In 2026, he says, it “couldn’t, actually, be more relevant.”
Serkis and his producing partner, Jonathan Cavendish, started tinkering around with an adaptation after he filmed 2011’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” The rebellion in that movie reminded him of “Animal Farm,” which he read for the first time on the bus to school when he was 10 or 11. Fifty-some years later, it sticks with him. He wore a red hat to the premiere that read, “Make Animal Farm Fiction Again.”
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Serkis approached the adaptation by asking himself what Orwell would write about if he wrote “Animal Farm” today. He didn’t want it to be a story about Stalinist Russia. Instead, he gravitated toward themes of capitalism, wealth and overconsumption. The billionaire antagonist, Pilkington (Glenn Close), drives what closely resembles a Cybertruck.
This isn’t the first attempt at a mirror universe Animal Farm; Roger Waters did the same thing nearly 50 years ago on Pink Floyd’s Animals: “Whereas the novella focuses on Stalinism, the album is a critique of capitalism and differs again in that the sheep eventually rise up to overpower the dogs.”
