Animal Farm: Cutesy adaptation of George Orwell’s text falls flat

If years have passed since you last picked up George Orwell’s evergreen allegorical 1945 novel – and how many of us haven’t since encountering it as an enshrined secondary school curriculum text? – you’d be forgiven for forgetting certain elements. Its plucky hero piglet Lucky, for instance, revolting against the devious pig overlords who overthrew, then mimicked, the human oppressors. Or the musical montages to popular tunes. Or one painfully extended fart gag. 

Of course, none of these appear in the original Animal Farm. Director Andy Serkis, writer Nicholas Stoller and their computer animation team are reimagining Orwell’s very specific takedown of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism; not only applying it to a modernised, media-infused totalitarianism, they’re trying to broaden it into family, farmyard entertainment. Orwell by way of Aardman Animation’s Chicken Run (2000), or the animatronic marvel Babe (1995). That’s the plan, at least. 

To give the film its due, there’s a canny shift in prime pig villain Napoleon’s power play here. He’s less ruthless politburo dictator, more populist opportunist; a performer who labels any critics as “losers”. His phoney bonhomie (Seth Rogen’s trademark yuk-yuk laugh smartly weaponised) and truth-muddying wins round the animals in a way that feels far closer to today’s autocrats. And when a human villain drives what’s clearly a Tesla, you can see which modern demagogues it truly wants to make great again. 

Sadly, that’s the extent of this version’s effective changes. In Orwell’s text, once the four-legged creatures banish their hapless farmer Jones, the subsequent two-legged threat centres on the pigs themselves learning to stand upright, repeating the cycle of exploitation and tyranny. Serkis and Stoller insist on inserting billionaire technocrat Frieda Pilkington as a Final Boss-level baddie, leading Napoleon, Squealer and co astray. It’s a dumbed-down cop-out and fundamental misreading of the story that also encourages the film’s worst tendencies, from sloppy, shopping mall slapstick, to the aforementioned flatulent inanity, to 101 Dalmatians-esque animal peril (Pilkington is voiced by Glenn Close in full Cruella de Vil mode). 

In truth, no Animal Farm screen adaptation, even the sobering 1954 British animation (apparently co-funded by the CIA to promote an anti-Communist agenda), has ended with the book’s infamous chilling final sentence: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig…” But in trying to pitch Orwell’s nightmarish prescience into a cutesy, kid-friendly triumph over adversity, Serkis and co seem to be looking from Orwell to bad Disney and from bad Disney to Orwell and make it impossible to say which is which.

► Animal Farm is in UK cinemas now.