Animal Farm, 2025.
Directed by Andy Serkis.
Featuring the voice talents of Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Woody Harrelson, Kieran Culkin, Glenn Close, Andy Serkis, Steve Buscemi, Kathleen Turner, Jim Parsons, Laverne Cox, and Iman Vellani.
SYNOPSIS:
Following an animal revolution, the pigs seize power and a farm is transformed into a ruthless dictatorship.
The notion of watering down George Orwell’s classic, eternally relevant Animal Farm into family-friendly fare warrants legitimate pause for skepticism. In execution, the real problem is just how low-brow and lazy this is.
One of the very first jokes has Seth Rogen’s pig, Napoleon, doing the actor’s well-recognized laugh while nervously and politely asking the other animals not to laugh at it. There is also a song called “Barnyard Rap” playing over the opening credits that casually lists off every talent in a prominent voice actor role, so you can lose some respect for them one by one and get it out of the way early (Kieran Culkin, who and what kind of dirt does someone have on you that you ended up in this), a hip hop tune that is as obnoxious as it sounds. During that same sequence, which features the barnyard animals revolting against their drunken owner, who has stopped feeding them and paying the bills, a cow rubs its genitals over someone’s face after going airborne.
The most dispiriting part of all this is that it is a project by director Andy Serkis and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller. The former certainly understands his way around evocative, lifelike motion capture, which gave this some potential before a first look was revealed that it is nothing more than generic animation, well below the standard of 2026. As for the latter, he has worked with Seth Rogen before and has made some genuinely funny, raunchy comedies, so it is downright shocking to watch this and see how little effort has gone into being funny. resorting to fart jokes, pigs driving luxury cars, and undeniably cringeworthy dialogue while typically losing the plot of Animal Farm and its themes to the point where the farm itself feels beyond secondary.
That’s also not to say these filmmakers don’t know what Animal Farm is; there is a basic setup involving animals revolting and taking over the farm, with wise de facto leader Snowball (voice of Laverne Cox) establishing a series of rules to ensure harmony and equality, all of which are broken one after the other once Napoleon develops a persuasive hold over the rest of the animals, insisting that building water mills for electricity and saving harvest for winter is a boring way to live. The problem is that their understanding of the novel feels like it came from a game of Telephone with 100 people, all substance lost in the process.
For a brief moment, I will be generous to the film and admit that there is an almost Trumpian vibe to how quickly and comfortably Napoleon (based on Joseph Stalin in the book) dismisses a much smarter woman, manipulating those around him to oust her from well-wielded power, not to mention his insatiable greediness and relentless ambition to live a life of excess. Trump may as well be classified as a pig, so there is also that. However, the other 99.6597800% of this movie is far too juvenile and not even remotely thoughtful or intelligent enough to further engage with the possibility that this film has anything to say beyond a gradual butchering of the source text. On a technical level, the animation is serviceable, if outdated, and the voice-over ensemble is impressive, making this moderately watchable even if they are phoning it in.
Nevertheless, it is up to Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo, playing a new character) to work through his fracturing friendship with Napoleon (slowly coming around to questioning everything he is peddling) and his loyalty to the other animals, such as a long-time hard-working horse pal, Boxer (voiced by Woody Harrelson), while managing a crush on one of a pair of oinker twins voiced by Iman Vellani. The quest also puts him up against some greedy humans (voiced by Steve Buscemi and Glenn Close), as the other pigs begin to blur the line between humans, beginning to walk on two legs, drink alcohol (referred to here as “naughty juice” for some inexplicable reason I don’t even want the answer to), become addicted to modern technology, crash cars into swimming pools, and become succumbed by a thirst for cash and material objects.
The shattered bones of Animal Farm are here, but the bite and soul have been cast out for your standard run-of-the-mill animated talking animal nonsense. And while the overall message that all animals are created equal is always a worthwhile metaphor to show younger viewers that everyone deserves the same treatment in real life, the majority of this experience is drowned out by so many awful attempts at comedy that they cancel each other out (this only gets a second star because I have seen worse modern animation in film recently.)
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
