Animal Farm Review: Not All Adaptations Are Created Equal

There’s a famous episode of classic British anthology comedy series The Comic Strip Presents… titled “The Strike.” In it, Hollywood producers make a big budget version of the story of the 1984 miners’ strike – an event that devastated communities across the UK – and in doing so one of the great crimes of class warfare is turned into an action flick that rewrites history and misses the point of the story.

Thus it goes for Animal Farm, director Andy Serkis’ adaptation (some might say violation) of George Orwell’s landmark 1945 allegorical novella of the same name. Dropping Orwell’s metaphor for the Stalinist betrayal of the Russian Revolution, this new script by Nicholas Stoller (Get Him to the Greek, The Muppets) becomes a loose and somewhat lax story of all-American corporate greed. What his script and Serkis’ resultant film retains is that this is all told through animals.

As is to be expected, it’s an all-star Hollywood voice cast, with Seth Rogen as loutish, short-sighted Napoleon and Laverne Cox as the prissy but conscientious Snowball, the two pigs who lead an animal revolution that liberates the farm from the mismanagement of drunken hick farmer, Mr. Jones (Serkis, pulling voiceover double duty). With the action transferred from post-war rural England to the modern American South, they fight for control of the future of their home, with the newly-inserted audience piglet proxy of Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo, Stranger Things) pulled between their visions. It’s hard not to think that Stoller created the character to give easier ingress for kids, which is admirable but can only be described as “pulling a Watership Down.” Just because it’s got fluffy animals, it doesn’t mean it’s The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.

This is actually the third cinematic adaptation of Animal Farm. First was John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s CIA-funded anti-communist animated feature from 1954. Next came 1999’s version by John Stephenson, part of the post-Babe wave of “live-action” films that relied on CG and puppetry to make the animals talk. Each version has moved further and further away from Orwell’s original narrative and also become less visually interesting, as Serkis’ take uses unremarkable 3D CG animation with a few more shadows to show that it’s Very Important Indeed.

This Animal Farm also defangs its own political tendencies. Unlike the book, this Napoleon is mostly just a greedy idiot who first dismisses Snowball’s ideas and then steals them for himself. There’s a pivotal scene between the two dueling leaders of Animal Farm that’s a clear re-run of the 2015 debates between Trump and Clinton, and that’s where this version’s flaws become clearest. If it had been released a decade ago, then maybe it would feel at least a little more timely. Yet, like many satirists, Serkis and Stoller couldn’t really grasp the depravity of the current administration. If anything, they’d probably have kept more bite if they’d hewed closer to Orwell’s original vision. It’s not that he simply used animals as a metaphor for how Stalin betrayed the intentions of the revolution and the people of Russia: He merely used it as a case study for all such betrayals. Attempts to make Napoleon a Trump stand-in stutter, and a credit sequence about how revolutions are always in danger of subversion feel like themes excised from an earlier, better script draft.

The worst narrative sin is that Serkis speedruns so much of the story. In the original book, the battle between Napoleon and Snowball that culminates in Snowball’s exile comprises the bulk of the narrative. Here, Snowball’s run out of town in the first act, making this mainly about Lucky’s realization that he may be on the wrong team as Napoleon strikes more deals with human agribusiness tycoon, Freida Pilkington (Glenn Close).

That shift also means that the pigs’ slow transformation into being indistinguishable from humans – the book’s final great shock – happens halfway through the film. By that point, they’re talking, wearing clothes, driving cars into pools, and Rogen is doing his signature huh-huh-huh laugh. Add in some insufferable family-friendly party R&B, and it’s basically a Sing spinoff, right until Lucky discovers that dissident animals are being sent to the glue factory.

This Animal Farm undeniably means well, but if anyone happens to mention “The Strike” to Serkis then it’s hard not to think that he’ll at least once gulp in recognition. The tonal disconnect between the subtext and the delivery leaves this Animal Farm wobbling like the first time Napoleon tries to walk on two legs.

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This article appears in May 1 • 2026.