Animal Farm
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️⭐️
Rating: PG
Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes
Stars: Seth Rogen, Woody Harrelson, Glenn Close
Writer: Nicholas Stoller (Based on George Orwell’s novella)
Director: Andy Serkis
Note to high school English students: Should George Orwell’s Animal Farm pop up on your reading list, do NOT try to substitute this somewhat Disneyfied version as your source material.
There is no happy ending in the original. There is no adorable little piggy protagonist. No sharp-featured Devil Wears Prada-class human diva arrives in a Tesla to canoodle with Napoleon the Pig.
In fact, it’s easy to lose count of the myriad ways director Andy Serkis (Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle) deviates from Orwell’s fanciful, but straightforward, fable of barnyard animals experiencing the folly of a communist utopia – and the resulting slide into totalitarianism.
Yet, the essence of Orwell’s cautionary fable endures as Serkis’s 21st-century menagerie negotiates the major touchpoints of the original. The specter of communism may here be replaced largely by slavish pursuit of material wealth, but the end point — surrender of freedom in the name of sustaining it — remains.
Seth Rogen provides the voice (and animation inspiration) for Napoleon, a porcine despot who attains barnyard power through a skillfully calibrated sequence of humility, flattery, fear-mongering, back-stabbing, historical revision, and, finally, brute force. By the time the rest of the animals begin to catch on, Napoleon is ensconced in the farm’s old house with his piggy collaborators, lording over the rest of the critters with an iron fist.
While Napoleon’s rise is chronicled by our narrator, a donkey named Benjamin (Kathleen Turner – no, really!), the story is largely told through the eyes of a piglet named Lucky (Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo). Lucky views Napoleon’s rise with trepidation, but nevertheless allows himself to become corrupted by it before, at the last minute, repenting. There’s no Lucky in Orwell’s version, but from a movie standpoint the character works quite well, providing the audience with a singular point of view that the original story lacks.
Animal Farm’s animation, by the Canadian group Cinesite, convincingly portrays a bunch of barnyard denizens building a new society. The voice work is uniformly excellent, especially Rogen, alternately smooth as butter and harsh as horseradish, masterfully manipulating his minions. Woody Harrelson conjures up unexpected heartbreak for Boxer, the old horse who just wants to be put to work. And as the film’s human villain, Glenn Close fairly spits venom. Similarly excellent work is turned in by Steve Buscemi, Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons, Kieran Culkin, Promising Young Woman’s Laverne Cox, and The Marvels’ Iman Vellani.
The book ends with old Benjamin watching through a window as the corrupt pigs and their human co-conspirators drink to their success – and discovering to his horror he cannot tell the people from the pigs. This Animal Farm includes that chilling scene, but Serkis chooses to play the story out until the common animals have their revenge. It’s a cinch that decision will draw animus from Orwell purists – but to be fair, both the 1954 animated version (bankrolled, in part, by the CIA) and the 1999 live-action outing similarly fudged the finale.
That’s show biz, folks; Hollywood endings are a fact of life. What’s important is respect for the source material, and this Animal Farm does not step back from Orwell’s galvanizing warning: The road to liberty is littered with land mines that look like lilacs. Choose your guide carefully, or the whole enterprise could well blow up in your face.
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