Animal Farm (dir. Andy Serkis)

by Jack Martin | Jul 22, 2026

Certificate: PG

Running Time: 94 mins

UK Distributor: Vue Lumière

UK Release Date: 24 July 2026

WHO’S IN ANIMAL FARM?

Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Kieran Culkin, Glenn Close, Steve Buscemi, Laverne Cox, Woody Harrelson, Jim Parsons, Andy Serkis, Kathleen Turner, Iman Vellani

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Andy Serkis (director, producer), Nicholas Stoller (writer), Jonathan Cavendish, Adam Nagle, Peter Nagle, Connie Nartonis Thompson and Dave Rosenbaum (producers), Heitor Pereira (composer), Kevin Pavlovic (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A group of rebellious animals take over their farm, but succumb to their newfound power…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON ANIMAL FARM?

As I’m sure a lot of other teenage schoolchildren were and still are, I was at first confused when my English teacher gave me a book to read by the name of Animal Farm. “What? That sounds like a children’s story, why do we have to read this?” I remember asking myself at the time. And then, upon actually reading it, I fully understood why. George Orwell’s classic novella isn’t just a brilliant allegory for the rise of communism in what was then the Soviet Union, but for young people such as myself it was both a clear and precise introduction to a dark period in human history, as well as the dangers of putting too much blind faith in a fundamentally flawed system that can never work in practise because of the inherent selfishness and desire for power that people possess.

I therefore weep for any child or teenager who is given director Andy Serkis’s abysmal animated adaptation of Animal Farm instead of the actual book. Its jumbled messaging, frequent pandering and tonally misguided storytelling are bound to push the next generation far away from what is fast proving to be a timeless story of corruption and greed, thereby keep them in a state of ignorance when it comes to recognising those fundamental truths within our wide-reaching society. On top of that, it’s just a terrible adaptation, one that misses the mark so much on what Orwell was trying to get across that it ends up feeling like its own dystopian nightmare.

At first, things seem reasonably like how Animal Farm should be. As in the book, we begin on a rundown farm where the neglected animals, led by the pig Snowball (Laverne Cox), stage a revolution against their human owners, and assume control of the farm. Snowball introduces a set of rules for each animal to follow in order for all to be equal, including not living in the dilapidated farmhouse and not walking on two legs like their human oppressors, which initially please all – except for Napoleon (Seth Rogen), a fellow pig who begins manipulating others, such as trusting young pig Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo) and faithful shire horse Boxer (Woody Harrelson), to turn on Snowball and hand him the leadership instead. From there, as you’d expect, rules are bent and broken, and eventually Napoleon turns the whole system into one that benefits only him and his fellow pigs.

But very quickly, Nicholas Stoller’s script begins dragging the story down with it into a gigantic pile of lowest common denominator family movie tropes: characters speak in woefully dated slang, there are numerous close-ups of animated pig arses shaking in front of the camera, people slip on animal excrement, rap songs dominate the soundtrack, and at one point everything stops so that a main character can let rip a massive fart. To say that Orwell would be most displeased by how his story, and along with it its messages and themes, are being treated here would be underselling it, because this film dumbs everything down so much that it leaves no room for the intelligent and dark turns that made the book so groundbreaking. Gone are the purges that the antagonist Napoleon inflicts upon fellow animals who don’t agree with him, as are the young pups who are raised into becoming blindly obedient foot soldiers (the latter being an especially unsettling commentary on the warped ideology of corrupted youth), replaced by crude puns and nonsensical sub-plots involving a tech conglomerate scheming to acquire the farm through their own nefarious means.

Furthermore, the plot points that they do keep intact here somehow make much less sense than in the original novella. For instance, it is Snowball who leads the revolution that begins the film – the elderly Old Major, who inspired it in the book, is scrapped entirely – but despite being beloved by the majority of the animals, they’re extremely quick to turn against her and banish her from the farm after Napoleon makes a couple of snide comments that could easily be dismissed. There is also the odd choice of having Boxer be the film’s narrator, which if you know this character’s fate in the story will have you questioning exactly how he knows certain details, even ones that he isn’t around to witness for himself. Even when it reaches the point where the original novella concludes, it goes on for at least another twenty minutes when it suddenly becomes a strange hybrid of Mission: Impossible hijinks and a Trump rally, before wrapping up too quickly on a saccharine note that once again goes against what Orwell set out to achieve.

It never knows whether it is specifically targeting the hypocrisies of communism, as in the book, or the seductive nature of modern-day consumerist capitalism, but either way both Stoller and Serkis fail to honour what Animal Farm stands for because the respective writer and director – the latter making an especially big fumble that should make one worried about that Lord of the Rings movie he’s just entered production on – seem too afraid to fully embrace the bleak nature of the original story. The film isn’t even appealing to look at, as it features some weirdly off-putting animation that gives these animals textures which at times make them look like rejects from a low-budget CG animated TV series, and a particularly ugly-looking one at that.

In short, this take on Animal Farm is terrible, both as an adaptation and as a film in its own right. It is everything you’d expect to see in a bad kid’s film, but never in an adaptation of a story warning us against the very thing this movie turns out to be. That alone makes it sting even greater that this book is essentially being bastardised to a point where, much like Orwell’s infamous ending, it’s impossible to tell it apart from all the other bad kid’s movies out there.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Animal Farm is a woeful adaptation of George Orwell’s classic allegory that nixes the intelligence and darkness of the original story in favour of pandering crude humour, nonsensical modern updates, and ugly animation that betrays the messages which Orwell hopes to impart.