Animal Farm

Andy Serkis’s Animal Farm should not exist. Angel Studios sold its 1.6 million Guild members a cautionary tale about communism. What showed up in theaters is a drab kids’ cartoon that races past Orwell so it can lecture about malls, then ends by implying the animals should try the revolution again with nicer pigs.

We caught a Thursday preview after the Regal listing looked nearly 40% sold. Three people sat in the auditorium. My brother and I were two of them. I will not pretend that is a full audit, but I left wondering whether Angel’s “pay it forward” machine is buying seats that stay empty. Someone else can dig that trench. The fishy house only stacked more controversy on a movie that already had enough.

This is the third theatrical Animal Farm: the CIA-backed 1954 cartoon, the haunting 1999 live-action puppet hybrid, and now Serkis’s near-fifteen-year passion project. It bounced from a Netflix berth through several producers before Angel took the U.S. theatrical release. The budget shows in the voice reel: Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, and Gaten Matarazzo as Lucky, a piglet invented for this version so someone can keep explaining the plot to an audience Orwell trusted to keep up.

Manor Farm is headed for repossession. A drunk farmer has sold his stock to Pilkington Industries for processing at the “Laughter House.” Snowball clocks the euphemism and leads the revolt. The animals seize the place, rename it, draft the Seven Commandments, then the movie sprints to the story the creatives wanted: pigs shopping, capitalism as the real bogeyman, and a second rebellion that, somehow, points back toward another round of the same system. The book’s critical beats get about twenty to twenty-five minutes. After that, Orwell is mostly in the rearview.

Strip the politics and you still have a children’s cartoon that treats you like an idiot. Every emotion gets spoken aloud. Every theme gets restated by Harrelson’s Boxer in a lullaby drone that could put a stadium under. When Napoleon turns on Snowball, another animal announces to nobody, “He’s turning on her.” Dialogue works like closed captioning for people who refuse to watch. Boxer is miscast at the microphone. Harrelson sounds a decade too young for a character built on dignity ground down by labor. The revolution that is the whole premise exits before the popcorn cools, because the script (Nicholas Stoller) is late for its own editorial. Twenty minutes of Animal Farm, thirty of slapstick and TikTok-grade fart jokes, forty of TED Talks.

The middle “satire” Googles its own metaphors. Pilkington, a new face for this take, reads like a stand-in for Elon Musk’s mother and drives a not-quite-Tesla cybertruck. Instead of dramatizing the seduction into a corporate alliance, Serkis ships the pigs to a mall. Sunglasses. Department store. A banker explaining how money works. Consumerism corrupts, illustrated by filming consumerism. As Napoleon’s rule hardens, the movie literally dims the sun over the farm so you will notice capitalism creeping in. On the nose is generous.

Orwell’s ending matters: the pigs become indistinguishable from the humans at the table, proof the revolution minted the next oppressors. This film tries a version of that beat, then swaps the window-watch for a body-horror morph where pigs walk upright and faces flicker between man and beast. Cronenberg cosplay inside a matinee package. The movie does not know its audience. It looks like a kids’ picture, loads dated references and slapstick that never charm, refuses the anti-communist spine of the book because the filmmakers want an anti-capitalist sermon, and lands in a mush that serves nobody. Not for kids. Not for adults. It should never have been released.

Lucky is the audience surrogate: questioning Napoleon, defending Snowball, asking the inconvenient thing while the farm cheers. When he comes back in the third act to organize against Napoleon, the mob diagnoses him with narcissistic personality disorder. Direct quote energy. They shame the only animal with a consistent moral line while the cowards and sellouts who clapped for Napoleon’s farts keep their seats. Those animals need the slaughterhouse. Start with the lamb chops.

The climax is the betrayal. Orwell ends with pig and man fused at the same table and the watching animals unable to tell which face is which. The hijack is the revolution. This film says we needed better pigs. Lucky topples Napoleon, friendship slogans roll, credits hit, and the cycle cues up again with Lucky as the next would-be leader. That is the Stalinism reading Orwell wrote the book to kill. Angel sold a communism warning. They shipped a fable where the system would have been fine without one bad pig and one bad billionaire.

Politics aside, the movie is ugly, drab, and boring. The messaging is obnoxious. It will sit among the worst adaptations ever put in theaters. If that dents Angel’s stock and punishes a Guild rug-pull, they earned it. Don’t Waste Your Time. If the scale went below one, I would use it.