Animal Farm (2026)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
I will say this: Andy Serkis’ Animal Farm is ambitious in attempting to take George Orwell’s iconic novella about tyranny and repurposing as an animated family film for young children.
Has a unique animated look about it.
The impressive A-list cast will draw some attention and for what does get through to young viewers, some of these jokes will land with them.
NO
Midway through watching this, I simply jotted down - “What. Is. Happening?”
The animation quality is inconsistent and the attempts at humor and simplifying Orwell’s cautionary story falls incredibly flat.
Though Andy Serkis has wanted to make this for years, I have zero idea who the target audience is for this.
OUR REVIEW
In and of itself, adapting George Orwell’s 1945 novella “Animal Farm” for a modern audience is not inherently a bad idea. We live in deeply polarized times. Orwell, more than 80 years ago, wrote a story about the rise of tyranny and, in part, how those in power use the concept of equality as a mechanism to re-establish class and societal balance. He framed it around a farm full of animals.
A bleak, complicated work, while at times funny and satirical in tone, “Animal Farm” essentially makes the argument that power is intoxicating. If someone in charge is toppled by those seeking and demanding change, it is only a matter of time before another despot or ruling class will take over. At the end of the day, someone is always standing on two legs, eager to look down on everyone else.
As the famed British historian Lord Acton once said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Andy Serkis’ attempt to repurpose and reintroduce Animal Farm as a family-friendly animated film is one of the more baffling misfires of recent memory. Adapted by Nicholas Stoller, who has had success with resurrecting The Muppets and Dora the Explorer to the big screen, the film guts and reconfigures Orwell’s themes. In their place are lots of juvenile humor, random pop culture references, and painfully unfunny one-liners delivered with the enthusiasm of a high school student preparing to take an SAT test they never studied for.
With an impressive A-list cast of voiceover talent, and his more than 15-year commitment to getting the film made, I can admire Serkis’ stick-to-itiveness. Yet somewhere along the way, he literally seems to have lost the plot.
Hints of Orwell’s novella are present. Believing they are being taken to the “Laughterhouse,” a group of animals break out of a flatbed truck once they realize they are being taken to the “Slaughterhouse” instead. Ultimately they break free, defeat their human captors, and take back the farm that evil tech billionaire and Cybertruck owner Freida Pilkington (Glenn Close) wants to possess.
Napoleon (Seth Rogen), a boar, starts to wrest control of the farm from Snowball (Laverne Cox), a sow, and thus begins a power struggle that finds Napoleon manipulating the other barnyard animals into following him, under the guise of freedom, equality, and independence, while slowly turning into the oppressive leader the animals originally fought to get away from.
The problems here are not that Serkis and Stoller took Animal Farm in a different direction. It’s how badly miscalculated this becomes. The animation style is wildly inconsistent, with landscapes and backdrops looking impressive, but the close-up rendering of faces and overall movement of the characters resembles something akin to an animated program made-for-television.
The film randomly fades to black at the end of certain scenes, as if the film had exit cues to insert commercial breaks. There is also the unbelievable rap song “Break Down the Farm,” by Pigeon John, which is used to introduce us to the cavalcade of celebrity voices and characters in the film. It does so with lyrics like “If you stand on two legs, then you’re getting attacked,” and “Old McDonald had a farm/take a look around/’cause it’s all gone.”
Then, one wonders why Animal Farm would appeal to young kids in the first place. While admirable to introduce Orwell to a youthful audience, Stoller’s screenplay doesn’t exactly give anyone watching a very thorough understanding of totalitarianism, oppression, and the manner with which those in power often become everything they claim to oppose. Conveniently, it ignores Orwell’s thoughts on how those with dissenting opinions are treated as enemies and so often, cruelty becomes the point in bending people to your will.
Instead, we get lazy jokes, a fifteen-second passing of gas described as “the sound of freedom,” and a love story between Lucky, a teenage pig new to the story and voiced by “Stranger Things” star Gaten Matarazzo. He is smitten with one-half of a set of female pigs (Iman Vellani). Steve Buscemi’s voice, portraying Pilkington’s right-hand man, Mr. Whymper, is pitch-shifted to an almost unrecognizable degree. The one character who we do kind of connect with, a horse named Boxer, voiced by Woody Harrelson, becomes part of a story arc that might actually really upset the youngest of viewers if they are able to put things together.
Inexplicably distributed by faith-based film studio, Angel, which releases films based on the decisions made by its two million “members” of “The Angel Guild,” Animal Farm is such an ill fit for a studio that has released The Sound of Freedom, The King of Kings, David, and numerous other devout Christian-themed films.
Honestly, who even knows anymore. What’s down is up and what’s up is down. And with Andy Serkis’ Animal Farm, we now have this self-described “Cautionary Tail,” which gives us kid-friendly, Z-grade hip-hop songs, bad jokes and one-liners, and seemingly ignores the very realities Orwell warned us about all those years ago.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Kieran Culkin, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox, Steve Buscemi, Woody Harrelson, Jim Parsons, Iman Vellani, Kathleen Turner, Andy Serkis
Director: Andy Serkis
Written by: Nicholas Stoller
Based on the novella “Animal Farm” written by George Orwell
Release Date: May 1, 2026
Angel Studios