Old MacDonald Had a Dud

'Animal Farm' aims to please everyone and by doing so pleases no one

It brings me no pleasure to report that director Andy Serkis and his team have made a spectacularly misguided “update” to George Orwell’s classic political allegory. A Hollywood figure who has never had much success breaking away from motion-capture acting and into the directing realm, I’ve always held out the belief that he had good movies to create and just needed to find the right funding. When Animal Farm was first announced, he had the intention of using motion-capture to create realistic animation and to honor the darker tone of Orwell, even planning a partnership with Rupert Wyatt whom he worked with on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It was his passion project that he wanted to share, and eventually partnered with Netflix for distribution. But as years passed, and Netflix dropped the rights, and the project turned to complete animation, and Wyatt was no longer attached to the project, and it was handed off to be written by Nicholas Stoller, famous for writing Judd Apatow comedies like Neighbors and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, something had definitely gone wrong.

It’s hard to know what exactly happened to break Serkis, but somewhere along the way, he sold out his passion project and let it get turned into an animated comedy for children. And it doesn’t matter how much he defends this movie in interviews; watching the actual movie makes it evident that very little care was put into this. While the animation on screen is serviceable at best, the script can only be described as utter hogwash. This is not the movie of a passionate director. This is the movie of a man resigned to the system. I mean all this with no disrespect to Serkis and the cast, who clearly are more talented than whatever happened here.

Gone is Orwell’s savage political allegory on the failures of communism, and where the allegory still occurs, it has been sanded down to be child friendly and digestible for families. If there was a desire to make a family friendly farm animal story, this wasn’t the classic to adapt, since Orwell fans will only be disappointed and kids will be left comparing it to better barnyard family films like Babe and Charlotte’s Web. Featuring witless jokes (Stoller’s family film credits include Dora and the Lost City of Gold) and predictable plot changes, there are very few children who will walk out saying it’s their favorite movie ever.

Mistakes begin right away when the farm animals rebel against the greedy farmer, and someone decides to set the revolt to a rap cover of “Old Macdonald’s Farm.” From there, so much of the movie feels trapped by this aggressively “modern” sensibility, including a whole subplot involving a tech millionaire who wants to buy the farm. This naturally lends itself to a montage sequence where the pigs visit the millionaire’s high-tech mall and scenes of the pigs having a rave with their new bling. The tonal whiplash that occurs between the scenes straight from Orwell’s book and the added modern sequences only heightens the disappointment, and just makes you wish for a real adaptation all the more.

Much of the plot is told from the perspective of a young pig named Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo), who is taken under the wing of Napoleon (Seth Rogan), a pig with an agenda of his own. Lucky is excited about the animals finding their new freedom, but as Napoleon slowly corrupts the original vision for the farm, Lucky is dragged along with the scheme, and has to eventually reckon with his own choices and help his friends overthrow Napoleon’s rule. It’s a simple and optimistic message for kids, but at what cost? At the cost of erasing the point of the book in favor of something more “audience friendly”? Unfortunately, after an hour and a half of pratfalls, toilet humor, and Little Richard needle drops, “audience friendly” definitely wasn’t the impression I got. It will undoubtedly keep indiscriminate kids in their seats, but kids deserve better. If there is a bright side to all this, it will encourage kids to go read a book instead.

After this got picked up by Angel Studios, they subtitled it Animal Farm: A Cautionary Tale. And it’s true that Animal Farm was always meant to be a cautionary tale about ideals becoming corrupted by those who desire power. How ironic, then, that this movie adaptation abandoned the original vision for the sake of money. A cautionary tale indeed.