Last Updated on May 3, 2026 by Monica Castillo
Andy Serkis wrote a director’s statement defending his adaptation of Animal Farm before the film was even released. That detail tells you almost everything you need to know about the film itself and probably more than you need to know about Serkis.
The statement includes the line: “Orwell would have approved.” I kept thinking about this while watching Napoleon. the boar execute a fifteen-second fart. Whether Orwell, a man who contracted tuberculosis living in a damp Scottish farmhouse just to finish this book, who died at forty-six, who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the final wreckage of his health, would have approved of a fifteen-second fart, I genuinely cannot say. I have my suspicions.
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Here’s what Serkis got right, or at least got close to: the impulse. Animal Farm the 1945 novella that Orwell wrote as a direct response to Stalin’s consolidation of power after the Russian Revolution is structured like a fairy tale. Talking animals, a farm, a story that children can follow and adults can feel the weight of. Serkis spent fifteen years trying to bring this to the screen in animated form, and the concept isn’t wrong. The novella practically asks for it. The problem isn’t the idea. The problem is everything that happened between the idea and the screen.
Seth Rogen voices Napoleon, the boar who leads the animal uprising and then, with the creeping inevitability that makes Orwell’s story so cold to read, becomes the thing he overthrew. Rogen is capable of this, he’s got a natural authority in his voice, a kind of blunt charisma. But the screenplay, written by Nicholas Stoller, doesn’t give him much room to work in. Napoleon’s corruption here reads less like political tragedy and more like a corporate acquisition. The farm becomes a farmer’s market, then a brand, then an empire. The allegory shifts from Stalin’s Soviet Union to something closer to a TED Talk about disruptive leadership. Serkis wrote in his statement that the animals “enthusiastically embrace capitalism” and what they rebel against is corruption, not the system itself. Which is a choice. A very specific, very legible choice. I’m not sure Orwell would have agreed with it, but then nobody’s asking Orwell.
Woody Harrelson narrates as Boxer, a horse, and I want to be careful here because Harrelson is a genuinely gifted actor and this is not his fault. The narration he’s been given operates at a frequency normally reserved for audiobooks aimed at early readers. Every theme gets announced before it arrives. Every emotional beat gets underlined twice and then circled. There’s a moment where human visitors to the now-animal-run farm proclaim their amazement out loud to no one in particular “I can’t believe I’m buying eggs from a chicken!” which is the kind of line that makes you wonder if anyone involved in this production had ever met a human being. People don’t talk like that. They don’t talk like that even in children’s films. They don’t talk like that anywhere.
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The animation does some things well and the rest badly, which is roughly the ratio you’d expect from Aniventure, the production house whose previous credits include Riverdance: The Animated Adventure. The skies are luminous. Certain wide landscape shots have a genuine beauty. Then you cut to a close-up of a character’s face and the eyes are flat and the expressions are telegraphed and you’re back in direct-to-streaming territory. A celebrity voice cast and the opening credits make a conspicuous point of reminding you how many celebrities are here: Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin, Kathleen Turner, Iman Vellani can carry a lot. It cannot carry flat eyes and a heavy-handed score that tells you how to feel three beats before you’d have figured it out yourself.
Then there’s the distributor. Angel Studios formerly VidAngel, a service that edits explicit content out of Hollywood films for family viewing has built itself into a crowdfunded, faith-adjacent production company whose website describes its mission as a desire to “amplify light.” The Harmon brothers, the Latter-day Saint family who founded it, have their Guild of two million members vote on which projects to fund and produce. They distributed Sound of Freedom in 2023. They have a Ronald Reagan political thriller in the pipeline. Whether their involvement in a film changes the film itself is a fair question the answer is probably not directly, not scene by scene but it does change the context in which you watch it. A story about propaganda distributed by an organization that uses the language of faith to mean something intentionally unspecific is a particular kind of irony. Orwell would have had a field day. The film does not.
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What survives all of this, the fart, the narration, the Angel Guild, the flat eyes is Orwell’s actual architecture. The Seven Commandments. The slow revision of history. The chant of “We’re all equal!” met with Napoleon’s quiet, devastating addition: “But some are more equal than others.” That line still lands, even here, even padded with pop music montages and Price is Right references. It lands because Orwell wrote it, not because the film earns it.
The end credits offer a sequence of painting-style images tracing the history of authoritarian leadership, ancient Egypt, the French Revolution, Stalin all rendered with pig stand-ins. The timeline ends with pig-Stalin. It does not include pig-Hitler. It does not include any figure who might be read as currently in office anywhere on Earth. The filmmakers drew a line, apparently, and that line is located somewhere between 1953 and the present. I’ll leave you to decide what that omission says about who this film is actually afraid of offending.
Animal Farm Parents Guide
MPA rating PG: For mild thematic content and some crude humor. Parental guidance suggested for discussions around the film’s political themes.
Violence & intensity: Mild–Moderate: Animated conflict between animals, including scenes of authoritarian enforcement and the suppression of dissent. Characters are threatened, expelled, and dominated by those in power consistent with Orwell’s source material. No graphic violence or blood. Some scenes of political intimidation and crowd manipulation may be conceptually unsettling for younger viewers even without visual intensity.
Language: Clean: No profanity or adult language. Distributed by Angel Studios, whose productions are screened for family-appropriate content. Dialogue is accessible and aimed at a broad family audience, occasionally to a fault, the film over-explains its own themes through narration.
Sexual content / nudity: None: No sexual content or nudity of any kind. Entirely appropriate for all ages in this regard.
Drugs, alcohol & smoking: None: No depiction of substance use. In keeping with Angel Studios’ family-first distribution mandate, the film is clean of any drug, alcohol, or smoking content.
Age recommendation: 8 and older: Younger children can follow the story; the political allegory and darker themes are better absorbed by ages 8+. Ideal for family viewing with older children as a gateway to Orwell’s novella.
