I don’t think I have any red lines or sacred cows when it comes to movie adaptations of books, and so purely as a matter of principle, I don’t really care if you want to adapt George Orwell’s Animal Farm as an animated film geared toward children, complete with fart jokes, dance numbers, and a climactic battle scene. As a matter of taste, I object to a lot of that, but not as a matter of principle.
Andy Serkis has done all of these things with his new film. And presumably he had good intentions, but the execution is appalling, and the result is toothless and shapeless. I suspect all of this is more a result of Serkis overthinking everything and ending up with nothing, rather than something that started out as a soulless corporate enterprise, but in terms of what we see on screen, this may be a distinction without a difference.
The film is narrated by everyone’s favorite doomed horse, Boxer, voiced by Woody Harrelson doing a terrible impression of Woody Harrelson, and it’s got a ton of other voices you know, including Glenn Close putting on who knows what accent, and Seth Rogen, whose Napoleon the pig is essentially Chick Hicks from the Pixar Cars movies. The animation itself is dreadful, looking like some sort of pre-Shrek-era work that will only terrify kids. And as for kids, a whole lot of what we see sure feels like grown-ups saying, “kids like this stuff, right?” and tossing it on screen. As for Orwell’s actual work, Serkis changes the events of the story drastically, introducing conflicts from all over the economic and political spectrum, and because of this, we end up with a movie that, apparently intentionally, doesn’t express ideals of any kind, and we wonder what the point is if it’s so aggressively going to avoid having a message. As far as I can tell, the worst thing that can happen in this world is breaking the rules, and if that’s what we’re actually getting at here, maybe we’re all better off at the glue factory.
Animal Farm is in theaters.
