Reading Animal Farm Backward

The reviews for Angel Studios’ animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm are worse than the film itself. Although director Andy Serkis and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller trivialize Orwell’s 1945 text by turning it into a family-friendly cartoon, disapproving reviewers misunderstand its faults in utterly banal political terms. In scoffing at Serkis’s rigged happy ending, generic animation, and fart jokes, critics ignore how such crass, propagandistic tactics (not Orwell’s shrewd perceptions) have become the animation standard in Hollywood.

By refusing the purpose of allegory in Orwell’s parable — in which assorted animals of Manor Farm play out the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin — Angel Studios follows the infantilizing conventions made popular by Pixar and Marvel.

This political vulgarization is consistent with the gaslighting of “family entertainment” that refrains from weighty topics or treats audiences as idiot consumers. It’s what we expect of a movie by Serkis (lauded for portraying Gollum in The Lord of the Rings franchise) and any film that features Orwell’s classic Pig and Sheep political figures (applicable to every political regime) embodied by social justice celebrities — Seth Rogen voicing Napoleon, Kieran Culkin as Squealer, Woody Harrelson as Boxer, and Laverne Cox as Snowball.

Serkis directs the intersection of anthropomorphic animals and human caricatures as an unholy combination of Chicken Run, Babe, Despicable Me, and the Toy Story flicks. The humor is as broad and flat as the sometimes harshly physicalized animation, and Orwell’s ideas are flattened, too. This antic cuteness (adding a piglet named Lucky modeled after Babe) fears the ideological narrative the same way Pixar taught childish solipsism, mechanical excitation, and greed.

Variety claims that “Orwell intended . . . the book as a kid-friendly critique of Soviet society under Stalin,” totally missing the purpose of the adult narrative and rejecting the cerebral for the inane. The Hollywood Reporter refers to the movie’s “critique of corporatization featuring human villains,” a backward reading of Orwell’s ingenious exposé of behavior and motive, not corporations.

Edmund Wilson made Orwell’s rep in 1946, with this review:

Mr. Orwell has worked out his theme with a simplicity, a wit, and a dryness that are closer to La Fontaine and [John] Gay, and has written in a prose so plain and spare, so admirably proportioned to his purpose, that ‘Animal Farm’ even seems very creditable if we compare it with Voltaire and Swift.

Bad pedagogy has turned youth against capitalism when it should have turned them against Pixar. That’s why Hollywood resists the faint whisper of Orwell’s politics. In this era, Orwell’s 1984 has gone from cautionary tale to a recipe for the Democratic Socialists of America and crusading progressives — the same hipsters who cling to the social distortions of Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite.

We’ve lost honest, cultured intellectuals like Louis de Rochemont, who produced the superior 1954 animated film version of Animal Farm. Directed by the husband-and-wife British animators Joy Batchelor and John Halas, it gave Orwell vivid pictorial dimensions without sacrificing logic or drama. Credited as England’s first animated feature, it resembles Disney’s figurative style, but it does what Disney wouldn’t. Batchelor and Halas’s streamlined, 72-minute cartoon follows the phases of historical political revolution in striking anthropomorphic imagery. When Farmer Jones’s bloodstained shirt is used as a flag of victory, the mongrel ferocity matches Orwell’s description: “The pigs’ ears were bleeding, the dogs had tasted blood, and for a few moments they appeared to go quite mad.” In a reeducation sequence, an abacus made of apples is eaten to its cores; a goat is painted as a trompe l’oeil stone wall during a counterrevolution; and pink bows adorn the tails of new generation of follower pigs.

During a home-invasion scene, the pendulum swing of a grandfather clock symbolizes the march of time, as per the socially conscious approach of Rochemont (who also produced the famous “March of Time” documentary shorts and the prescient biracial drama Lost Boundaries).

Animal Farm might have been an ideal follow-up to Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin if not for too-close association with Lenin acolyte Tony Kushner. Instead, unsophisticated Serkis lacks Orwellian edge. We can’t connect the pig named Squealer to being a propagandist for the new revolution, or link Napoleon’s trained attack-dog army to miseducated college protesters and Antifa; or relate the calumny against Snowball to Adam Schiff’s July 25, 2019, allegation before Congress of a fantasy Trump crime. As a comic coup, Serkis offers Glenn Close voicing a human vagabond villainess who drives a purple Tesla Cybertruck.

Serkis also weakens Orwell’s most daring point: The revolutionaries pledge seven commandments that are originally intended to shape their new egalitarian society but that change once the new leaders gain real power. Their initial “All animals are equal” gets amended to “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Yet this cartoon prevents recognition of how recent political rhetoric has switched “equality” to “equity” — a shift that emphasizes Orwell’s thesis. Serkis’s circus disguises how Orwell’s nightmare has come true.