In a year that’s given us Melania and Michael, Animal Farm is not 2026’s worst film, but it’s as dead-on-arrival as you can get. Delivering mature sentiments with immature execution is a self-defeating prophecy, but this film commits the sin of butchering Orwell’s source material so thoroughly it could be branded animal cruelty.
Andy Serkis’s directorial adaptation of Animal Farm is teeth-grindingly awful. It’s an animated feature that removes all satirical bite under the guise of increasing accessibility. Made with pantomime characters and a puke-inducing Hollywood ending, calling it a betrayal of the book is too tame. The only thing faster than its descent into preposterous toothlessness is George Orwell spinning in his grave.
Modern audiences have an exhausting habit of proclaiming that politics are being forced into our entertainment. We can debate that claim’s legitimacy until the cows come home, but Orwell’s 1945 dystopian novella was enriched by its political allegories. Inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution, it told a tale of animals seizing their farm from oppressive humans, only for their rebellion to be slowly bastardised into a dictatorship. Whether read as a subtextual critique of Stalinism or a broader textual condemnation of power’s corrupting nature, Orwell’s sharp political observations made his story’s cautionary themes timelessly sobering.
Serkis’s film initially follows suit, albeit with tweaks. It assigns a new character, a piglet named Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo), as the protagonist. He participates in the opening coup that leads the animals to take control of Manor Farm, transforming it into a safe haven of equality. This farm is taken in the first few minutes, framed as a split-second choice to avoid slaughter rather than to rebel against a system of abuse and exploitation. One could highlight how this removes the urgency from the inciting incident – Old Major, the boar whose words sparked the uprising, is entirely absent from the film – but we’re too busy facepalming at the craftsmanship. Creative choices include juvenile comedy with obvious punchlines and the reworking of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” into a rap. The film wastes no time in letting you know you’re in trouble.
Lucky is admired for his intelligence, but he finds his loyalties split between Snowball (Laverne Cox) and Napoleon (Seth Rogen), two pigs who compete for leadership of the new farm. In the original text, these characters were allegories for Lenin and Stalin, respectively. In this film, Napoleon is made into a grotesque Trumpian figure given his vulgar charisma and entitlement despite blatant incompetence. This Snowball is seemingly a stand-in for Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris – it would certainly explain the gender swapping – but this bizarre change highlights the film’s key issue. In modernising the source material, be it through contemporary political references or lowest-common-denominator humour, the film ends up watering down the substance of its novella, leaving something impotent and annoying in its place.
One can sympathise with Serkis and team’s goal here. But their otherwise timely sentiments on late-stage capitalism and modern authoritarianism become difficult to appreciate when they’re presented via condescending comedy and binary storytelling. Rather than gradual opportunism rising from the ashes of well-intended movements, Nicholas Stoller’s script makes his characters bland caricatures of good and evil, erasing nuance in favour of faux-universality, and jokes that even children would scoff at. One particularly embarrassing sequence has Napoleon comparing freedom to one of his farts. Such sage philosophy. Other scenes see sheep being followers, and a donkey character claiming to be “ass support”. Hilarious.
Napoleon takes over Manor Farm and systematically erodes communal harmony, building a hierarchy with the pigs on top and changing the agreed-upon rules to suit his vanity (“All Animals are Equal, but Some are More Equal than Others”). Lucky watches on in horror, his good nature tested by Napoleon’s greed, culminating in Napoleon making a partnership with a billionaire capitalist (Glenn Close). Lucky’s character arc is recycled from better films (Sorry to Bother You), his agency as a hero as flat as the satire. He’s an audience surrogate who’s forgotten that dismay was the point, not the conflict.
Had the film not been so audiovisually grating, these changes might’ve been more tolerable. Rogen, who is brilliant in The Invite, crassly pontificates throughout, the effect being nails-on-a-chalkboard scene-chewing. Close and Kieran Culkin are just as irritating as secondary antagonists, while Woody Harrelson and Jim Parsons spell out the script’s flimsy gags and diluted themes with enthusiasm worthy of funerals. The colour palette is muddy, and the rendering lacks depth, creating a cheap, boxy look to the animation that feels distinctly amateur. For a film so hellbent on smoothing the source material’s disturbing edge, its visuals sure do generate putridness.
The definitive nail in the coffin comes from the third act, which trades in the book’s bleak resolution for a final showdown where Lucky has a chance to redeem himself and save the farm. Aside from the obvious – a happy ending defeats the purpose of the original text – it’s this heroic climax that really signifies how misguided the film is. It takes a compact but thematically rich story and simplifies it into bottom-of-the-barrel entertainment. The intention may have been to make the fable easier to access, but if you have to rely on cynical tactics of dumbing the material down through modern slang and toilet humour, then chances are you didn’t really appreciate the fable to begin with.
In a year that’s given us Melania and Michael, Animal Farm is not 2026’s worst film, but it’s as dead-on-arrival as you can get. Delivering mature sentiments with immature execution is a self-defeating prophecy, but this film commits the sin of butchering Orwell’s source material so thoroughly it could be branded animal cruelty. It’s patronising, visually repulsive, thematically shallow, and actually quite boring at various points. The film has frequently been marketed with the subtitle “A Cautionary Tail” (har har). Take this review as a cautionary warning to skip this ludicrous pigsty. With The Odyssey, Toy Story 5, and even Minions and Monsters all currently playing, you aren’t short of better alternatives for your next cinema trip.
Animal Farm is showing in cinemas nationwide from July 23.
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