Animal Farm movies have a long history of missing the point

Animal Farm is not a difficult book. Short—under 100 pages, depending on the edition—and written in a direct and approachable style, George Orwell’s “fairy story” is clear in its intentions. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and its evolution into the crushing stranglehold of Stalinism, Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, described the novel as “the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” It has endured for decades, remaining one of our most potent and devastating portraits of how dictatorships can hijack a rebellion for their own nefarious means. Even now, it faces censorship from book banners and governments, who are all keenly aware that it remains an eerily relevant read of undiluted potency. It shouldn’t be so tough to adapt, and yet every major movie version has looked at the material and flinched.

Joining the pack this year is a film from Andy Serkis, the king of motion-capture acting who has moved behind the camera once more for another animated take on Orwell’s story. Featuring an all-star cast, including Seth Rogen, Kieran Culkin, and Glenn Close, Serkis’ spin on the novel includes a curious political recalibration. With a script by comedy writer Nicholas Stoller, Serkis’ version shifts away from Orwell’s allegory to a more modern focus on corporate corruption. The end result is both baffling and insulting.

The changes are largely odd. Snowball, the Leon Trotsky stand-in and co-leader of the rebellion exiled by Napoleon in a power struggle, is now a woman. The entire thing has been made suitable for kids, which mostly means lots of songs and crude jokes and a newly added young pig protagonist. There are big action set pieces and villainous humans who corrupt the poor gormless pigs into doing evil. And, of course, they changed the ending. One of the most famous conclusions in English literature was rewritten so that this fart-joke-laden reimagining could avoid having to say anything truly relevant or dangerous. It’s spineless, chickening out on tackling even the most basic qualities of the novel. And yet, for decades, this has been the norm with Animal Farm adaptations.

The first adaptation is still the most successful, even though it’s also politically compromised to the point of parody. The 1954 cartoon was directed and produced by John Halas and Joy Batchelor, the husband-and-wife animation team who got their start creating propaganda films for Britain during World War II. Unbeknownst to the directors themselves, this was why they were chosen to make Animal Farm. The rights to the book had been optioned by film executives Carleton Alsop and Finis Farr, who were also undercover agents for the Central Intelligence Agency. E. Howard Hunt, CIA officer and one of the people imprisoned over the Watergate scandal, admitted that the film was “carefully tweaked to heighten the anti-Communist message.” That involved changing the ending, much to the reported outrage of Batchelor.

Up until its conclusion, though, this Animal Farm is remarkably effective. Its simple animation style, evocative of Disney and designed to be instinctively appealing to kids, makes the farm’s descent into violence and corruption all the more potent. The stretched-out faces of horror on the animals’ faces as Boxer, the beloved horse, is driven to his doom at the glue factory, plays out as traumatically as anything in Watership Down. Its no-frills approach acutely captures the looming realization of a fascist takeover.

Still, you notice the changes. Snowball is depicted as a more negative force because the CIA investors didn’t want audiences to sympathize too much with the Trotsky figure. A memo to the production team declared that Snowball must be presented as a “fanatic intellectual whose plans if carried through would have led to disaster no less complete than under Napoleon. And then there’s its ending. After the animals see that Napoleon and the pigs have reduced the farm’s commandments to the famous singular rule, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” word spreads to other pig-owned farms across the land, and they march to Animal Farm, “instinctively uniting once again in common cause.” Within two minutes, the pigs have been overthrown, Napoleon is dead, and the big baddies have been defeated. It all happens so easily.

Contemporary critics immediately called out the changes and how it defeated the purpose of Orwell’s work. Halas defended it as a necessity to give viewers hope because “you can not send home millions in the audience being puzzled.” But, even without knowing of the CIA’s meddling, it’s hard to overlook that finale’s failure. Animal Farm is meticulous in showing how, bit by bit, a political rebellion becomes co-opted and turned into the antithesis of its roots. It’s not an overnight process, and even in this slim 72-minute film, you see its gradual shift, one not necessarily called out by its citizens, as is often the case in real life. To undo all of that with a hasty ending where the animals march threateningly towards the farmhouse, then the pigs are killed off-screen before “The End” pops up is, at the very least, cheap. As Orwell’s book details, the structural implementation of fascism would not be so easily undone.

It would be four decades until audiences would get another Animal Farm (with no CIA involvement, at least), a 1999 film directed by John Stephenson and with special effects provided by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. It combines live-action and puppetry, which makes for an unnerving visual blend, and—story-wise—it changes far more than its animated predecessor. Old Major, the pig who inspires the animals to rebellion in the first place, is accidentally killed by the human farmer when he slips in the mud and his shotgun goes off.

Sometimes, the effects’ uncanny qualities work incredibly well, such as when the pigs dine alongside the farmers and their faces blend together, showing the ways that the new system has replicated the old one. There are moments of unexpected perversity—why does this adaptation have a sex scene?—that also makes good use of the creatures, but it’s hard to get over just how creepy they look. Adapting animal allegory into live-action with real humans was always going to be a challenge, and it just doesn’t work. Moments that should elicit shock and sadness, like the death of Old Major, instead lead to giggles over the misplaced melodrama focused around these janky models. And, again, the ending is changed. This time, after seeing the pigs in full dictator mode, several of the animals escape the farm to find peace elsewhere. Many years later, they return to find the farm in disrepair, and Napoleon’s reign of terror over by his own hand. The farm falls under new (human) ownership and the remaining animals hope to build a brighter future where they learn from the mistakes of the past.

This ending is far more cowardly than that of the Halas and Batchelor version. At least in that one, the animals got to lead the change. Here, the message seems to be that the best thing to do is to wait for the fascists to tire themselves out or fall prey to their own stupidity. Then the animals can find nicer, more understanding humans and work with them for a happy ending. Who knew it was possible to do both-sides centrism with a George Orwell story?

Animal Farm is a stridently leftist story written by a man who watched as an idealistic rebellion was slowly poisoned into the exact thing it purported to be against. It was fiercely critical from the inside of the movement, not a smarmy anti-Commie tract from someone who never wanted the Russians to succeed. It’s also a universal tale about how pathetically easy it is for fascism to take over even the most seemingly stable societies. One wonders if mainstream filmmakers, especially those of Britain and America, have trouble faithfully adapting Animal Farm because they believe this notion is out of date and needs to be changed for contemporary sensibilities. That or, as the CIA’s involvement proves, they knew it was relevant and had to be rewritten before our eyes. 2026 could’ve used a real Animal Farm film, if only Andy Serkis had been brave enough not to repeat history.