Animal Farm (2025) [Film review]

In Theaters May 1, 2026 · Angel Studios

What went wrong with Animal Farm?

The revolution is over by minute six. Not the film’s revolution, which grinds on for another ninety minutes, but the one that George Orwell spent every page of his 1945 novella building with the slow, grinding inevitability of a propaganda machine consuming its own operators. In Andy Serkis’ animated adaptation, the animals of Manor Farm seize control, rename it Animal Farm, and establish their code of laws before the opening act has finished settling. Then the film has an hour and a half left to fill, and the question of what to fill it with is the question Animal Farm (2026) never satisfactorily answers.

Fifteen Years in Development, Six Minutes to Blow Through the Point

The production history of this Animal Farm is longer than most careers. Andy Serkis was first attached to direct an adaptation in 2011, working with Rupert Wyatt. Netflix acquired distribution rights in 2018. The project moved through multiple configurations before settling into its final form: a fully animated feature produced at Cinesite Studios with a screenplay by Nicholas Stoller, the writer of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Muppets. It premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2025, screened at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2025, and reached American theaters on May 1, 2026 through Angel Studios, the conservative-leaning distributor behind Sound of Freedom and His Only Son.

That last detail is worth sitting with before the film begins. Angel Studios acquired US theatrical distribution rights in December 2025, and their involvement shapes the context in which Animal Farm arrives in American theaters in ways that the film itself goes to considerable lengths to obscure. Serkis sent an accompanying essay to critics describing his adaptation as having “no ideology,” a film designed to apply Orwell’s fable to any political context equally. It is a well-intentioned statement that happens to be in direct contradiction with everything George Orwell ever said about why he wrote the book, and about what fables are for.

What Orwell Actually Wrote, and Why It Matters

Orwell completed Animal Farm in 1944 and spent two years watching British publishers reject it, largely because its satirical target, Stalinist Soviet communism, was at that moment a wartime ally of Britain. The book’s power was always inseparable from its specificity. In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” Orwell explained that his storytelling was never meant to drift into abstraction or polite ambiguity, but to instead confront oppression with intent. He noted that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” Animal Farm endures not because it is ideologically blank but because it is both undeniably compelling and unafraid to be precise.

This context matters for reviewing Serkis’ adaptation because the film’s fundamental creative decision, to drain Orwell’s allegory of its specific political content in favor of something universally applicable and family-friendly, is not a neutral artistic choice. It is an ideological one. A film that sands down the specific mechanics of Stalinist totalitarianism into a general-purpose parable about corporate corruption and social media dopamine does not become apolitical. It becomes differently political, in ways that the film seems unwilling to acknowledge and that its distributor has particular reasons to prefer.

The 1954 animated adaptation of Animal Farm was funded by the CIA, which had its own reasons for wanting a pointed anti-communist allegory in wide circulation during the Cold War. The 2026 adaptation is distributed by Angel Studios, which has its own ideological commitments. Both facts are worth knowing. Neither one is the film’s only context, but ignoring either one produces an incomplete account of what the film is and what it is for.

Lucky the Piglet and the Coming-of-Age Problem

Stoller’s screenplay introduces Lucky, a young piglet voiced by Gaten Matarazzo, as the film’s coming-of-age protagonist and primary audience surrogate. Lucky rises to farmhouse leadership alongside Napoleon during the revolution and then watches as the utopia he was promised crumbles under the weight of corruption, corporate pressure from Freida Pilkington (Glenn Close), and Napoleon’s increasingly authoritarian consolidation of power. The addition of a young, naive character through whose eyes the audience experiences the farm’s descent is a structurally conventional choice for an adaptation aimed at children, and it is the source of the film’s central tonal problem.

Orwell’s Animal Farm is not a coming-of-age story. It is a political autopsy. The book’s emotional power derives specifically from the absence of a young, naive character who can be spared the full weight of what the narrative is documenting. Benjamin the donkey, who knows and says nothing, is the reader’s surrogate in the original, and his understanding of what is happening coexists with his decision not to act, which is part of Orwell’s indictment. Lucky, by contrast, is positioned as a character whose journey toward knowledge and eventual resistance is supposed to generate hope. Hope is not what Animal Farm is about. Hope is what Animal Farm is systematically dismantling.

This is not an argument that adaptations must be slavishly faithful to their sources. It is an argument that the specific creative choices Stoller and Serkis made in adapting Animal Farm fundamentally alter the story’s function. Lucky’s arc converts Orwell’s unflinching political document into a conventional animated hero’s journey, which is the narrative equivalent of staging 1984 as a love story that ends with Winston and Julia escaping.

Seth Rogen, Kieran Culkin, and the Star-Studded Blur

The voice cast assembled for this Animal Farm is, on paper, remarkable. Seth Rogen as Napoleon. Kieran Culkin as Squealer. Glenn Close as the film’s human antagonist Freida Pilkington. Kathleen Turner as Benjamin. Steve Buscemi as Mr. Whymper. Laverne Cox as Snowball. Woody Harrelson as Buster, the hard-working horse (rechristened from Boxer in a change that no one has adequately explained). Iman Vellani as Puff. Jim Parsons as Carl. Andy Serkis himself as Mr. Jones, Old Major, and the farm Rooster.

What IndieWire’s review accurately observes is that this lineup blurs into a sort of bleating celebrity noise rather than functioning as an ensemble. The performances are not individually bad. Rogen’s Napoleon gestures toward contemporary political caricature without ever fully naming its target. Culkin’s Squealer has the serpentine charm the character requires. Turner’s Benjamin is the film’s most faithful characterization of the source material, and Turner plays the donkey’s weary omniscience with more honesty than the surrounding film deserves. The problem is not the cast but the material they are given to perform, which treats them primarily as recognizable voices attached to broadly sketched characters in a narrative moving too quickly to develop any of them.

Close is saddled with an overextended subplot as Pilkington, who serves as the film’s primary human antagonist in ways that shift the story’s power dynamics away from Napoleon and toward an external corporate villain. This shift is ideologically revealing. When the source of oppression in Animal Farm is a corporate billionaire rather than the pigs themselves, the film’s allegory becomes a critique of capitalism from outside rather than a critique of revolutionary corruption from within, which is a categorically different story with different political implications. Whether that shift was deliberate or inadvertent is a question Serkis’ “no ideology” essay cannot answer.

The Hoverboards, the Rap, and the Tonal Catastrophe

Nothing in the marketing for Animal Farm quite prepares you for the film’s tonal register, which oscillates between corporate animated spectacle, rude comedy, genuine moments of Orwellian dread, and Silicon Valley satire with an incoherence that suggests a production that never resolved its fundamental identity questions. The pigs wear hoodies. There is a sequence involving hoverboards. There is an “Old McDonald” rap. There are fart jokes. The slaughterhouse is rebranded as the “Laughterhouse” in what the film presents as a darkly comic piece of dystopian wordplay and what actually functions as the defanging of one of Orwell’s most genuinely horrifying images.

Watching Minion-esque farm animals ride around on hoverboards and play beer pong creates the uncanny sensation of watching something that feels like AI slop, even as its authors proclaim years of human effort. This is the IndieWire review’s most precise observation, and it captures something real about the film’s visual and tonal register. The modernizing touches in Animal Farm do not feel like the choices of filmmakers who understood what they were trying to say and found contemporary equivalents for it. They feel like choices made by a committee trying to ensure the film would register as current, which is a different thing entirely, and a worse one.

The climactic credits sequence layers painterly images of pigs reenacting real human conflicts across history, from the French Revolution through World War I, in a final bid for allegorical grandeur that the preceding ninety minutes have not earned. And then the post-credits sequence arrives: a QR code directing viewers to a pay-it-forward charitable initiative via Angel Studios’ community platform. As IndieWire notes, after the catastrophe that precedes it, the moment feels like passing around a collection plate at a funeral.

What the Film Actually Gets Right

This is not entirely a record of failure. The animation produced at Cinesite is genuinely accomplished, with a visual design that gives the farm environments a richness and detail that the story’s accelerated pace does not always allow the audience to appreciate. There are individual sequences, particularly in the revolution’s early stages, where the film achieves something close to the emotional clarity of its source material. The scene where Snowball (Laverne Cox) articulates the Seven Commandments has a genuine civic dignity that the film largely abandons in its second act.

The structural parallels to contemporary media and social platform dynamics, the ways that Squealer’s propaganda operation maps onto algorithm-driven content and dopamine-loop consumption, are intermittently sharp. The film recognizes that Orwell’s account of how truth is erased and dissent crushed has contemporary applications that an audience of 2026 will recognize, and it is not wrong about that. The problem is that recognizing the contemporary relevance and doing something precise with it are different operations, and Animal Farm consistently chooses the former over the latter.

Pete Hammond of Deadline Hollywood made the case that Stoller’s screenplay is “alternately funny and frighteningly perceptive” and that the film is “not outwardly trying to be political but nevertheless is uncannily meeting its time.” This is the most generous reading available, and it is not an absurd one. If you have never read Orwell’s novella and arrive at this film without expectations shaped by the source material, the experience is considerably less frustrating than for those who know the book well. The film works better as an animated fable about institutional corruption for audiences who do not have the specific version of that fable against which to measure it.

The Angel Studios Question

Any honest review of Animal Farm (2026) has to engage with the distribution context that the film’s marketing has worked to minimize. Angel Studios is not a neutral distributor. Their output has included explicitly faith-based and politically conservative content, and their community-funded model involves an audience that has specific expectations for the films they help bring to theaters. The acquisition of Animal Farm in December 2025 prompted immediate questions about whether a film that Serkis describes as having “no ideology” was being positioned for a specific ideological audience.

The film itself offers no definitive answer to this question, which is its own kind of answer. A version of Animal Farm willing to be as specific as Orwell was would be legible as the product of a particular political perspective. The version Serkis made, stripped of its specific anti-Stalinist content and reframed as a universal parable about the corrupting influence of power, is available to be read from multiple political directions simultaneously. That flexibility is commercially convenient and artistically cowardly in equal measure. Orwell wrote Animal Farm because he had something specific to say about a specific form of political betrayal. A film that declines to follow him there, in 2026, makes its own statement by that declination.

Who Should See Animal Farm

If you have children between roughly eight and twelve who have not read the Orwell novella and who enjoy animated films with a slightly darker edge than the Disney and Pixar mainstream, Animal Farm will probably work for them better than it works for anyone who knows what the film is declining to be. The animation is strong, the voice cast is engaging enough in its individual moments, and the story’s basic arc, from revolutionary idealism to authoritarian corruption, is legible even in the diluted form in which it is presented here.

If you have read Animal Farm and love what Orwell was doing, this film will frustrate you in the specific way that a good subject treated with insufficient courage always does. It is not cynical IP exploitation, and there is genuine reverence for the source material visible in Serkis’ choices throughout. That makes it more dispiriting than a cynical cash-in would be, because the gap between what this Animal Farm could have been and what it is represents squandered conviction rather than absent conviction. Serkis clearly cares about this book. His adaptation does not have the courage to say what the book actually says, and no amount of painterly credits sequences changes that.

If you want to know what Animal Farm actually says, and how it says it, the 1954 animated adaptation remains in circulation. It has its own ideological complications, having been covertly funded by the CIA. But it does not have hoverboards, and it does not end with a QR code.

Animal Farm is in theaters now via Angel Studios.