When I first saw the trailer for the new, animated Animal Farm, all I could think was it looked awful. George Orwell’s novel, though written something like a children’s book, is not a children’s book. This movie looked to be taking that story and making it into a kid-friend Seth Rogen comedy since Rogen was clearly the voice of Napoleon. Now, for the record, I like Rogen’s movies most of the time, but I think he does better behind the scenes these days than in front of the camera. I like Orwell’s novella too. It’s well-written and gets its point across rather well. But the combination of the above-mentioned factors plus all the slapstick from the trailers told me this could very well be a glorious trainwreck.
Every so often, I decide to see one of those.
Things are going badly on Manor Farm when Farmer Jones, an obvious drunk, is sending all of the animals off to what they think is a laughter house but is, in fact, a slaughterhouse because one pig named Snowball (Laverne Cox) is smart enough to read the entire truck, but also smart enough to know how to read, a skill she in turn taught to small pig Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo), the main character for the movie who, last I checked, was not in Orwell’s original work. The resulting chaos allows the animals to escape, despite Napoleon’s (Rogen) best efforts to do as little as possible. Napoleon, with assistance from his abused sidekick Squealer (Kieran Culkin), eventually manages to take over the farm using lies and promises of good times now and no future planning at all, and if you know Orwell’s story, you might be wondering why Boxer the horse (Woody Harrelson) is the movie’s unseen narrator.
However, this is 2026, and this is also what looks like a kids movie with so-so computer animation, so there needs to be a villain to defeat in the end beyond the greedy pigs, and that brings in corporate bigshot Freida Pilkington (Glenn Close), who has been buying up all the small farms in the area and has an army of all-seeing drones, possibly as a reference to the other famous Orwell novel. As Napoleon thinks pigs should only associate with other pigs, what will a basically good pig like Lucky do, especially when he abandons his longtime best friend Boxer to live with the other pigs? Why, there may be an explosive ending to this thing that George Orwell never really anticipated.
I went into this movie, hoping for a train wreck. I didn’t get that. I got nothing good, but also not the fun sort of bad that sometimes happens. This is a movie where fart jokes are added to a novel that, again, was not intended for children, the opening credits slows a farmer getting slapped in the face by a cow’s udder in slow motion, and dialogue was added to make Snowball less than idealistic, gave Napoleon some very Trump-ish things to say, and suggested the real enemy might be capitalism or at least conspicuous consumption. That last part seemed a little odd given who the distributor of the movie was (more on that below), and I honestly don’t know what director Andy Serkis (also voicing a rooster) was thinking with this movie. The movie sanded off the edges of Orwell’s work, but that doesn’t account for the oddities. Why does Boxer advise looking up to the stars for comfort and then do so in the middle of the day? Why can’t humans understand animals at the beginning of the movie, but later they can just fine? If reading and writing are rare skills when Snowball teaches Lucky, how does Squealer know how to read and write later on, and why do the other animals seem capable of reading the rules written on the side of the grain silo?
It’s just not a good movie, and there was something bugging me as it started, namely that the first production company listed in the credits was Angel Studios. I can’t say that I had ever seen anything they’d made before, but the name sounded familiar. The pre-movie trailers included two from them, one a Ronald Reagan biopic starring Jeff Daniels depicting nice guy Reagan having his Icelandic summit with a very belligerent Mikhail Gorbachev, the other a biopic of a young George Washington that included Kelsey Grammer, so I had an inkling of what kind of movies Angel distributes, but then the closing credits kept flashing these messages to stay for something special attached to a ticking countdown. When the countdown hit zero, what flashed on screen were some QR codes so people in the audience could buy tickets for the movie for other people, the same pay-it-forward campaign famously (or infamously) used by the movie The Sound of Freedom that led to questions of how many people were actually seeing the movie if tickets were purchased for strangers who then never used the tickets. Now, I wouldn’t do something like that for any movie for a wide range of reasons, but I especially won’t be doing it for Animal Farm because it was bad. Very, very bad. None of the jokes worked. The message of the story was covered over by the lousy presentation. And it wasn’t even the fun kind of bad movie. Don’t bother with this one.
Grade: F
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