The new animal farm movie focuses on the dangers of capitalism, not totalitarian USSR

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The final image in George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm is bleak and unforgettable: as the pigs and farmers drunkenly play cards around the dining-room table, the watching animals realise their porcine liberators have become indistinguishable from the human oppressors they replaced.

The moment exposes the lie at the heart of the Marxist promise of utopian equality. Yet a new animated adaptation of Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis, offers a strikingly different take.

The film, which spent 14 years in development and struggled to secure a distributor, retells Orwell’s 1945 dystopian classic through the eyes of Lucky, a plucky piglet whose character is invented for the adaptation and voiced by Gaten Matarazzo, the Stranger Things actor.

In this CGI retelling, Serkis, who rose to prominence as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings before turning to directing, has said he wanted to make Orwell’s work “accessible”, not “overtly political”, and suitable for a modern audience.

Corporate corruption
Rather than serving as a critique of totalitarian Soviet Russia, the film shifts its focus towards the dangers of capitalism and corporate corruption.

Serkis has also sought to give the story a more optimistic ending. Explaining why at a round-table discussion at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival last July, he said: “We wanted some hope.”

In the final scenes, Lucky confronts Napoleon, Orwell’s Joseph Stalin figure, voiced incongruously by Seth Rogen, before the animals overthrow their pig leaders and plan for a better future.

When a trailer for Serkis’s Animal Farm was released on Friday night ahead of its cinema release on May 1 next year, it prompted outrage and confusion online, with critics accusing it of abandoning Orwell’s central warning about the impossibility of a Marxist utopia.

Napoleon’s despotic traits appear muted when set against a new billionaire villain, Frieda Pilkington, voiced by Glenn Close, another invention for the film. She spends much of the story plotting to take control of Animal Farm.

The promotional clip shows stylised cartoon animals briefly living in apparent utopia before the pigs’ ideals are corrupted by Frieda, who is depicted driving a high-tech vehicle, which resembles Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybertruck. The producers said any resemblance to Mr Musk’s electric vehicles was accidental.

One user shared the trailer on X, writing: “It’s 2025. And Animal Farm is a movie about communism working, and being ruined by capitalism.” Another remarked: “Hollywood is incapable of critiquing anything other than capitalism, exhibit #13890471.”

Online commentary and reviews from journalists who saw the film at festivals last year prior to its official release have been critical of the tonal shift from Orwell’s bleak satire to what they describe as scatological, family-friendly humour.

Reviewers were particularly scathing about Serkis’s decision to play Napoleon’s power hunger for laughs. In the book, his walking on two legs is sinister. In the film, it is accompanied by flatulence. Peter Debruge, Variety’s critic, wrote that the moment focuses on “amusing the kids and reminding adults how low Serkis will go to get a laugh”.

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