- Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin, Steve Buscemi
- July 18th 2026
- 94
- Andy Serkis
A pig named Napoleon decides to become the leader of Animal Farm and rules over his fellow animals with an iron fist.
Andy Serkis has been trying to make his animated adaptation of George Orwell’s famous 1945 novella Animal Farm for more than 10 years, and now his passion project is finally complete.
For those unfamiliar with Orwell’s book, Animal Farm follows a group of farm animals who overthrow their owners and decide to run the place themselves, believing that they are free because they are no longer ruled by humans.
The group, led by a pig named Snowball (voiced by Laverne Cox), draws up a list of commandments for their new life, with the most important entry being the mantra “all animals are equal”.
Their new lifestyle works well until fellow pig Napoleon (voiced by Seth Rogen) decides he doesn’t like Snowball’s sensible ideas and forcefully overthrows her leadership.
He declares that the pigs are the ruling class, and they slowly break all of the commandments, and eventually the farm ends up being the same as before, with pigs instead of humans on top.
Many critics have blasted Serkis for creating a watered-down, family-friendly version of Animal Farm and making so many changes to the original story, including the introduction of the new character Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo) and a new action-packed third act.
But there is nothing wrong with making this important cautionary tale more palatable for children. The core messages about corruption, power and greed are still there, just in a brighter, more hopeful package, and you can still see the parallels between Napoleon and world leaders today.
That said, Animal Farm still has a lot of problems. Namely, it is supposed to be a comedy, but Nicholas Stoller’s script is painfully unfunny and resorts to toilet humour in a bid to elicit some laughs from the kids.
And that’s not all – the animation style won’t be for everyone, the song choices are ill-judged, and they go overboard with humanising the pigs, making them greedy for phones, cars and TVs. Why do pigs need this technology?!
Animal Farm features a game voice cast – also including Woody Harrelson, Kieran Culkin and Glenn Close – and the message is as powerful, relevant and resonant as ever, but it’s overall a tonally messy and poorly executed coming-of-age story.
In cinemas from Friday 24th July
By Hannah Wales
© Cover Media