Animal Farm: Andy Serkis’s take on George Orwell’s fable is a mess
The Irish Times criticizes Andy Serkis's new animated adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm, describing it as a messy departure from the original source material. The review highlights the film's heavy-handed political allegories and lack of fidelity to Orwell's themes.
Why it matters
It reflects the ongoing cultural debate regarding the adaptation of classic literature and the use of political satire in modern media.
In chapter five of Animal Farm, George Orwell ’s indestructible (or so we imagined) allegory from 1945 for the betrayals of the Soviet Union, Napoleon, the porcine stand-in for Joseph Stalin, takes an unconvinced look at his rival’s plan for a windmill.
The author has him stand “for a little while contemplating them out of the corner of his eye” before making judgment. “Suddenly he lifted his leg, urinated over the plans, and walked out without uttering a word,” the paragraph concludes.
Now that’s what I call criticism. Shall we just leave our review of this disastrous project at that?
It’s an interesting irony that Animal Farm arrives in the same week that right-wing culture warriors seek (feebly) to portray Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey as an exercise in “woke” revisionism. That sounds like a silly argument.
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