ANIMAL FARM
Starring: Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Jim Parsons, Andy Serkis, Kathleen Turner, and Iman Vellani
Director: Andy Serkis
QUENTIN
Andy Serkis’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm is an odd one. On one hand, many of Orwell’s original themes are relevant today, particularly in the United States, which makes a movie like this even more important right now. On the other hand, this is a movie geared towards younger audiences. Will kids pick up on any of the timely subtext? Will they even care? I just don’t know. Still, it’s an enjoyable film with great vocal performances by the star-studded cast, but it falls into the purgatory of being too childish to be strictly for adults and too thematically nuanced to be strictly for kids.
ADRIANO
What do you get when you take a masterwork and try to dumb it down for babies? You get Animal Farm, a baffling disaster. I get modernizing George Orwell’s book to reflect today's authoritarianism, but because director Andy Serkis and writer Nicholas Stoller are so intent on making this dark tale kid-friendly, it’s sanded down to the point where its critiques are obsolete. And even if you want to ignore the source material (like the filmmakers did), Animal Farm is still the lowest common denominator kids' nonsense. Yet they expect them to understand totalitarianism? This is truly for nobody.
This film was reviewed by Quentin as part of Bitesize Breakdown's coverage of the 2025 Zurich Film Festival.