2 days ago
First look at Andy Serkis' animated Animal Farm goes light on Orwellian satire, heavy on Seth Rogen
It's kind of ridiculous how long Andy Serkis has been trying to get an animated version of George Orwell's satirical allegory Animal Farm made: The first industry reports of the project (which was set up at Netflix for a minute, before they dropped it) date all the way back to 2012, when it was still being touted as Serkis' feature directorial debut. (He's since directed five films, most recently Venom sequel Let There Be Carnage, with his Lord Of The Rings film The Hunt For Gollum still on the way.) Now, though, the first glimpses of the animated Animal Farm have finally begun to roll out, and they're certain to delight scholars of Orwell's work who are also absolutely massive fans of Seth Rogen doing improvisational riffing during a voice take.
Rogen is, of course, playing Orwell's tyrannical boar Napoleon in the animated adaptation, making for what we're fairly sure will be mainstream film's most vocally chill Joseph Stalin allegory ever. The first look released for the film also features a falsetto'd Gaten Matarazzo as 'Lucky,' who appears to be an original character for the film, and who gets manipulated by Napoleon into viewing him as a father figure—while receiving some rhetoric about how animals should stick within their species groups. (We don't get to hear Rogen's take on 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' here, although the script feints at it for a second.) Kieran Culkin also appears as the film's version of Orwell's Squeaker, who, in this scene, is less a collective stand-in for state propaganda, and more a vehicle for mild social awkwardness comedy.
Serkis has never been shy about the fact that he intended to soften Orwell's often-bleak fable a bit, the better to get kids watching. More than a decade ago, he told reporters 'We are not going to handle the politics in a heavy-handed fashion,' instead making a more 'emotionally centered' version of the story. (At the time, he was also taking about the movie as a heavily motion-capture-based project: That seems downplayed in the clip, although Napoleon's facial movements definitely have some Rogen-esque touches to them.) Animal Farm is set to have its world premiere on June 9, at the Annecy International Animal Film Festival.
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First look at Andy Serkis' animated Animal Farm goes light on Orwellian satire, heavy on Seth Rogen
