On May 1, American audiences will be able to experience classic novella Animal Farm in 21st-century animation. That’s when the fourth screen adaptation of George Orwell’s masterpiece will be released in U.S. theaters. It’s loaded with A-listers. Woody Harrelson plays the loyal horse, Boxer. Kieran Culkin plays Squealer, the shifty pig who placates the animals with lies on behalf of the boar commissar, Napoleon. Think Toy Story meets Darkness at Noon, or an Ice Capades rendition of The Gulag Archipelago.
The original Animal Farm is a treasure of 20th-century literature. It’s a deceptively simple book, written in plain and concise prose meant for a precocious adolescent reader. But in its pages is a chilling warning about the false promise of socialist revolution. In short, farm animals launch a rebellion and after taking over the farm, the pigs adopt a new political philosophy, “Animalism,” which holds that “All animals are equal.” But over time, Napoleon the boar takes over and hoards the farm’s apples and milk for himself and the other pigs, and in a final act of cruelty he sends Boxer to a glue factory to be slaughtered. In the last scene of the novel, the animal workers peer into a card game between their pig bosses and the human farmers and cannot tell them apart.
The clear anti-Soviet message is the reason why the CIA commissioned John Halas and Joy Batchelor in 1954 to create the first screen adaptation, an animated affair that looks like the Disney films of the era. The visionary behind the new Animal Farm is Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and more recently directed the 2021 superhero film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
