About: A satirical allegory of revolution and power, Animal Farm traces how a movement for equality is systematically corrupted. As the pigs consolidate control, truth is erased, dissent is crushed, and the farm descends into a ruthless dictatorship—fulfilling Orwell’s warning about the dangers of communism.
Premiere: May 1st, In Theaters
Directed by: Andy Serkis
Starring: Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Jim Parsons, Andy Serkis, Kathleen Turner
Director Andy Serkis had the following to say in an interview about what compelled him to adapt the classic George Orwell book:
I have such strong memories of reading the book when I was around twelve. Along with the Hobbit book, those were the two books that really resonated with me. Then I saw a theatrical production at the National Theatre in London in the 1980s, and I thought, wow, there’s a way of telling this story visually as well.
Smash cut to 2011, when I was working on The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and we were shooting the sequence where Caesar, the character I was playing, leads the apes to freedom in a sort of rebellion. And suddenly I realized that there hadn’t been a cinematic representation of Animal Farm for a long time.
We started to work on it and did a lot of experimenting, which led us to realize that animation was the right medium for this adaptation. That allowed us to keep the innocence of the storytelling that the original book had, while being able to say much more than live action would allow us to do. In live action, such a story would necessarily have been darker from the outset. Whereas with an animated movie, breaking those ties with reality and keeping Orwell’s book, which he described as a fairy tale, in that realm gave us much more freedom to still have emotional engagement with the characters, keep it innocent, and then progressively let the darker themes come in underneath that.
