The reason ANIMAL FARM endures has something to do with its imagery. A story about animals carries its themes differently than a story about people — the allegory arrives with the simplicity of a fable, which is why it reads as timeless rather than historical. Any revision must be done with a steady hand. The film seems to believe power today doesn't come from fear, but from likability. Casting Seth Rogen leans into that idea. The only problem is he's never likable enough here to make the corruption feel like a loss.
It's ironic that there's a harsh, almost Soviet quality to the 1954 animated version of ANIMAL FARM. Which makes perfect sense when you consider that the CIA funded most of the movie. But it seems even the CIA has a line it won't cross. Namely, desecrating the legacy of George Orwell.
I remember reading ANIMAL FARM back in tenth grade, which already makes it something of an outlier—I was usually more of a "skim the CliffsNotes and get the gist" kind of student. It's hard to say precisely why I chose to read this book. I just found it engaging in a way previous attempts at reading literature never had. Not long after, we watched the 1999 TNT version of ANIMAL FARM in class, a movie that, in hindsight, is a little better to look at than it is to sit with. The animatronic work from Jim Henson's Creature Shop gives it a tangible, grounded quality. Its greatest strength is the Napoleon character, voiced by none other than Jean-Luc Picard himself. Kelsey Grammer brings an unexpected intellect and compassion to Snowball, although perhaps it shouldn't have been a complete surprise. In the more nuanced moments on FRASIER, he did occasionally remember how to act like a human being. For most of its runtime, it feels like a solid, if slightly uneven adaptation. And then it ends. A human family arrives and takes over what's left of Animal Farm, a choice that doesn't just soften Orwell's point—it sidesteps it entirely, replacing something unsettling with something far more tidy, and far less effective.
That ending always felt like a step too far—a movie second-guessing the material it was adapting. The new version has a different instinct. It doesn't second-guess Orwell so much as reinterpret him through a very modern voice, right down to its casting, with Seth Rogen's Napoleon setting the tone. The result is a film that doesn't soften the message so much as blur it.
Lucky, the film's invented protagonist, has no counterpart in the ANIMAL FARM book. He's designed to give the story a personal center—a literate pig who can read, write, and, in theory, understand what's happening around him. Drawn into Napoleon's orbit as a kind of surrogate son, Lucky becomes the film's way of translating Orwell's broader allegory into an individual journey. The problem is that journey never tracks. Lucky should recognize that something is wrong much earlier than he does, and without Seth Rogen's Napoleon ever fully selling the kind of charm that would justify the delay, his slow realization starts to read less like naivety and more like complicity. The film keeps telling us he's smart, but the longer he goes along with it, the worse that claim holds up. At a certain point, he doesn't come across as naive—he comes across as a bad judge of character. The movie doesn't seem to know the difference.
Snowball, voiced by Laverne Cox, doesn't last long—she's out of the picture before the movie really gets going. That wouldn't be an issue if she left a stronger impression on the way out. The role calls for someone the animals would actually follow, but here she comes off more like the person explaining the rules than the person you'd trust to lead. She's right about everything, but not especially compelling about it. So when Napoleon pushes her out, it doesn't feel like a shocking exile—it feels like the louder personality winning. That's a problem, because the whole story depends on that moment carrying weight. It also highlights a larger imbalance: Seth Rogen's Napoleon never sells the charm, and Cox's Snowball never sells the authority.
Boxer, voiced by Woody Harrelson, is the film's strongest element by a comfortable margin. The performance works because it refuses irony—Boxer believes in the mission, in hard work, in his friends. The movie, for once, doesn't talk down to that. Harrelson plays him straight, and it gives the story heart it otherwise struggles to find. He becomes the emotional engine of the film, which is why his trip to the glue factory lands even here, in a film that keeps everything else light on its hooves. The result is something close to structural cruelty: a movie too gentle to fully honor Orwell, but not gentle enough to save its best character. If that final note of hope is meant to feel earned, letting Boxer live to see Napoleon's fall would have done far more work than Lucky's closing speech ever could. And in the margins, after Boxer is taken, Kathleen Turner's Benjamin turns on Lucky in the film's most recognizably Orwellian moment. He's the one character allowed to understand everything and do nothing about it, played with a restraint that never calls attention to itself.
The film's modernizing instinct runs into a basic problem: it doesn't know where or when it exists. It gestures at the present—capital, branding, influencers—but never builds a coherent world around those ideas. You can't quite read it as contemporary, and you can't quite read it as a fable either, not with all the what-whats, the "naughty juice," Squealer doubling as a publicist, and Napoleon dreaming up action figures and movie deals. This Napoleon feels assembled from the present day—a little bit of political theater, a little bit of influencer energy, all filtered through the language of branding and optics. You recognize the type immediately, which is kind of the issue.
The biggest shift the film makes isn't tonal, it's ideological. It keeps the shape of ANIMAL FARM but changes what the story is really about, leaning into capitalism and debt instead of the internal collapse Orwell was writing about. The pressure comes from the outside now—the banker, Pilkington, the whole system of credit—which makes the ending easier to soften. In the book, there's no one else to blame. The pigs don't need help to become what they become, and that's the part that sticks. This remake seems less interested in sitting with that idea. It borrows the darkness, but not the conviction behind it. Orwell's bleakness comes from caring about something and watching it fall apart. Here, the film gestures toward that kind of weight, then pulls back, smoothing things over with a hopeful finish. What you're left with is a bit of a split personality: something close to nihilism underneath, optimism on top, and not enough in between to make the two fit together.
A bittersweet ending would have made more sense. Instead, the movie is wired for optimism from the beginning, and that choice shows up everywhere. The losses don't really stick because they're all recoverable—Lucky gets a speech, the farm gets saved, the whole thing wraps itself back together. That's the opposite of what gives ANIMAL FARM its weight. In Orwell's version, nothing comes back. Here, almost everything does, which makes it hard to feel like anything was truly lost. Boxer is the odd one out. The film keeps his death but softens everything else, so the moment lands without a world around it to support it. Even the nuts and bolts of the ending feel shaky—the dam goes, Pilkington disappears, Whymper hands things over, and suddenly it's all resolved.
I saw it in a theater that sold beer but, for reasons never fully explained, didn't allow it into that particular auditorium. So the whole thing had to be taken in completely sober. By the end, in a mostly empty room, with maybe one other person who didn't stick it out, that small detail started to feel like the final judgment. Not something the movie says out loud, but something it leaves behind all the same.
Final Verdict: 30 out of 100
Sidenote: It looks like there's going to be a post-credits scene — there isn't one. Instead, the film prompts you to pull out your phone and scan one of the QR codes on screen to give feedback. The two options I saw were "WOW I LOVED IT!" and "NEVER DO THIS AGAIN!" I searched the entire screen, but I couldn't find the one labeled "MIDDLE FINGER!".
