The first responses to Andy Serkis’ star-packed animated re-imagining of George Orwell’s classic 1945 novel Animal Farm are in, and there’s a notable trend to them. The reviews aren’t all bad: A handful of writers at various outlets seem to be pretty okay with the updates Serkis and writer Nicholas Stoller made to Orwell’s totalitarian allegory, including a rap sequence, flashy sci-fi technology, an egregiously exaggerated fart joke, and a much happier ending. But the critics who didn’t like the movie have been exceptionally brutal and colorful, calling Animal Farm “muddled” and “sloppy,” “an abomination” and “a tonal nightmare,” or “so bad, it’s enough to turn George Orwell fascist.”
Speaking to Polygon ahead of the film’s release, director Andy Serkis (best known as Gollum from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies and Caesar from the Planet of the Apes reboots) says he embraces the vehement responses to the film’s trailers and previews.
“In terms of the first trailer, I was actually delighted that it got, on the one hand, people saying, ‘Orwell will be turning in his grave’ and ‘Andy Serkis has turned Orwell into fart jokes,’ and then on the other hand, people are saying that it’s one of the most important films of the year,” Serkis says. “That is exactly what Orwell would have wanted — to cause debate, to cause discussion.”
Serkis sees the divided response to Animal Farm as equivalent to the responses to Orwell’s own work. “He’s claimed by both sides of the aisle, across left and right,” Serkis says. “Some revile him. Some adore him — on both sides. So he’s a very interesting storyteller and communicator of ideas.”
Two of the most divisive aspects of the new Animal Farm have been that extended fart joke — social media responses have been particularly scathing about the entire idea of introducing lowbrow humor into a Very Serious Classic — and the way the movie revises Orwell’s bleak, despairing ending. Serkis sees both of those aspects as necessary for approaching a younger audience that isn’t familiar with the original book.
“We wanted to have this as a film that could reach young minds and start a debate, a conversation, between kids and their parents and their grandparents, having hopefully watched all this together,” Serkis says. “It [should] be an opener, really. But with that, we felt it was necessary — Orwell doesn’t have a third act. We have a third act. It ends so bleakly in Orwell’s book. But we are facing a situation where the world is in such a mess. We can’t throw up our hands and say, ‘Well, we can’t do anything about it.’ Part of dealing with it is by saying, ‘OK, if history is going to repeat itself, what can I do to perhaps change the course of it?'”
Animal Farm arrives in theaters on May 1.