Review: Animal Farm brings an Orwell classic to a new audience, along with some fart jokes
Like most American high schoolers, I was assigned George Orwell's classic allegorical novella, Animal Farm , as a school reading assignment. I was (and I guess, still am) an English geek, so I tended to like the assigned reading, and Animal Farm was no exception. It's a lean and powerful tome, an imminently readable satire of the Russian Revolution. It's a classic, and a curriculum mainstay, for good reason. It's also, perhaps, an unlikely bit of source material for a family movie, but here we are in 2026 welcoming a new cinematic take on the book that injects cartoony animal antics, pop song needle drops, and fart jokes into the mix. Director Andy Serkis has reworked Orwell to be more palatable, more Hollywood, and also to rhyme a bit more with the current political climate (you might see more Trump than Stalin in this version of Napoleon the pig). This is a movie where I'm not quite sure why it was made, or why it exists in this form. Adding to the overall strange...
