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Andy Serkis’ Animal Farm, as those have watched will confirm, is a baffling abomination. One of the biggest issues survivors of the new animated movie have is the way it adds a happy ending to the historically bleak tale (tail?) of power corrupting — a choice Serkis defended in a new interview with USA Today.
Without getting too deep into spoilers, this new Animal Farm covers the original plot of the George Orwell adaptation, then continues on with a new sequence in which the remaining “good” characters of the farm rise up against both their human and pig oppressors. For Serkis, this was a decision motivated by what he sees as “a world where there seemingly is no hope at the moment.” As he continued:
“We keep making the same mistakes. There are oppressive regimes globally. There are bosses in companies that maltreat their workers globally. We’re living in such a difficult time. All times are difficult for humanity, but we’re living in, it seems, certainly a world without truth or the inability to really know what is true and what isn’t true. So we wanted the next generation, the kids who we hopefully are going to be watching this film, to at least have the ability to question what they should do next time around. History will inevitably repeat itself.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Serkis defended the choice to remove the original story’s violence for a more PG-rated experience, saying that “[Orwell] was writing with children in mind … I think we’ve remained loyal to that.” He also stated his feeling that Orwell would have wanted the controversy surrounding the movie, which Serkis feels is “about authoritarianism and our response to that and power corrupting.”
Animal Farm, starring the voices of Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Kieran Culkin, and Glenn Close, arrives in theaters on May 1st. Be sure to revisit our review, and check out the trailer below.
English (US) · 