ANIMAL FARM Movie Poster | ©2026 Angel Studios

Rating: PG
Stars (voices): Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Jim Parsons, Andy Serkis, Kathleen Turner, Iman Vellani
Writer: Nicholas Stoller, based on George Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM
Director: Andy Serkis
Distributor: Angel Studios
Release Date: May 1, 2026

George Orwell’s short 1945 novel ANIMAL FARM has often been adapted in animated versions for the big screen, but this new edition is probably the most family-friendly of them all.

Despite the title and talking barnyard characters, Orwell’s original is a dark political parable, full of betrayal, despair and death. Most of the movies have followed suit.

This time around, there’s still a lot of betrayal and a bit of death, but not so much overall despair. Directed by motion-capture actor extraordinaire Andy Serkis and scripted by Nicholas Stoller, ANIMAL FARM plays more toward what parents who don’t read (or at least haven’t read Orwell) think they’ll be getting for their children with 3D animation and talking pigs, sheep, horses, etc.

It is still darkish, a clear lesson about how absolute power can corrupt absolutely and why going along with the herd is not necessarily a good thing. Indeed, it makes for some decent openings for discussions with little kids on these topics. Still, it is also geared toward, say, the CHARLOTTE’S WEB target audience.

While our narrator is the farm’s work horse Boxer (voiced by Woody Harrelson), the primary protagonist is the piglet Lucky (voiced by Gaten Matarazzo), a new character created for this ANIMAL FARM. Lucky is the child stand-in figure for young viewers.

The farm is being repossessed by the bank from its alcoholic owner, a farmer who has sold all his livestock to a slaughterhouse. While the animals are being rounded up, educated pig Snowball (voiced by Laverne Cox), who can read and write, leads a rebellion. With their superior strength and numbers, the animals succeed in (literally) kicking the humans off the farm.

Snowball has the best interests of her fellow animals at heart, but she’s a bit of a know-it-all, bossy and ready to take shortcuts around the ignorance of others. In theory, the farm is now a democracy, with all animals being equal. There are seven guiding rules for the new community, which include no killing, and no imitating or trusting humans.

For a while, the animals do a great job of running the farm themselves, selling their crops to human neighbors for enough money to pay the mortgage on the farm. But the pig Napoleon (voiced by Seth Rogen) wants attention, denounces Snowball’s sensible ideas as “boring,” and leads the other animals into behavior that is long-term self-destructive.

Napoleon befriends some homeless Dobermans, who soon serve as his bodyguards. He gets Snowball ejected from the farm and begins rewriting the rules to suit himself. Soon Napoleon is in charge, pigs are a species “more equal than others,” and he is trafficking with a human mega-farmer (voiced by Glenn Close) so villainous that she drives a cybertruck.

So far, ANIMAL FARM is going by Orwell’s framework, including for what many readers is the most traumatic event in the book. But a whole new final act has been added to make this much more like a regular animated action/adventure, so that there’s a lot more going on physically and strategically, ending on a note of hope.

Napoleon is a leader who talks over others, has no helpful plans of his own, squanders anything good that comes the farm’s way for his own benefit, lies continuously, and could not care less about the welfare of other animals or even other pigs. This is true to Orwell’s creation of the character. However, despite the standard “no resemblance” disclaimer in the end credits, if anybody wants to read something or someone into Napoleon, this ANIMAL FARM isn’t going to argue.

Rogen smoothly takes Napoleon from blundering klutz to comedic bro to smooth operator to pure evil. Matarazzo is dependably plucky and personable as Lucky. Harrelson, while not sounding like himself for part of the film, puts heart into the confused but always dedicated Boxer. Cox makes Snowball a proper reasonable intellectual who just doesn’t know how to sell concepts to the masses, and Serkis shows up in a supporting role as the farm’s main rooster.

As director, Serkis demonstrates full comprehension of animated sight gags and chaos; he appears as adept in the 3D medium as he is in motion-capture. There’s an amusing montage of history re-imagined with pigs as the central figures under the closing credits.

This ANIMAL FARM is fine fare for children old enough to deal with its sobering aspects. Adults may feel some cognitive dissonance at the homogenization of material that’s against (among other things) homogenization in general. Even so, for those with children, this can be an illustrative starting point for Political Discourse 101. Likewise, it’s an intriguing example of how subject matter can be altered for specific purposes while maintaining its core principles.

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