Official Trailer
Rating: 4.5/10 | Genre: Animation, Comedy, Drama, Family, Science Fiction | Runtime: 96 min
Starring: Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Laverne Cox
I went into Animal Farm expecting a fun animated take on Orwell’s classic. What I got was 96 minutes of good intentions that never quite come together. The movie has moments. It’s not a complete disaster. But it’s also not the clever satire you’d hope for.
The setup is solid enough. A group of farm animals get tired of their owner’s neglect and stage a rebellion. They take over the farm with this dream of creating a place where all animals are equal and free. It’s hopeful. It’s inspiring. Then the pigs, being the smartest animals, gradually take charge. And that’s when things go wrong.
Here’s where the movie’s problems start. The pigs’ slide into corruption happens way too fast. In the book, Orwell takes his time showing how power corrupts step by step. The movie just sort of rushes through it. One minute Napoleon is a reasonable leader and the next he’s basically a dictator rewriting history. There’s no real tension because you never feel like the other animals trusted him in the first place.
Seth Rogen voices the main pig and his delivery is fine, but it’s just Seth Rogen doing his thing. Nothing about the character feels particularly threatening or complex. Glenn Close plays an old mare and she’s probably the best part of the voice cast. She brings actual weight to her lines. Steve Buscemi and Laverne Cox are fine too, but none of them have much to do. Gaten Matarazzo voices one of the horses and sounds exactly like you’d expect a young actor to sound voicing an animated character. Not bad. Just not memorable.
The animation is bright and colorful but kind of generic. The farm doesn’t feel lived in. The backgrounds look like they were done on a budget. Some scenes move at a good pace but others drag. There’s this whole sequence in the middle where the pigs are teaching the other animals their new laws and it just goes on forever. I get that the movie is trying to show how boring propaganda is, but that doesn’t make it fun to watch.
What really doesn’t work is the tone. The movie can’t decide if it’s a comedy or a serious drama. It throws in jokes that feel out of place when things are getting dark. There’s a scene where some animals get executed and it’s treated almost like a punchline. That’s not funny. That’s just weird.
The pacing also suffers in the second half. Once the power grab is complete, the movie doesn’t have much story left to tell. We just watch the animals suffer under pig rule. The ending is bleak, which is true to the book, but the movie doesn’t earn that bleakness. It feels like we’re just watching bad things happen without really understanding why the other animals don’t fight back sooner.
I think the real issue is that this material is genuinely difficult to adapt for a family audience. Animal Farm is a political allegory about totalitarianism. It’s dark and complicated. Trying to make it cute and animated and funny strips away what makes the story actually matter. You end up with something that’s not quite smart enough for adults and not quite fun enough for kids.
There are better versions of Animal Farm out there. The 1954 animated film is worth watching if you want to see how to do this story right. Even the 1999 live action version, as weird as it is, has more personality than this one. Animal Farm 2026 isn’t terrible. It’s just forgettable. It goes through the motions without ever figuring out what it wants to be or why you should care.
Have you seen this one yet? Did you feel like it worked better than I did, or were you let down too?
Where to Watch
Rent on: Amazon Video