Angel Studios Commits Unforced Error With Unfaithful Animal Farm Adaptation Trailer
Conservatives and liberals appear to agree on two things. First, that the 1945 George Orwell book, Animal Farm, is not a comedy. And second, Angel Studios and Andy Serkis clearly missed the mark with their Animal Farm adaption.
As reviewed by the City of Newport Beach:
“Animal Farm represents the Russian Revolution of 1917. Old Major represents Karl Marx, Snowball represents Leon Trotsky, Napoleon represents Josef Stalin, Squealer represents propaganda, and Boxer is a representation for all the Russian laborers and workers.”
“Old Major’s dream about equality is a stand in for Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Both speeches talk about how laborers and workers produce all the product, but the heads of the organization take everything for themselves. In Animal Farm’s case, the laborers are the animals and the head of the organization is Mr. Jones and humans in general.”
Not exactly comedy material.
Yet, Andy Serkis, of Lord of the Rings fame, spent fourteen years adapting this classic story for a ‘modern audience’. In an interview with Flip Your Wig, Serkis says:
…and although Orwell was writing about totalitarianism in, you know, in particular in Russia in 1945, 1946, this book holds up as an incredible distillation of, you know, of what it is to be oppressive, what is it to face authoritarianism.
But what we’ve done is contemporized It, and we wanted to make it for…
He pauses because he knows what he’s about to say but then continues…
There hadn’t been a retelling of this that really connects, uhm, with uhm, a modern audience. So we couched it in such a way that it feels like a family film but all the darker themes are there.
Andy Serkis clearly had the time to read Animal Farm, and chose to try and shoehorn this important story into a family film. But that was not the only change. According to the trailer, it is now capitalism that is the enemy, not communism.
Historian Rafe Heydel_Mankoo summed it up perfectly:
And the headlines of mainstream media were just as critical of this adaption as well.
Angel Studios
This part pains me because I’ve long been a supporter of Angel Studios since their founding in 2021. They were the subject of one of my very first articles when I highlighted their upcoming Christian family content, much of which has been released and became massive hits. I was also one of the first to report the review bombing of their Homestead film.
Angel Studios has amassed a reputation for their Christian content such as The Chosen, Cabrini, and the critical hit, Sound of Freedom, which is why so many of their fans feel betrayed after today’s trailer release.
Sound of Freedom was Angel Studios’ first major box office hit, and they have been chasing that success ever since by working with more known Hollywood assets. Just this year, they released The King of Kings, which featured many far-left voice actors, such as Oscar Isaac as Jesus, Mark Hamill as King Herod, and Uma Thurman, whose daughter Maya recently gushed about her mother’s teenage abortion.
Angel Studios was able to survive this association with the Hollywood elite as most of the actors promoted the movie without political division and its trailer received millions of views and a positive ratio.
However, Angel Studios is not receiving such grace with Animal Farm. As of this writing, Animal Farm has a massively negative disparity on YouTube as both sides of the aisle are outraged by Serkis’ adaption.
This is an immense misstep by Angel Studios, who I believe underestimated how beloved Animal Farm truly is. But the warning signs were there that Angel chose to ignore. Many actors in Hollywood are known socialists and communist sympathizers, so they were never going to give an anti-communist novel a true adaption.
Many on the right are calling for an Angel Studios boycott. I wouldn’t go that far yet. So far their record has been stellar with pushing family-friendly content and filling a void with successful Christian movies. People are allowed to make a mistake, which Animal Farm appears to be, and allowed to correct that mistake.
However, Angel Studios has carefully cultivated an audience since 2021 that can be very fickle. With the constant betrayals on the right, many are looking for reasons to end their support of something that betrays their values. I personally do not believe we are there yet with Angel Studios, but their recent flirtation with Hollywood may be a signal of where this studio is headed, which is a path many of their current fans cannot follow. Me included.
Angel Studios will do well to remember Paul’s words to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15:33 (NIV)
33 Do not be misled: Bad company corrupts good character.
You sleep with socialist dogs, you wake up with communist fleas.