George Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1944, at the height of the Soviet-Western alliance, as a grave warning against making friends with Stalin. He satirised the rise and fall of the Russian revolution through the eyes of barnyard animals, allegorising the Kronstadt rebellion, the Moscow trials, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Tehran conference. Animal Farm is a polemic about moral degradation and the corruption of truth. It is full of timeless wisdom and political insight. Not many fart jokes, though.
For the actor and director Andy Serkis, better known perhaps as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings saga or Caesar from the new Planet of the Apes films, the sound of freedom in his new children’s adaptation of Orwell’s novella is a loud, long PPRRRRTTT expelled from the backside of a pot-bellied pig voiced by Seth Rogen. Not a classic take on the text, then – but if toilet humour is what it takes to engage a young audience in Orwell’s cautionary message, then so be it. Not everyone agrees.
