I recently went to see the new(ish) Animal Farm in theaters (as I have ascertained, it technically debuted at an art festival last year between Netflix shirking the distribution rights and Angel Studios picking them up). As you can probably tell, given that this is a focused editorial on a small part of the movie and not a review, my reaction to the film is such that I do not care to go back to it for a more in-depth review. I did not like the film, I think it is actually pretty poorly told, I only laughed out loud once at an unintentionally funny part, and it is a terrible adaptation of George Orwell's book. However, it is very important to me that you understand that those are four distinct claims I shared and not one half-baked argument. Liking or not liking a film is subjective, as is humor. Why I think the adaptation is pretty poor will become clear with the rest of this article, but you must keep in mind I regard adaptation changes as "sideways" in quality, neither inherently good nor bad. As for why I think the film is bad, I think there are unfortunate interruptions in the arcs of Napolean, Lucky, Boxer and Puff that make me unable to track their growth and changing attitudes in many cases because of the jokes in this movie taking the easy shortcut to appeal to I-Pad babies. I am still open and willing to have discourse on this movie that can change my assessments; there are just four distinct areas to have those conversations. If you like the film and have watched it multiple times, your recollections of the film are probably more precise than mine, but I have done my best to remember and double check the plot points I will be discussing, as well as cross-referencing these decisions with Andy Serkis' stated goals from interviews. With that out of the way, we can begin the actual topic here.
One of the most puzzling changes from the outset of this project is the inclusion of Lucky, a young piglet played by Gaten Matarazzo, who is both student to Snowball and protege of Napolean. Andy Serkis has said that Lucky is supposed to be an innocent audience insert to frame this story, and he has also said that he pursued animation for this project to make it easier for kids to relate to the story, so the obvious answer for why Lucky is in the story is to make it more palatable for children with a likable lead and happy ending, already a concerning direction to take this story but I digress. (Making it a parable with animals is already enough to help it teach children important lessons. I think Andy Serkis should have consulted Aesop or the Brothers Grimm if he still thought children needed to be talked down to with these stories. Similarly, in contexts set after the fall of the Soviet Union, I understand Animal Farm better as a warning against revolutionary populists; "corporatism is the new communism" is probably not a theme you should include in a story where the happy ending is that the surviving characters all recommit to a new communism.)
Upon a first glance, Lucky's role seems to be the standard liberal archetype of 'being unable to do anything except token gestures against rising authoritarianism and getting swept up in the increasing compromises until they become the new bourgeoise and get backstabbed.' Once Lucky realizes Napolean has gone too far, his plan is to appeal to the pigs and humans' sense of decorum by showing in video how Napolean is actually crass, pathetic and irresponsible, the most fecklessly liberal plan imaginable (especially because Seth Rogen seems to be playing Napolean as though he were Trump, but that might have been unintentional yet inevitable the moment they dumbed the Stalin character down into a fat materialist celebrity with an exaggerated cartoon voice). Add back in the fact that Lucky never lost his privilege even once he rejoins with the oppressed animals and becomes their de facto leader, and it is actually very, very difficult to root for Lucky.
However, there is potentially more to Lucky's character and what he represents in this film than may be obvious. I mentioned earlier that there was one moment that I busted up laughing in the theater, and it wasn't Napolean shaking his butt or Lucky's plan destabilizing into suicide terrorism (I'll get to that in a moment); it was a 'touching' moment of Lucky using the memory and martyrdom of Boxer and Snowball to rouse the impoverished starving animals into a second revolution to purge the 'rightists' that have taken power from Animal Farm. It all clicked place into me there, and I could not contain myself. Lucky is, whether intentionally or not, Mao Zedong, and the movie is actually fairly propagandistic in shaping our view of Lucky and what he represents to Animal Farm.
I admitted that it is difficult for me to root for Lucky, but the film does not share those qualms. Boxer actually narrates the film, immediately casting Lucky in a positive light. Boxer was chosen to narrate this film because Andy Serkis resonated with the character all his life, but the fact that Boxer, the paragon hero doomed to die, vouches for Serkis' OC transfers some of that inherent goodwill onto him. Indeed, Lucky is Boxer's best friend and tries to share the milk Napolean hordes for the pigs with Boxer early on in the story. Though Boxer starts out as a mentor character to Lucky, we all know that Boxer is very naive and assumes the best of this movement, working himself to the grave. That is the first misspeak in the film; his narration is far more nuanced than he has the capacity to be, and Lucky even says in one of his last monologues to the Animals that even Boxer was not correct about their movement. The closing moments reveal that Boxer was narrating this film from heaven (the stars specifically, but if a fat pig can be Stalin without that ever being stated in the text, spirits in the stars can be Heaven), but, in order to keep that twist intact, when Boxer dies, his narration ceases, and it cuts to Lucky telling this story to the new generation. Lucky's narration also gets a wrap around in the ending, and, in lieu of a better way to square away two characters both claiming to narrate the film, I have to assume that the heavenly martyr Boxer is part of Lucky's propaganda.
Consider this. Lucky is the junior partner to Snowball during her illegal forays into the farmhouse and protege to Napolean as they make every other compromise through to the book's original ending of looking back from pig to human and being confused which is which. (The "cautionary tail" version of this story, as it markets itself, should obviously end there, and the POV switch to Boxer would be very chilling as we, the audience, could debate if Boxer was right about Lucky or if Lucky was this adaptation's version of the rose-colored glasses Boxer has for the regime.) Instead, Lucky flees and returns to the downtrodden animals, regains their trust and launches an assault on Animal Farm's dam. Though his plan is peaceful in the biased version of the story we hear, let us consider what actually happens, the suicide terrorism I mentioned. Napolean has a bunch of fireworks planned to show off his strength (for whatever reason he has started dressing like Stalin instead of a gang leader, as he was for the rest of the movie) as he holds a large rally of pigs and humans. Lucky wants to sabotage the fireworks, and so he unplugs them and the fireworks themselves wind up in a pit that just exists in the dam for some reason. Squealer plugs it back in, and the Andy Serkis voiced rooster is on guard to stop the fireworks. He stops the spark from going down the line to the fireworks but catches on fire himself, which sets the lines on fire. The rooster falls in the pit with the fireworks, and, as they explode, he says a nationalistic chant about fighting for Animal Farm. The dam explodes, killing countless humans directly and leading to the circumstances where Lucky gets to kill Napolean. (The rooster does not show up again for another tenish minutes, leading us to believe he died, until he pops back up to reveal that Lucky also survived, as the film was desperately trying to convince its child audience that Lucky had died escaping the deluge.)
It does not matter if Napolean deserved it, and it does not matter what the film shows Lucky's intent to be. This story is about questioning revolutionary populists that say the right thing and focusing on the indistinguishable actions of the Tsar and the Stalin. Lucky's Continuous Revolution immediately became the most violent action in the movie, and this is after he was complicit in the mistakes of Snowball and Napolean. Why, oh why do the other animals forgive him? Why is he the defacto leader in their charge on the dam? Why is it okay for Lucky to let the falling silo crush Napolean when it wasn't okay for Napolean to let dogs kill Snowball? The simple fact is that, after his arc two thirds in the movie, the movie does not allow us to question Lucky's motivation or his actions. (The cult of personality of this film is Lucky's.) As soon as he has reunited with the peasants and started to liberate them, all nuance disappears from the conversation. Ending Animal Farm with a continuous revolution where the animals are happy (even though it has been done before) removes the satire and reclassifies it as textbook revolutionary romanticism, specifically Maoist peasant fiction as the film make a point to show much poorer the proletariat animals have become since Napolean rose to power. (Also consider how much literacy is emphasized in these animals, how Lucky knows how to read and tries to teach Boxer, how Lucky's girlfriend Puff teaches the illiterate peasant animals, and how Maoist propaganda was the earliest form of writing education for peasant writers such as the prolific award winning author Mo Yan.)
Alright, even if you are still following me, Mao Zedong specifically is a little random. I've been sprinkling a few hints throughout this article, but I really should make this reading a bit more blatant. This film very clearly distances itself from the Russian allegory by having a 'Big Bad Duumvirate' of Napolean and the owner of Wal-Mart. That is obvious from the trailers, but the story also very deliberately removes Old Major (the Marx/Lenin of Animal Farm). I cannot speak to the intent of this decision as, to my knowledge, no one has asked Serkis about that yet, but it means that the communism of Animal Farm can mean other things with other figures. The way that we can know Old Major is Marx or Lenin is in his archetypal stylings and position in the story. How would we write an allusion to Mao Zedong? Well, he was a student during the earlier revolutions surrounding May Fourth 1919. Wait, Lucky is the student of Snowball during the first revolution against Farmer Jones. Before the revolution, he is merely an educated animal, failing to read the obscured S in slaughterhouse and getting in the van with the other animals, but after he is present for every major decision, the same way that the May 4thers became activists and political leaders (whether communist or nationalist). You have to admit there is something there, but I must again return to the moment I found so hilarious in the movie.
Within Maoist propaganda, there were certain ideal communist figures that Mao would valorize with propaganda. The thing is that pretty often these people all died for the cause, so the unfortunate implication is that Mao's ideal worker is a dead one, his ideal woman a dead one, his ideal communist, if they survived the great famine and depression of the Guomindang, starved in Mao's famine. Lei Feng was one such figure, the ultimate loyal and hardworking soldier. Selfless and devoted, he links up to Boxer in several key ways, and like Mao, Lucky uses his martyrdom to get the other animals into line. I am not a scholar on Mao, and the notes from classes into Chinese history are pretty much useless for me because I could not write the names down in time due to less familiarity with how to spell those pronunciations. But of the women martyrs that Mao valorized, I can at least tell you about Yang Kaihui. She was one of his wives that died in the 30s, but I think that Puff would actually map better on to his later wife Jiang Qing (gaining political power after a split with Lucky but then falling in line at least for a while). The idea here is that the people that Lucky valorizes are not the living members of Animal Farm, and he leads a much smaller force of peasants against Napolean's larger army because Lucky advocates for a continuous revolution of purging rightists (purging rightist authors often meant simply ejecting them from the society, such as Lucky's original plan for Napolean). Lucky's peasant underdogs succeeding against his enemies could match the underdog communists winning the Chinese Civil War in 1949, which means that Lucky's Animal Farm is still doomed to go through the Great Leap Forward (especially since Lucky alludes to hard work and communes for his future plans) and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Forgiving Lucky for his mistakes when they are still in dire straits due to destroying the industrialized dam and nearby humans is tantamount to forgiving Mao for the Great Leap Forward.
I might seem overly cynical about the propagandistic nature of this movie, but redeemed heavenly Boxer telling us a story from the stars he used to look at with Lucky is cloyingly sentimental, unless there is a purpose in the text for it. Initially, I thought it was one of those tropes that wound up in there because Angel Studios released it (because all of the Angel Studios movies I have seen have something subtly in there to point the kiddies back to Christ), but Angel Studios acquired this film very late in its history. This was going to be a Netflix film, which certainly means that they were not intentionally including Maoist imagery but also means that Christ is not on the forefront of the creative's minds. Realistically, the answer is that Serkis likes Boxer so much that he wants to think of him as going to heaven, but that is also how Mao felt about Yang Kaihui. The following is two lines in two translations of Mao's "Reply to Li Shuyi" that directly concern Poplar (Yang).
"I lost my proud poplar, and you your willow,
Poplar and Willow soar lightly to the heaven of heavens..."
"I lost my proud poplar and you your willow.
As poplar and willow they soar straight up
into the ninth heaven...."
Mao was a revolutionary romanticist. Though he censored a lot of Chinese authors, his own poetry is not as rigid as you might expect. He includes romantic appeals to nature, but he believes the collective that conquer it easily. From "Return to Well Ridge Mountain" - "We can clasp the moon in the Ninth Heaven and seize turtles deep down in the Five Seas. Nothing is hard in this world If you dare to scale the heights..." So why is this important. When the Animal Farms works together, their yield is higher than it ever was under Jones. I am not pleased that they included this scene, but early in the movie all of the animals trade with some humans at the Animal Farm farmer's market, and they still pull in more cash than Jones ever did together. At the end of the movie, the Andy Serkis rooster goes out in a fiery blaze to take down the dam, but he survives it. The whole of the new Animal Farm survive the deluge wiping away Napolean's regime. In the most literal sense (outside of Rocky Balboa punching down trees and climbing a mountain), these communists conquered nature as Mao himself told them they could. The film ends by telling us they can all do it again. (If you think it is unrealistic for Mao to inherit a bad economy and famine and then balance the budget and restore the economy, he technically already did that in reality. Chiang Kai Shek's wartime policies against merchants led to an unparalleled famine and depression decades before Mao tried to skip Marxism's middle stages and starved everybody.)
But okay this still all feels random. Communist animals commenting on humanity, Mao Zedong, what's the connection? Well, I'm sharing a bit more of Mao's poetry than I meant to today, but here is one last poem from Autumn of 1965, "Two Birds: A Dialogue."
"Leviathan-roc spreads his wings
Rises ten thousand miles
By the whirlwind's force propelled
The sky on his back he surveys below
Walled cities where humans dwell:
Horizons lit by gun-flash
Shell craters all around
Startle a sparrow from a bramble dell
'Whatever to do?
Oh! I want to fly off as well'
'And whither, sir, shall you journey?'
Now comes the sparrow's reply:
'There's a fairyland, I hear tell,
Where a year or so back, when the moon was bright
Three clans contracted in peace to dwell
They've lots to eat there too
Potatoes piping hot,
Plenty of beef to sell.'
'Bullshit, my friend:
Just watch heaven switch with hell.'"
There are also other translations of this poem, but I am not copying a full poem in here twice for Mao Zedong of all people. I am not going to say if Mao was aware of Animal Farm when he wrote this poem or if he was merely engaging in the long-held tradition of Aesop to Grimm to Orwell of using animals to explain human concepts, but I am more confident in my reading of Animal Farm 2025 for knowing that Mao has also used animals in his communist writings. I think we are well past the point where a New Critic could read Mao into this story, and we are just left with "this clearly is not what anybody making the film intended." I will be the first to admit that as I have done so already. But that is kind of the lesson here, is it not? If you are writing or adapting such an important story as Animal Farm, you have to be really extraordinarily careful about what changes you make. If you want to valorize your own characters in a story with a moral about how you shouldn't let populist strongmen get away with anything, and you also want to undo the very purposeful logical negative ending of a retelling of Stalinism, you need to be very careful to not accidentally rediscover Mao. (If you would like a more in-depth version of this in video format, I can make no promises. I really don't want to rewatch this movie.)
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