The vegan author Jordi Casamitjana discusses the vegan angle of Andy Serkis’s animated movie “Animal Farm”, based on the famous George Orwell’s novel.
It’s one of those books.
I am sure many of you would relate when I confess that there are some classic books I am not sure if I have ever read. Because of how important and iconic they have become, you assume that, at one point in your life, you must have read this book, especially if you get all the cultural references about it and you sometimes even quote it.
I have indeed quoted the famous sentence “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” to reference George Orwell’s famous satirical novel Animal Farm, so I have assumed I must have read it. However, in all honesty, I am not so sure. I may have read part of it, or I may have watched movies about it, and this is why I seem to know it so well. However, from now on, I will know it even better, because I learnt that a new animated movie had been released under the same name, and yesterday I went to watch it.
Although this is an adaptation rather than a precise reproduction of the book, it’s close enough to the original in terms of plot, characters, and situations to allow you to get the message Orwell intended to communicate, and to experience the satire and irony with which he communicated it — perhaps the most memorable aspect of his book.
Although I acknowledge that he held some views that are controversial by today’s standards, I have always been quite fond of George Orwell because one of his books, Homage to Catalonia, pays tribute to my country of birth. He helped us to fight the Spanish fascists during the Spanish Civil War of the early 20th century (unfortunately, the fascists won, and 40 years of a totalitarian dictatorship followed, in which Catalonians like me were persecuted — as I experienced directly during the first 12 years of my life).
I was keen to watch this movie based on his book because of my emotional connection to the author, but there was another important reason. In January 2002, a key life-changing decision significantly reshaped my life: I became an ethical vegan. Since then, I have been promoting veganism and campaigning for the abolition of all “animal farms” — you can see, therefore, another reason for my interest.
In the last six years, I have channelled my vegan activism toward writing books, essays, and articles, and part of the latter have been reviews of movies. So, I thought I would review this one and do what I normally try to do when I review a film: finding the vegan angle. I did find it — many, to be precise — so if you have already watched the movie (because this article will contain spoilers for those who have not read the book or seen any other movie about it), continue reading, and you will discover which.
A remake of the famous Orwell’s cautionary tale
Over eighty years after George Orwell published Animal Farm in 1945, the classic political allegory has received a new animated adaptation directed by Andy Serkis. Best known internationally for portraying Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films, Serkis has spent much of the last decade developing a reputation as a director specialising in performance capture and ambitious visual storytelling.
This CG-animated adaptation is a 94-minute political satire produced by Aniventure, The Imaginarium Studios, and Cinesite, which handled the film’s animation. Written by Nicholas Stoller, the screenplay reimagines Orwell’s classic novella with an original protagonist (a piglet named Lucky) and was produced alongside Serkis by Adam Nagle, Dave Rosenbaum, and Jonathan Cavendish. Featuring a musical score composed by Heitor Pereira, the animated feature premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on 9th June 2025, before receiving its North American theatrical release on 1st May 2026, via Angel Studios.
The ensemble voice cast includes Seth Rogen as Napoleon, Gaten Matarazzo as Lucky, Woody Harrelson as Boxer, Laverne Cox as Snowball, Kieran Culkin as Squealer, Jim Parsons as Carl, Steve Buscemi as Mr Whymper, Glenn Close as Freida Pilkington, Kathleen Turner as Benjamin, Iman Vellani as Puff and Tammy, and Serkis himself voicing Mr Jones and Old Major. The new Animal Farm premiered in the UK in late July, and I watched it on the first day.
Orwell’s original novel was written as a satire of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. In the book, the animals of Manor Farm overthrow their drunk human exploiter in the hope of creating a society based on equality and justice. However, as the pigs gradually accumulate power, the revolutionary ideals become corrupted until the new rulers become virtually indistinguishable from the humans they replaced.
The film follows the same overall structure but softens some of the political satire in favour of a more personal coming-of-age story centred on the piglet Lucky, a character created specifically for this adaptation. While Orwell’s novel ends on an intentionally bleak note, the film offers a more hopeful conclusion, emphasising cooperation and collective responsibility rather than pure political pessimism.
Although Orwell never intended Animal Farm as an animal rights novel, it is almost impossible for a modern vegan viewer not to notice how closely many of its images resonate with contemporary debates about animal exploitation. Watching the film through that lens —which I can’t help doing with any film I watch — exposes a fascinating tension. At times, it comes close to expressing ideas central to the vegan philosophy, but at other moments it retreats into typical assumptions inherited from a speciesist society that still views Nonhuman Animals as resources.
There is a curious aspect of the film — although not directly related to the production — that I found interesting. Andy Serkis has spoken publicly over the years about becoming vegetarian when he was 18 before later becoming pescatarian during his recording of The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand. I don’t know if he is still a pescatarian (it seems he still was in 2022), and whether or not this has any relevance to the film is difficult to know without his insight, but it struck me as an interesting irony. Animal Farm is, after all, a story about ideals that slowly become corrupted and compromised through dilution and propaganda. In a purely metaphorical sense, one could see a parallel between the gradual corruption described by Orwell and the way ethical commitments sometimes soften over time in people who aspire to be ethical. It seems to me that the “ring of power” that corrupted Gollum in The Lord of the Rings might have somehow jumped the script page and “corrupted” Serkis into abandoning vegetarianism in the wrong direction (rather than improving it toward veganism, worsening it toward flesh-eating — which, incidentally, it takes the form of fish-eating in the case of Gollum himself).
At the same time, Woody Harrelson — who has been vegan for many years — not only voices the abused shire horse Boxer but also is one of the film’s executive producers. I think this is interesting, because Boxer becomes one of the story’s moral centres, and it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the film’s moments most compatible with a vegan interpretation involve his character (I wonder if he had any say about the script). Perhaps carnist and vegan forces might have been pulling the production in opposite directions, and this is why my vegan reading of the movie is somehow eclectic.
The Softening of the “Freedom Rather Than Food” Slogan
Perhaps the strongest explicitly animal rights moment comes early in the story, when the animals discover that the vehicle they believed was taking them on holiday is actually transporting them to a slaughterhouse. Snowball, the idealist pig who incites the revolt (who in the novel might have represented Leon Trotsky), asks the question that, for me, becomes the moral heart of the film: “Do you want to be food, or do you want freedom?” That single sentence enters the language of liberation. Freedom, not simply better treatment, is precisely what vegan animal rights activists seek for Nonhuman Animals (and this is why many of them now call the animal rights movement the “animal freedom” movement). The rebellion that follows therefore carries a meaning extending beyond Orwell’s political allegory into what could also be understood as a symbolic struggle against Nonhuman Animal exploitation itself (the core of the animal rights philosophy that has been synergistically connected to the veganism philosophy in the last decades).
Similarly, towards the end of the film, Lucky rejects loyalty to the pigkind when asked whether he is “a pig or an animal.” When he replies “I am an animal”, this can be interpreted as a rejection of speciesism (which is the belief that individuals can be treated differently based on the group they belong to, and therefore is the basis of supremacy, discrimination, oppression, and exploitation). From a vegan perspective, this is a surprisingly powerful moment because one of the main axioms of the philosophy of veganism is the “anti-speciesist axiom”, which states that “Not discriminating against anyone is the right ethical way”. We are animals not only because humans belong to the Animal Kingdom too, but also because we recognise our evolutionary kinship, so embracing that shared identity undermines the assumption that one species should automatically dominate another. In the film, that means the recognition that pigs should not dominate the other farmed animals (as ends up happening), and in real life, that means humans should not dominate the other fellow animals. Changing his ways, Lucky eventually breaks ties with his supremacist privilege and decides to fight for all the animals, not just pigs — which I would say could be seen as the beginning of his veganisation process.
However, while the film often gestures towards animal liberation and the vegan ideal, it also goes in the opposite direction, reproducing carnist assumptions that most non-vegan viewers may never consciously notice. One example appears at the beginning of the film. The animals initially board the truck happily because they believe they are going somewhere enjoyable, but, in reality, farmed animals experience stress, confinement, deprivation, and suffering long before reaching the slaughterhouse. Their suffering does not begin on the final journey to death, but it is built into the entire animal agriculture system — regardless of whether we are talking about a factory farm or a small “high-welfare” organic farm.
Similarly, the original farmer is portrayed as a harsh, drunken, aggressive man. This frames exploitation as the consequence of a particularly “bad human being” rather than animal agriculture itself. The implication is that there are good animal farmers and bad animal farmers, rather than recognising that using animals as property is the problem — as we vegans keep saying, but meat-eaters, vegetarians, and pescatarians ignore.
Later, the principal human antagonist, Freida, represents the industrial corporate world that wants to take over the farm. Again, the criticism falls mainly upon large-scale industrial agriculture (the so-called factory farming) instead of the broader institution of animal farming. This is clearly the animal welfare perspective, where factory farming is condemned, but smaller-scale farming remains largely unquestioned, rather than the animal rights/veganism perspective, which advocates the abolition of all animal exploitation.
Interestingly, the film briefly portrays indoor vertical farming as something sinister run by Freida and her enormous, scary, castle-looking factory, because it appears industrial and mechanised, but vertical farming may actually offer part of the vegan solution by producing crops efficiently while potentially eliminating pesticide use if it is done veganically (being veganic farming a type of organic farming where no exploited Nonhuman Animals are involved).
Switching between Animal Welfare and Animal Rights
One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the film concerns the gradual rewriting of the animals’ commandments that Snowball created at the beginning of the revolution. In the novel, there are seven (1. Two Legs: Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy; 2. Four Legs or Wings: Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend; 3. Clothes: No animal shall wear clothes; 4. Beds: No animal shall sleep in a bed; 5. Alcohol: No animal shall drink alcohol; 6. Killing: No animal shall kill any other animal; and 7. Equality: All animals are equal), but in the film they have been simplified and some merged. Initially, the rule that simply prohibits alcohol (“naughty juice” in the movie) is quietly altered (diluted and weakened as all the others, when the ideals are compromised by corrupted leaders) to prohibit drinking only “to excess.” That tiny addition transforms an absolute principle into a qualified one, which echoes what animal welfare generally has been doing to the animal protection movement (somehow, also “quietly”) by seeking to reduce suffering within systems of exploitation, rather than stopping the exploitation altogether — which is what the animal rights and veganism movements seek. The gradual dilution of principles is one of Orwell’s central themes (which, politically speaking, represents the change from an idealistic Marxism to a corrupted Stalinism, something that Trotsky reacted against, and because of that he was exiled and ultimately murdered by soviet agents), and here it unintentionally mirrors contemporary debates within the animal protection movement.
The sheeps provide another good metaphor. For much of the film they speak collectively, repeating slogans without independent thought (personifying the popular stereotypical metaphor). After one sheep, Carl, loses the wool covering his eyes, he begins thinking differently from the rest, challenging the assumptions that all the other sheeps blindly accept. The symbolism almost writes itself, as vegans often describe outreach as helping people “remove the wool from their eyes” (literally and metaphorically) and see realities that have previously remained hidden to the indoctrinated masses. Whether intentional or not, the image works remarkably well as a metaphor for ethical awakening and vegan outreach.
Although Boxer is often portrayed as considering himself “intellectually challenged”, he repeatedly emerges as one of the wisest characters. At one point, he accidentally traces Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc², suggesting hidden intelligence beneath an underestimated exterior. He also expresses discomfort about drinking milk that “isn’t mine.” Within the story, this refers to sharing resources, yet it is difficult for a vegan viewer not to hear the additional resonance about milk belonging to the young of the species for whom it is produced.
Perhaps most importantly, Boxer ultimately saves a human being despite everything humans have done to the farmed animals. This is quite poignant, because the ultimate goal of veganism is not revenge against humanity after all animals are set free, but the creation of a world that benefits everyone, including those who currently oppose it. A world, which we call The Vegan World, where exploitation and oppression of any sentient being, human or otherwise, will no longer be systemic anywhere on Earth. Ending violence benefits both the victims and those who perpetuate it. Boxer’s eventual fate — being sent away to become glue because he was the one who “held everyone together” — returns us brutally to the reality that systems of exploitation ultimately reduce sentient individuals to commodities and punish those who oppose this.
The film contains several smaller moments that drew my attention. When Freida looks affectionately at two chicks and says that they are “so cute” that she wants to eat them, she embodies the classical contradiction many people express when they sincerely describe themselves as animal lovers while simultaneously consuming animals. One of the chicks, interestingly, still wears half of the eggshell on her head (I am saying her as most male chicks are killed soon after hatching as they would not produce eggs when they grow up — although I am not sure if that “human” policy had being reinstated in the corrupted Napoleon’s regime), suggesting that the cognitive dissonance should be interpreted as including the consumption of eggs.
Another memorable scene (which made it to the trailer) involves the ruling pigs discussing “optics” with Freida. Napoleon (who adopts the most charismatic nickname “Napopo”) asks what optics means. I felt that was very relevant in today’s discussion of veganism, as modern animal agriculture increasingly relies upon images of happy farms, higher welfare labels and deceptive marketing to change the “optics” of their products and companies, and in doing so responding to the challenges vegans constantly bombard them with. Public perception often becomes more important than confronting the ethical question itself — and marketers know this well — so the language of animal welfare is used to hide the truth and portray the demands of vegans as too radical and idealistic.
One line gave me pause. Boxer, who constantly says he loves work (as if he is blind about how he is exploited, or, rather, as if he experiences Stockholm Syndrome), says that “freedom is hard work”. This also reflects on the animal welfare and “stewardship” approach of animal protection that still shows supremacist and speciesist underpinning as it suggest that wild animals work hard to be wild and “human help” is indispensable for other animals to live at peace — which, of course, it’s not true for any wild animals, and for many domesticated animals who, when they become feral, show that they do not need humans at all. “Free” animals are not constantly wishing to be managed. Living freely is not an unnatural burden imposed upon them but the way their lives have evolved.
Likewise, when Boxer later remarks that horses “do not survive broken legs”, he unknowingly repeats another assumption shaped by domestication. Horses frequently die after such injuries because humans often decide treatment is not economically worthwhile, not because nature itself leads to that outcome. Yet, in his honest and charitable nature (which is the nature of the vegan movement he kind of seems to represent sometimes), he does not see the humans as the perpetrators of violence against horses but assumes it’s “the way things are”. In my opinion, Boxer’s naivety, mixed with his strikes of genius, his moral upstanding, his compassion, and his hard work to help others, represents the average vegan more that some vegans may be comfortable to admit (because, let’s face it, many vegans still think that the Vegan World can be achieved in just a few decades — while it will take some generations).
Radical idealists are the antidote against corruption
There are many things I like about Andy Serkis’ Animal Farm. I think the animation is flawless (and I expected this because of Serkis’s career), to the point that you forget it’s an animated movie after a while, retaining the necessary cartoon-quality not to feel uncomfortably realistic. The characters move convincingly without being too anthropomorphised (except when they are supposed to be), and I think this is an achievement.
The casting of voices is very good. Seth Rogen as Napoleon is perfect, and I think incorporating his natural laughter as part of the story is genius. The pace is also right, with not excessively long high-energy action sequences or low-energy conversational dialogue. It does not lean on overly emotional resources — although who can blame them for using the “cute” factor as much as possible — and I personally liked that Lucky’s romantic interests did not take over the social plot, which is the core of Orwell’s novel (I understand that this is a 2026 America movie intended for all audiences, which considerably limits depth and artistic expression, and forces you to use some obligatory storytelling devices). I also found the friendship between Lucky and Boxer very sweet (and suiting, as Lucky is a Pinocchio-like “audience” and Boxer is a Jiminy-Cricket-like “conscience”). I was pleasantly entertained, and had I not known about Orwell’s book, it would have made me think about what he wanted people to think about.
Even though the vegan reading I made of the movie was probably never intended by the pescatarian director, Animal Farm deserves credit for how often it brushes against ideas that resonate deeply with animal rights, and which must be loitering in the suburbs of most people’s minds. Ideas such as the value of freedom extended to all sentient beings, resistance against oppression of any kind, questioning blind obedience to authority and dogma, recognising all beings rather than identifying only with one’s own group, and exposing how easily noble ideals become corrupted. These are valuable themes, and Orwell’s original warning about the erosion of principles remains as relevant today as ever, particularly within the vegan movement, as ideological pragmatists, selective altruists, and meat promoters are openly attempting to “rewrite” the movement’s principles as Napoleon and his minions did with Snowball’s noble and fair “commandments” (the fact that she is voiced by a trans actor did not escape me, by the way).
As a vegan viewer, I found myself wishing the film had gone one step further. Rather than framing corruption primarily as the consequence of power-thirsty bad leaders, it could also have explored how societies gradually weaken their own ideals until they begin to resemble the systems they once opposed, and this is not always an issue of corruption from the top, but from pragmatism seeping in from the sides and idealism gradually evaporating if not nourished.
Even the closing montage, in which pigs symbolically replace humans throughout the worst events in history, left me feeling that the message could have been sharper. The real problem is not pigs, humans or any particular species being bad (and pigs as a species do not deserve to be demonised either), but speciesism, supremacy, and domination having become the accepted paradigm, and the “radicals” who challenge it not only not being supported but being marginalised and dismissed. No species is inherently corrupt, not even the human species, but systems can become corrupt if they are not maintained and corrected when they begin to malfunction and crumble. That’s the job of idealist radicals like Snowball, and they should never be exiled from any movements because they are the antidote against corruption.
If movie executives pushed for a happier ending than the pessimistic ending of the book, they could have opted for The Vegan World where all farms would be animal-free, and all Nonhuman Animals would be fully free.
All animals are equal…full stop.
