Andy Serkis turns Animal Farm into anti-capitalist slop

When George Orwell published Animal Farm, his biting critique of the Russian Revolution and the totalitarian communist regime that followed, in 1945, the novel was denounced as anti-communist propaganda and immediately banned in the Soviet Union.

Director Andy Serkis, who appears to share at least some of the Soviets’ aversion to political mockery and rebuke of leftism, has decided to go one better. His new animated adaptation of Orwell’s tome is a distortion so brazen it would have made Andrei Zhdanov, Joseph Stalin’s propagandist-in-chief, weep with admiration — before confiscating Serkis’s $18 million net worth and shipping him off to a labor camp.

The film opens with solemn narration from Woody Harrelson, who also voices Boxer, the hardworking horse. For the animals, he explains, “just one thing stood in the way of freedom and our dream of animals running the farm and working together.” That obstacle, naturally, was man — greedy, avaricious,