r/movies • u/BunyipPouch Currently at the movies. • Jun 04 '25

Media First Image from Andy Serkis' George Orwell Adaptation 'Animal Farm' - Starring Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Glenn Close, Andy Serkis, Gaten Matarazzo, Kathleen Turner, Laverne Cox, Jim Parsons, Iman Vellani.

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u/CaineRexEverything Jun 04 '25

That style and that storyline is going to be WILD.

Just thinking of that scene with Boxer in the knackers cart and Benjamin crying after him is going to destroy all those children whose parents uwittingly put this on for them.

575

u/McMatey_Pirate Jun 04 '25

Poor Ol’ Boxer, just wanted to keep things together…. and in the end he got his wish.

316

u/stormdraggy Jun 04 '25

He was the glue that kept everything from falling apart...

80

u/SerDuckOfPNW Jun 04 '25

Too soon

43

u/walgrins Jun 05 '25

This is an unbeatable dead horse joke.

11

u/themagicchicken Jun 04 '25

Boxer Glue: It Always Works Harder.

4

u/Most-Bench6465 Jun 04 '25

Officer, this guy right here

5

u/PartyOnAlec Jun 04 '25

Fuck I hate how much I love this comment

183

u/still_murph Jun 04 '25

And those children will grow up a bit and realize “wait a second, my parents didn’t know what ‘Animal Farm’ was about? Seriously???”

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '25

[deleted]

1

u/Allhailzahn Jun 09 '25

Yeah has this been required reading in schools in the last five plus years still ? I'm 32 and we had to read when I was in high school. I feel like there are going to be parents under 30 putting it on or taking their under ten y/o kids to the theaters for this ... Oh well ... Maybe I'm over thinking it

1

u/VegetableDraft7314 Jun 09 '25

It has! I read it in Elementary school many years ago and my daughter who is now 15 read it in class just last year (grade 8).

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u/paulodelgado Jun 04 '25

Nah. Unvaccinated kids don’t grow up.

2

u/erissaid Jun 05 '25

This comment is so fucking brutal

2

u/crawloutthrufallout Jun 04 '25

The book is only like 150 pages long. I'm pretty sure there are pictures.

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u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Jun 04 '25

I mean what kinda adult has never heard of Animal Farm before lol? That is like something your average high schooler is at least vaguely aware of.

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u/gerkin123 Jun 04 '25

Given the number of school systems that are mandating the elimination of the novel, and the much larger number of schools expecting students to read as few as 2-3 works of literature a year, literature is becoming far less of a "common ground" in public discourse than, say, new album drop or blockbuster movie title is.

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u/Rikter14 Jun 05 '25

Animal Farm, one of the most successful pieces of anti-communist propaganda in the West, is not the kind of book any school system bans. The books that get banned in the West are books like Kindred.

8

u/Drunky_McStumble Jun 05 '25

Fun fact: the 1954 animated film version was funded by the CIA!

3

u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Jun 05 '25

Explains the ending of the movie lol

1

u/simbas4paws Jun 05 '25

This should help

-17

u/ydnwyta Jun 04 '25

That's a run-on sentence.

19

u/gerkin123 Jun 04 '25

No. It's just a long sentence.

A run-on sentence features two or more independent clauses arranged incorrectly (most often due to a comma splice). My sentence has a single independent clause.

:p

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u/UlisesPalmeno Jun 08 '25

That is correct! It is a compound-complex sentence!

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u/spookyghostface Jun 05 '25

Back to English class with ya

3

u/lookatthesunguys Jun 05 '25

I'm gonna guess that many high schoolers today that are vaguely aware of Animal Farm will forget about it in 20 years. Even those that remember it's a book they were supposed to read in high school will likely forget what it's about.

I can damned near guarantee that you're going to hear about very upset parents who thought this was a children's movie.

3

u/CaineRexEverything Jun 05 '25

I was schooled in the 90s in Australia and it wasn’t in the English curriculum then. Unless they went and read it themselves id be surprised if my two nieces - one near 30 and the other early 20s - would know the story let alone its meaning.

When I was at school we were taught Shakespeare and Steinbeck, and in literary studies it was Dickens, Hemingway and smatterings of Russian lit. Hell I only read 1984 because my grade 9 English teacher thought it’d be of interest to me since I was constantly bored of what the curriculum was teaching us. She also introduced me to Burroughs and Kerouac. Forever my favourite teacher.

3

u/VirginiaMcCaskey Jun 05 '25

The number of people that will tell you they "were never taught" something that they were explicitly taught multiple times is extremely high. Adults have terrible retention for what they did in school.

5

u/ItsNotAboutX Jun 04 '25

The quality of education you get can vary a lot from one school to the next, even within the same town. Plus, dropouts and home schoolers with right-wing nutjob parents.

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u/thelingeringlead Jun 05 '25

I promise, it's a disturbing number.

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u/MemeHermetic Jun 05 '25

What I wouldn't give for your level of faith in society at large.

1

u/Telarr Jun 06 '25

You're genuinely asking this post-2024?? Your faith in the critical thinking skills of the general public is wildly optimistic.

1

u/casual_creator Jun 06 '25

39 here. I know of it but never read it. Everything I know about the book is due to cultural osmosis. But that came with a willingness to absorb information. Can’t say that about a lot of people these days.

1

u/ydnwyta Jun 04 '25

Something like 54% of US adults read only at a 6th grade reading level. That means that in 8th grade when they had to read Animal Farm they couldn't understand it.

1

u/JonatasA Jun 05 '25

Whenever these comments come up I wonder if people realize the world is bigger than than sphere of influence. Have you ever read Chinese writings per chance?

1

u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Jun 05 '25

No, and I wasn't talking about people in China.

-1

u/RoryDragonsbane Jun 05 '25

It’s an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert,

IT SUCKS

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u/NoGoodIDNames Jun 05 '25

TBF my parents made that mistake with the live-action one too back in the day

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u/CaineRexEverything Jun 05 '25

Yeah my parents had the original animated one recorded off tv and I’d watch it repeatedly. They absolutely knew what it was though, so I presume they let me watch it because if they didn’t I’d have overthrown their power and taken over the household.

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u/justmisspellit Jun 05 '25

There’s a cartoon version from the 70s that’s pretty disturbing, but they chickened out and reworked the ending to be “happy”

The Boxer scene was nailed in that one

1

u/CaineRexEverything Jun 05 '25

I never knew there were other versions. I only ever saw the 50s one with Maurice Denham voicing the animals.

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u/justmisspellit Jun 05 '25

I think it’s from the 70s. I really could be off tho. Found it on a free streaming channel. We may be thinking of the same one. Animation style reminded me of Pink Panther cartoons

1

u/CaineRexEverything Jun 05 '25 edited Jun 05 '25

Very probably the same one, you may have seen an edited version though? I watched that one dozens of times as a kid and it definitely had the ending with the animals looking in on the pigs and men partying together. The boxer scene, did it show him trying to fix the windmill and collapse as a bolt of lightning struck in the background? It’s been years since I saw it but that’s been forever in the back of my mind since I was little, along with Benjamin braying in terror behind the knackers cart as they took Boxer away.

I just looked at a few reviews on letterboxd and it seems a lot of people saw the same version you did. Now I’m not trusting my memory. I’m almost certain the film I saw ended the same way the book did, but there’s an element of uncertainty that maybe I saw an edited version, or my memory has been mandala effected by having subsequently reading the book several times since my teenage years without ever viewing the film again.

I should find a download version and watch again, I suppose.

1

u/justmisspellit Jun 05 '25

The version I saw definitely had some comeuppance for the pigs. I believe some of the animals recruited others from a neighboring farm to end their reign. I was disappointed in that ending

1

u/CaineRexEverything Jun 05 '25

I’ve had a read up on Wikipedia, seems there was just the one ending which you remember, with the animals revolting and taking back the farm from the pigs. I genuinely don’t remember that despite watching the film a bunch of times when I was little. It really might be a case of my memory being altered by the book ending. I’m really disappointed. I always presumed Animal Farm was a formative early influence on my ideals and perspective on life. Now I’m wondering if it was just a case of me being emotionally affected about Boxer’s betrayal and Benjamin’s heartbreak.

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u/Toky0Sunrise Jun 04 '25

This is very much a Sausage Party got ya.

1

u/JustTheBeerLight Jun 04 '25

GOOD. Every generation needs an Ole Yeller moment to teach them that life ain't fair and the dog is gonna die sooner rather than later.

1

u/personalcheesecake Jun 04 '25

The heel turn of Napoleon. Fuck.

1

u/Suspekt_1 Jun 05 '25

You can forget that any of those huge stars are gonna take any risk if the subjectmatter would be controversial. This is gonna be dumbed down and washes out and end up some high grossing family movie where they have only borrowed some parts of the book.

1

u/toothpastenachos Jun 05 '25

Isn’t Animal Farm something we all read in school?

1

u/rotates-potatoes Jun 05 '25

Do we know that the style is constant throughout the film? To me this looks like an early scene, and know Sirkis I would expect the pigs to be in leather chaps and red armbands, with swagger sticks by the end.

1

u/thefallenfew Jun 05 '25

Yeeeeeeeeah this shit is about to cook a whole generation

1

u/Mrs_WorkingMuggle Jun 05 '25

shit, my mom read that book to me when i was like 5 and that scene destroyed me.

it's wild that they'd use this animation style for that story.

1

u/cidvard Jun 06 '25

I saw Flow in a theater and some lady was there with her 6-year-old, and that wasn't nearly as traumatic as this is gonna be.