Finding new partners and going “full-on animation”: how Andy Serkis kept his ‘Animal Farm’ film alive for 14 years

Andy Serkis says partnering with UK production companies Aniventure and Cinesite, and removing the performance capture format, broke the logjam on his long-gestating Animal Farm film.

“We’d been spending years developing it as a performance capture and live-action movie,” Serkis tells Screen from Annecy International Animation Film Festival, where the film debuted last night (June 9). “There was a cost to that. It would have made the story look grimmer. The characters we’d designed were less fairytale – which is what [George] Orwell called his book, a fairytale.”

• ‘Animal Farm’ review

Serkis began trying to make the film in 2011 while shooting motion-capture feature Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, and, with producing partner Jonathan Cavendish at Imaginarium Productions, acquired rights to Animal Farm from the Orwell estate in 2012.

The project was taken to several studios, before it was set up at Netflix in 2018. However, the streamer dropped the project a few years later.

After meeting Cinesite and Aniventure, Imaginarium moved forward with the film as “full-on animation” in 2022, “to allow the messaging and darker themes that creep into the story to percolate under the surface of what looks like a classic animated movie”, Serkis says.

Introducing the film in Annecy on Monday, Serkis gave a short speech in French, to the delight of the local audience, before switching to English. “Our version was not made to satisfy any algorithm, but to begin a debate whilst entertaining humans of all ages,” the director said on stage.

Speaking to Screen, he clarified that the comment was not a specific dig at Netflix but rather “aimed at the world we live in”.

“Particularly in the film industry, fear-driven decision-making about whether something is going to make its money back is paramount,” Serkis says. “Aniventure was certain they wanted to tell this story. They let me make the film I wanted to make in many respects with hardly any intervention. That wouldn’t have happened in any other setting.”

Real weight

Although the film in the end was created through techniques involving 3D computer animation, special effects, animated objects and original animation, Serkis tried to maintain the motion capture and live-action techniques with which he is associated from franchises like The Lord Of The Rings and Planet Of The Apes.

“I don’t want it to feel like a cartoon,” the director says. “The pigs feel that they’ve got real weight. They wobble. When their trotters go into the mud, they sink into the mud.”

Serkis’s film is adapted from Orwell’s 1945 novella, a political allegory for Soviet Russia in the 1920s and ’30s about a group of animals who rebel against their owner and take control of their farm, only to be torn apart by the desire for power.

The director first spoke to Seth Rogen about the role of Napoleon, the pig who takes despotic control of the group, in 2013. The longstanding attachment of talent including Rogen, Glenn Close and Jim Parsons kept the project alive throughout its search for the right partners. “They’re the OGs [original gangsters]. They go right back,” Serkis said. “They were right there at the beginning.”

Woody Harrelson also joined early on to voice the dependable horse, Boxer, and has an executive producer credit. More recent additions include Steve Buscemi, Kathleen Turner, Laverne Cox, Kieran Culkin and Iman Vellani. Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo leads the voice cast as a character invented for the film – Lucky, a young pig manipulated by Napoleon.

“I knew voice-booth acting is what you do for animation but I always read the scenes with the actors so they had something to bounce off,” Serkis says of his working technique. “We honed the script, but people were still free to improvise. Everyone brought so much to that.”

The dictatorial Napoleon has characteristics and uses language that could be compared to US president Donald Trump, while a conniving human character drives a vehicle that has similarities to a truck built by Elon Musk-owned Tesla.

Serkis says such similarities are “not intended” specifically. “It would be crazy to be partisan,” says the filmmaker. “There are so many despots all over the world, so many corrupt regimes, so many oppressed people all around the world that this speaks to. This was always to speak to a global audience, for people to take and associate freely.”

He also notes that much of the film was designed “three or four years ago”, before Trump’s second term as president and Musk’s greater prominence.

Goodfellas Animation launched international sales on Animal Farm at Cannes and Serkis says “there’s lots of positivity” with regard to deal-making.

The filmmaker next has The Lord Of The Rings: The Hunt For Gollum in the works, for which he will reprise the role in Peter Jackson’s films for New Line that made his name. The project is in development and Warner Bros has scheduled a release date of December 17, 2027.

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