Andy Serkis uses new allegory-ignoring technology to make George Orwell's Animal Farm more family-friendly

By Sean O'Neal | October 22, 2012 | 7:14pm

Aux Features Film

Master of simulacra Andy Serkis has announced his intentions to move beyond creating artificial replicas of things using his body to doing so with his production company, The Imaginarium, by mounting a performance-captured adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm that will remove all of its cumbersome politics. “We’re keeping it fable-istic and [aimed at] a family audience. We are not going to handle the politics in a heavy-handed fashion,” Serkis said of the film he hopes to direct, while wearing an advanced, breathable rubber suit that will allow him to move freely through weighty allegories, instead of being limited by creaky, old-fashioned authorial intent.

Whereas before anyone attempting to make an Animal Farm movie had to contend with Orwell’s examination of the Soviet Union under Stalin and its selling out of ideals in favor of wealth and privilege—an outmoded critique that doesn’t lend itself it to Happy Meal tie-ins—Serkis is now able to use technological advancements to ignore all that, and make a film that is “emotionally centered in a way that I don't think has been seen before,” as previous generations lacked the scientific means to make George Orwell’s Animal Farm more lovable. But now, by once again mimicking something’s motions to create a more slickly modern interpretation, Serkis can at last create an Animal Farm that is less about the inherent corruption of power, and more about the inherent cuteness of talking pigs and horses.