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Oh god, I don’t even know what to say about this one. Personally I blame the involvement of Hallmark in this atrocity. Having watched numerous other mini-series and TV movies that produced in the mid-to-late 90s, I can safely say that as they went along they just kept trying to make them more and more kid-friendly. Animal Farm, despite featuring talking animals, is not exactly a warm-fuzzy family-friendly piece of entertainment. The novel details the revolution of the barnyard creatures against their unseen master(s) and eventually destruction from power-hungry forces within. It’s a scenario that plays and replays throughout history, one need not read too far back in world news to find an example.
The mistake here is that they mistook it for a novel exclusively about Stalin and Lenin. So the falsely optimistic framing device, which sees the new owners and return journey of the animals that fled as a comment upon the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, stands in glaring contrast for the lie that it is. Yes, Animal Farm was an allegory for the situation in Russia at the time, but it could easily stand-in for just about any revolution that went south shortly after.
That’s just the beginning of the problems with the film. A lack of understanding of the source material is a glaring enough problem, but filling in the roles with stunt-casting of various big name stars and having them all sound fairly generic is even worse. Only Patrick Stewart and Kelsey Grammer’s specific deep tones and musical cadences standout as Napoleon and Snowball, everyone else sounds like random assorted voice actors reading from the script with relatively little emotion.
Another problem comes from the insistence on giving us a central character who bears a highly similar function and personality to that of Border Collie in Babe. A female border collie with a sweet English accent and who lives on a farm, coming only a few years after the original and one year after the sequel, this feels like they’re trying to piggyback on the success of others. It doesn’t work, mainly because her puppies are then taken and used as the guard dogs. Border Collie’s don’t exact instill fear, and it just goes back to my point of Hallmark trying to make everything they touch overtly kid-friendly.
Of course, much of this could have been forgiven if the animation of the animals had been any good, but it’s not. The animatronic pigs are obviously fake and don’t synch properly with their spoken words. They also move in an inelegant, jerky manner that one doesn’t expect from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The CGI mouths on the rest of the animals are embarrassingly bad, appearing too rubbery or looking glued on over the actual image of the real animal. The donkey alone wouldn’t make it past the test stage for an amateur product as it looks like a bizarre stuffed animal.
Yet Animal Farm offers us one neat piece of artistic license with the material. However you feel about it, the use of propaganda films, highly violent black-and-white newsreels depicting chicken’s being killed and Napoleon in human clothes is a nice touch that wasn’t found in the novel. It adds to the corruption of the pigs by not only using materials that humans do, but going about rewriting history and getting the dumber animals to buy it wholesale. It’s in these sequences that a better, darker, more authentic version of Animal Farm takes shape, one that doesn’t seek to please family audiences, but takes a good hard look at human nature reflected back at us in the face of the creatures we think are beneath us.
