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Andy Serkis Says ‘Animal Farm’ Had to be Animated: ‘You’re Freed of Reality’

Andy Serkis says 'Animal Farm' had to be animated, even though the project was originally announced as a mocap production.

“By definition, doing it as a live-action movie would have made it bleaker from the outset, darker, and the character designs that we were working on in the way that we were doing it was too heavy handed,” Serkis told The Wrap. “What the animated world gives you, which I’ve realized, is an innocence and a way of storytelling which allows the audience to connect and fill in the dots in a much more profound way. The most recent filmed version of “Animal Farm,” the George Orwell novella in which farm animals rise up against the human farmer who owns them, was a live action 1999 television film that matched the voices of Kelsey Grammar, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patrick Stewart, and Paul Scofield, among others, to real-life pigs, chickens, dogs, and horses.

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