INTERVIEW: Andy Serkis Talks ‘Animal Farm’ At Annecy: "We Wanted Some Hope"

Andy Serkis' adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm had its world premiere at the Annecy Animation Film Festival on June 9th. The film boasts a stellar cast including Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi, Glenn Close, Iman Vellani, and Kieran Culkin. The animated film offers a refreshing take on Orwell's well-known dystopian novel about dictatorship, and the timing couldn't be better — especially as Serkis introduces changes that make the adaptation more hopeful while still keeping it cautionary.

In a roundtable interview, we spoke with Andy Serkis about Animal Farm, directing an animated movie, the incredible voice cast, and the universal themes of the movie.

How did you feel about yesterday?

Andy: It was wonderful. It was just so great to see the film with an audience. It's the first time I've seen it with a big audience, so it was wonderful. It was such a nice response from people.

Demet: So, the film's layered storytelling makes it suitable for both children and adults, though it tackles some heavy themes. How did you navigate making such a politically charged story accessible and engaging for a family audience?

Andy: It was very important to us that we were not being overtly political, or messy, or anything like that. We wanted to make first and foremost a film. The book obviously is so relevant and when Orwell was writing it, he wanted to make it accessible, make a political story accessible, which is why he put it inside the innocence of these animals. But of course, the book doesn't really have a central protagonist so one of the things I felt very passionate about was that we have a character that we can follow. We put him in the hot seat to have to make the moral decisions and put him on a track where he thinks he's doing the right thing but then gets corrupted, therefore we get corrupted alongside Lucky, our invented character. I mean there are pigs mentioned later on in the book, the next generation of young piglets so that was where I took the cue from. And then based it very much on a kind of Bronx Tale-type story where a young character is guided by adults in two different directions and he finds himself caught between two different ideologies and making the wrong choice and then realizing that at a certain point in the journey. So, I think by putting the young people who are going to be watching this in the hot seat, it charges it for them in a way.

Demet: Yes, I very much enjoyed that decision.

It has such a stellar voice cast, that goes without saying. How did you allow each of these actors to play to their strengths and bring their own forms of humor to their roles?

Andy: I have to say every single actor that we went to who we wanted to be part of agreed to do it because they all loved the book and were passionate about the book, so that was a great start. I mean this goes back, obviously we've been trying to make this film for many years, but we first met Seth back in in 2012 to talk about it and Jim Parsons as well. They've been loyal to this movie for a long time because they love the book. We decided originally it was gonna be a more of a live action, performance captured movie, but then we decided that in order for it to retain its innocence, maybe keeping it in the real world and making it look photo real was gonna be more difficult to have that duality of it being a fairy tale, which is what Orwell wrote.

Aside from those people who were long time kind of supporters and wanted to be part of it, I've worked with Woody Harrelson now for 5 times. He's a very good friend of mine, and he was always gonna be perfect for Boxer and there's a charm that he really brings to it and a humor as well, which is delicious. And Kathleen Turner as Benjamin, I mean... We also wanted to just cast it up in a different way, 'cause there aren't that many female characters in the book. [Kathleen] just adored it. And working with everybody individually in their own: Seth was brilliant at improvising, Kathleen was great at taking the text and twisting and turning it around in her own indomitable kind of style, and Glenn Close, she manages to make that character so sinister, but at the same time you're sort of drawn to her. Everyone that we work with just brought their A game and had fun with it, and that was the thing. It was that we want to dance on this sort of knife edge of it being comedic, but at the same time heartfelt. And mostly, we really just wanted it to be believable and truthful.

Such a dream cast! Even if somehow someone wasn't familiar with Animal Farm, you'd want to see it just for that.

Andy: Right, that's the other thing... It's important to have great storytellers that all come together to tell such an amazing piece of literature like that.

It's your first animated movie. Yeah, so what did you bring from live action to that and what will this movie bring to other live action movies?

Andy: We intended to make this as more of a live action performance capture movie, but I'm so glad that we went this route because it just opened up the possibility of finding the tone that was necessary to convey the story with innocence we always talked about. We don't want to be messy with this, we don't want to be overtly political and so the look and feel of it was crucial to get right. And early on the design, I wanted it to feel physically real, the animals to feel physically real whilst having a look at the physics of the way they moved. Boxer as a shire horse, I wanted him to look like he was a real shire horse, not a cartoon horse and all of the animals — the weight of the pigs. [We were] always talking to the animators about making the physics of the characters real so that when the pigs eventually stand up, it feels like they're not just like an animated cartoon character that can suddenly pop up and start walking around — they're struggling with gravity.

Then, crucially, talking to the animators about bringing the performance down so that there's a lot of close-ups in this film 'cause you want to see inside the characters' minds and feel what they're feeling. So, a lot of the discussions I had with the animators was about not overtly expressing too much, not feeling you have to sort of be big with the facial expressions, but you could allow the audience to come to you like you do in a live action close up. That, I think, was one of the big joys of directing animators like directing actors —because animators are actors — making sure that they could trust themselves to really, really bring it down and they did.

And do you think you learned some stuff for your next movies?

Andy: Absolutely! Every blade of grass, every piece of everything in those shots in an animated movie, you have to make a decision about. There's nothing, there's no set. You're doing it in a completely different way; therefore, it teaches you to envision things in a very holistic way in animation. Everything is working together to tell the story in every frame and it's like you find the essential things you want the audience to focus on, so you don't want to be distracted by certain things, and I think it focuses you to really look at what's important in the frame and that's certainly a lesson I'll take, isn't it?

Demet: Your adaptation ends on a more hopeful note with animals coming together to overthrow Napoleon. What made you choose to include this moment of solidarity and resistance?

Andy: At the end, we felt that we live in such a bleak world at the moment, in very dark times. We didn't want to have a sort of a fake happy ending, but we wanted some hope. We wanted some hope there, although history repeats itself and we always make the same mistakes. We keep going round and round, and never finding a way of creating, a way of living, which is inclusive. We always go wrong somehow. So, we want to at least offer up a moment, a brief moment, where Lucky actually confronts the darkness that is Napoleon. Having gone through and made the wrong moral choices, he somehow makes amends to the rest of the animals so that there is an element of hope. I don't think it's an overly optimistic ending. It still says it's gonna be difficult next time round and that's where we leave it. Although we're starting again and the animals have to sit down and kind of go, "OK, now what?" Then it's as Boxer says, they weren't gonna find it easy, but at least they'd try and that's all we can do every time we go wrong, all we can do is try and make amends and make things better.

© Aniventure & The Imaginarium

Demet: Yeah, it's a very fitting ending because they have to try and history might repeat itself again for them, but yeah, you have to try every time. So that was a good ending.

Like you mentioned, this has been in the works for over 10 years now, and you said that it went from more of a live action adaptation to animated. How else did your vision for the film evolve over the years to now in its complete form?

Andy: The design of the characters when I first started was crucial, and I remember when we first started off, there were a lot more beaten characters in a live action way. [It] looked much more beaten up and you could see that they'd been sort of not brutalized but neglected by Farmer Jones at the beginning of the movie. So they all were not pretty to look at, and I think we purposefully changed the design of the characters to look a little sweeter, a little bit more accessible for younger people because we knew that the journey that we were gonna take would take them into a slightly darker place, but we didn't want to start off there and that was a major design decision.

Talking about design. I was really struck by the car of Glenn Close's character which looks very familiar. So was it on purpose or was it like 10 years ago and it had just happened to be from that time?

Andy: That car was designed about 5 years ago. I mean it was supposed to be a modern car and her whole facility is supposed to be like a futuristic facility, but it wasn't referencing any particular [thing]. But that's the amazing thing about allegory and how it is relevant... It's scary, very scary, and as I say this, this film is not particularly aimed at any particular regime or time or place. It's eternally relevant, but it happens to chime in with a lot of the things that are going on in the world at the moment.

Would you do animated movie again?

Andy: Oh yeah, definitely! I think it's an incredible way of speaking to a broad audience. Family films tend to be patronizing to children or they're very hard to get right. This isn't a family film as such, but it's a film for all ages, and that's the way that we've seen it. I know that the response that we've had from children has been great, actually. We tested it and the kids really do love this film because they are being asked to challenge themselves as to what they think about things.

Demet: OK, one last question. Are there any particular scenes or character moments in the film that you feel especially powerful or personally meaningful?

Andy: It's interesting. One of the scenes I really love is the animals hadn't had any food and then Napoleon realizes that he's made a huge mistake, but he's just covering and he's blaming Snowball, who'd left the farm a long time ago. He's got a punch bag and he's punching it, and then Lucky's saying, "What have we got to do? The animals are starving; we have to rectify the situation." And Kieran Culkin's relationship as Squealer to Napoleon, just the mood of that scene before they go to see Pilkington and start to strike a deal with humans — a meaningful deal with humans... That scene, it really becomes the turning point in the movie where it suddenly goes to becoming quite dark, but it's really funny as well. And getting the tone of that scene right was really important.

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This interview has been edited for clarity.