Why Andy Serkis Ditched Performance Capture for His Animated ‘Animal Farm’ Adaptation

Andy Serkis remembered the first time he read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

It was around the same time that he first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” (“I can’t remember which one I’d read first,” he admits). He was on the bus to school and enchanted by the tale of animals and their fall into fascism. The original novel, published in 1945, dramatized the events of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism, but even removed from the historical context, Serkis was knocked out. “I was really hit by the book in a major way,” the actor and filmmaker told TheWrap at Annecy, where his animated adaptation made its premiere. “And it stayed with me.”

Later on he saw a theatrical production at the National Theater in London, “bizarrely with with humans using crutches and masks.” “I just found it so entrancing and like, Wow, there’s a way of visually bringing the story to life, other than what I’ve conjured up in my head from the book,” Serkis said. Years later, when Serkis was making “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” his mind returned to “Animal Farm.” “I just thought that there hasn’t been a recent retelling of this for a new generation,” Serkis said.

Initially, he thought about doing it through performance capture, a medium that Serkis, perhaps better than any other actor, knew well. As they worked on the script (and wanting the movie to be as accessible as possible), he began to second-guess this approach. “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 said. Instead, he pivoted to a completely animated feature, with zero performance capture, just like the 1954 adaptation of the book, which was co-produced by the CIA (seriously, look it up).

“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,” Serkis explained. “You can still have characters that are as meaningful and emotionally engaging, but you’re freed of reality to certain extent. And therefore you can retain innocence.”

Serkis’ version of the story, which he directed and lends a voice to, just had its premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, introduces a new character, a young pig named Lucky (voiced by Gaten Matarazzo). Serkis said that he was influenced by “A Bronx Tale” in fashioning his new version of “Animal Farm.” “I kind of fell upon putting the young audience members into the eyes of this corruptible, innocent young piglet who has to then make life choices between two different strong ideologies, and go plumbing for the wrong one, and then having to make amends after the scales fall from his eyes and he realizes he’s made the wrong decision,” Serkis said.

The other big decision he had to make was for the look of the film. He finally decided on a “painterly” style that took cues from early Disney animated features. “That painterly style felt to me like it was a great way of bringing all those elements together,” he said.

And you can feel the push-and-pull throughout “Animal Farm,” particularly between its darker themes and the brighter, more commercial visuals. Serkis said that was also a struggle, to make sure that tonally and visually, there was a unifying conceit. Serkis said that when he would talk to various studios early on, they would tell him, “No, it’s too all too message-y, too political, too spinach-y.” The bottom line was that they thought it was going to be boring.

“What Orwell had written was not a boring book,” Serkis said. Sure, he said, the original novel was an “allegory at the time of totalitarian Russia,” but he knew he could make a version that reflected concerns of contemporary society. “We live in a difficult world, but every generation lives in a difficult world for different reasons, and we always make the same mistakes,” Serkis said. His goal was to “tell that in an innocent and comedic and funny and heartwarming way, but most importantly, where you do deeply care about the characters and what happens to them.”

Serkis set his “Animal Farm” in a quasi-futuristic world, where a monolithic, technologically advanced corporate structure is looking to prey on the farm. (One appearance of a Cybertruck-style vehicle elicited howls of laughter from the premiere audience.) He said that the book is “eternally relevant” and that, in setting in a nebulous futuristic realm, it would help the film to resonate in the same way, where you could see it in 20 years and get just as much out of it.

“There’s nothing in our film which is specifically drawing comparison with any political party, regime or person, because we started making this 14 years ago,” Serkis said. When he started working on the script with Nicholas Stoller around eight years ago, “the political systems that are in place now and the things that are happening in the world are different.” Instead, Serkis relied on the characters to ground the story and provide consistency. “That was the way in,” Serkis said.

The post Why Andy Serkis Ditched Performance Capture for His Animated ‘Animal Farm’ Adaptation appeared first on TheWrap.