One of the best known and most enduring Prometheus Hall of Fame winners for Best Classic Fiction has finally been adapted into an animated film.
Actor-director Andy Serkis has worked for years to bring to the screen a new animated film version of George Orwell’s fable Animal Farm, a Prometheus Hall of Fame inductee for Best Classic Film. Serkis’ film, which has been screened overseas at a film festival, is not yet available to watch in the United States.
Orwell’s cautionary and satirical fable focuses on a group of anthropomorphic farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to achieve a fully egalitarian society where all the animals are equal. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed, with a pig named Napoleon becoming dictator of the farm, which ends up in a far worse state than before.
Next to Orwell’s cautionary dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the earliest works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, Animal Farm is the British author’s most popular novel – with an enduring and libertarian theme about the inhuman consequences of coercive egalitarianism carried to its logical extreme.
Seth Rogen voices the role of Napoleon in the film, with Steve Buscemi as Squealer.
Other cast members voicing key roles include Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Kathleen Turner, and Serkis himself.
Serkis, who previously directed Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle and the 2021 Venom sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage, is best known for his motion-capture roles as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the title ape in the 2005 King Kong remake and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy.
Serkis’ Animal Farm, with a screenplay by Nicholas Stoller (The Muppets), previewed last summer at France’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
Serkis’ effort will be the second animated film version of Orwell’s classic, following a 1954 version based on the British writer’s 1945 novella.
By my count, Serkis’ Animal Farm will be the tenth Prometheus-winning work to be adapted to the large or small screen – not counting several other films or TV series that have been recognized themselves with Prometheus Awards.
Can you identify all the Prometheus-winning novels and stories that have reached the large or small screen? (To help you answer that question, check out the list of more than 100 works of fiction that have been recognized on the Prometheus Awards page of the LFS website.)
Stay tuned for the full list, in an upcoming blog post.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
