Andy Serkis’ adaptation of ‘Animal Farm’ has been given the green light by Netflix.
The 54-year-old actor has owned the rights to option the George Orwell novel since 2012, when he was trying to turn it into a TV show, and Netflix has now purchased the movie rights to the adaptation, according to Variety.
Speaking last year, Andy – who is also due to play Baloo in his self-directed film ‘Mowgli’ – shared: "We actually started working on it before I started directing ‘Mowgli’.
"It’s a difficult enough process to take an actor’s face and put it on an ape, but actually, how do you create a non-humanoid character and anthropomorphise that to a believable degree? Really read the emotion and intention of the actor, like Christian Bale playing a panther, or Benedict Cumberbatch playing a tiger. Really being able to see their faces.
"So the same will be with ‘Animal Farm’; we’re going to use performance capture, we’ve got a great cast lined up, and we’re just evolving the script. And boy, there couldn’t be a better time to make ‘Animal Farm!’"
Meanwhile, Andy revealed in May that was happy to take his time with ‘Mowgli’, rather than race to compete with Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’, which was released in 2016.
He explained: "It was a moment where it was like, you know, who’s coming out first? And then it just seemed crazy, because we wanted to take our time to evolve the facial capture, and to really not rush it, because it was a complex thing to do.
"My first real entry into this was to design these animals so that they felt like emotionally believable characters. And so it wasn’t just a matter of creating photo real tigers and panthers and bears.
"It was about designing them around the actors’ faces, and then allowing, in post-production, the visual effects company to really make it real, to really honour those actors’ performances and take the time to do that."
Andy Serkis’ Animal Farm gets the green light from Netflix
