There’s a moment, roughly an hour into Andy Serkis’s new animated take on “Animal Farm,” when Napoleon (voiced by Seth Rogen) waddles up to a freshly painted barn wall and adjusts the Seven Commandments with a conspiratorial wink. It’s the closest the film comes to suggesting that George Orwell wrote a story about how revolutions devour themselves. Then a chicken cracks a one-liner, a rooster does a spit take, and the moment dissolves into the same sugary mush that swallows the rest of the picture.

Subtitled “A Cautionary Tail,” because of course it is, this Aniventure and Cinesite production has been sold as a passion project from a director with serious literary ambitions. Serkis brought us a gnarled, photoreal “Mowgli” back in 2018, and you can imagine what he might have done with Orwell’s bleak little fable if he’d been allowed to. Instead, what reached theaters last weekend through Angel is a movie that seems terrified of its own source material.

The look is the first warning sign. Cinesite’s animation is technically polished but creatively anonymous, all rounded edges and saucer eyes, as though every character had been focus-grouped to within an inch of its life. Boxer is built like a plush toy. Squealer, voiced by a wasted Kieran Culkin, looks ready to host a children’s YouTube channel. Even Old Major’s deathbed speech, the ideological core of the entire book, is staged like a pep rally, complete with reaction shots from a goose who appears to have wandered in from a different movie.

Then there’s the script, by Nicholas Stoller, whose résumé runs through “The Muppets” and “Storks” and which, based on the evidence here, doesn’t run much further. Stoller has done the unthinkable: he’s made “Animal Farm” busy. There are subplots about a runaway piglet, a missing egg, and a barnyard talent show. There’s a montage set to what sounds suspiciously like a Spotify-core acoustic cover of “Old MacDonald.” The pigs no longer represent a specific historical betrayal so much as a vague, kid-friendly notion of “bad bosses.” Trotsky has been replaced by HR.

What’s especially galling is that the cast is genuinely terrific, and almost none of them get to do anything. Glenn Close shows up as a human industrialist who isn’t in the book, vamping like she’s auditioning to play Cruella again. Woody Harrelson narrates with a folksy gravitas the movie hasn’t earned. Steve Buscemi, as a greedy banker (also invented for the film), gets two scenes and a punchline about cheese. Laverne Cox lends Snowball real warmth in the brief window she’s onscreen before being chased off, and that’s the one beat the film gets close to right, mostly because Orwell did the heavy lifting decades ago. Rogen, for his part, plays Napoleon as a low-key stoner who occasionally remembers he’s supposed to be a tyrant. It isn’t bad, exactly. You can just hear the studio note in every line: keep him likable.

That’s the rotten heart of the thing. Serkis has said in interviews that Orwell’s allegory has never felt more relevant, and he isn’t wrong, which makes it all the stranger that he’s directed a version with nothing in particular to say. The 1954 animated version, famously bankrolled by the CIA, at least had a political agenda, however cynical. This one feels like it was bankrolled by a streaming algorithm. It gestures at “power” and “propaganda” the way a Super Bowl ad gestures at “community.” The pigs are bad because they lie. The humans are bad because they’re greedy. Don’t be like them. The end.

Even the famous gut punches are softened. Boxer, who in the novel is sold to the knacker while his friends are powerless to stop it, here gets a final, dignified close-up and a literal sunset. Orwell’s closing image, one of the most chilling sentences in twentieth-century literature, arrives onscreen as a single dissolve, scored to a rising orchestral swell, and held just long enough to register before the credits roll out over a peppy original song called “Hooves Up High.” I am not making that up.

There’s a real movie to be made out of “Animal Farm,” and someday someone will make it. Serkis isn’t a hack, and his cast isn’t lazy, and you can feel them all reaching, periodically, for something sharper than the film around them will allow. But “A Cautionary Tail” is the kind of subtitle that tells you everything you need to know. It’s a pun. It’s harmless. It’s been approved.

Orwell deserved better. So do we.