The Animals Film is one of the seminal documents of the animal rights movement. Along with Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, it helped bring the plight of animals under industrial agriculture and research to light. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has both the strengths and the weaknesses of the animal rights movement.
The film's strongest point is its use of undercover footage at labs, slaughter houses, and other venues to uncover animal abuse. The footage and commentary obtained is graphic and genuinely disturbing. Although much of what is shown is easily available on the Internet today, for the time it was made it was a genuinely disturbing revelation.
However, the film also suffers from being overly radical, with some of its commentary pieces even inducing laughter. The film posits an extremist utilitarian argument that places animals on basically the same footing as humans in terms of happiness. One can oppose the mistreatment of animals and still eat meat. In probably the most laugh inducing scene, we see a pair of animal rights activists handing out pamphlets in New York. When one woman refers to her pets, the female animal rights activist tells her to "liberate her language." We can only presume they edited out the parts where passersby laughed at them.
The most disturbing bit, however, is the positive depiction of the Animal Liberation Front. The film follows a group of ALF "activists" as they prepare to do a raid on a lab. Given that the ALF has evolved into an at least borderline terrorist organization, it is hard to take the film's praise of them at all seriously, and it seriously undermines the film's overall message.
