Category: Animal: Rat

  • Antisemitism. The Rat Catcher. Dir. Wes Anderson. Netflix. 2023.

    Antisemitism. The Rat Catcher. Dir. Wes Anderson. Netflix. 2023.

    Is, I suppose, how the conversation went between Wes Anderson and his casting agent when searching for an actor to play the titular character. Following Anderson’s success with Fantastic Mr. Fox there is no surprise that Anderson jumped at the opportunity to return to the works of Roald Dahl. The Rat Catcher is a short…

  • The Rat Catcher. Dir. Wes Anderson. Netflix. 2023.

    The Rat Catcher. Dir. Wes Anderson. Netflix. 2023.

    September 2023 saw Wes Anderson’s return to the works of Roald Dahl with the cinematising of The Rat Catcher. In true Andersonian fashion the film foregrounds aesthetic and framing in order to focus our attention on the visual/character design of The Ratcatcher. Anderson uses animalisation to represent the rat via a human and aided by…

  • The Muppet Christmas Carol. Dir. Brian Henson. Walt Disney Pictures. 1992.

    The Muppet Christmas Carol. Dir. Brian Henson. Walt Disney Pictures. 1992.

    A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is not only a heart-warming Christmas story from the Victorian period, it also speaks volumes about social class inequalities. In The Muppet Christmas Carol, Director Brian Henson uses the species of rats to emblematise the impoverished, low social class. This contributes to Dickens’s interpretation from the original novel, this…

  • Mason’s Rats. Dir. Carlos Stevens. Netflix. 2022.

    Mason’s Rats. Dir. Carlos Stevens. Netflix. 2022.

    “Like World War fucking IV.” The Love, Death and Robots’ episode, Mason’s Rats, centres around conflict regarding control and the co-existence of humans and animals, specifically rats, in a world dominated by technologically advanced humans. Significantly, the identities of the two clashing forces – the rats and Mason – are used to portray the errors of internecine fighting, with…