Category: Imaginary Animals: No
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Every Which Way but Loose. Dir. James Fargo. Warner Bros. 1978.
James Fargo’s 1978 film Every Which Way but Loose follows Clint Eastwood’s character Philo Beddo and his orangutan companion Clyde in their search for love. The audience’s expectations of human-animal relationships depicting docile animals who are human playthings are immediately subverted by Philo’s interactions with Clyde, the orangutan. Clyde throughout the film is given a freedom not…
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Red River. Dir. Howard Hawks. Monterey Productions. 1948.
American expansionism and the frontier myth – the romanticisation of prosperity found in claiming the ‘wilderness’ and the forceful expansion of the American border – pillars of the Western genre [1]. From Jan Troell’s The New Land (1982), John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950) to Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925); Western cinema has constantly glorified the rich…
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Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Dir. Raja Gosnell. Walt Disney Pictures. 2008.
In Beverly Hills Chihuahua, the superiority and entitlement of animals are used as tropes to represent Chloe the chihuahua and her furry friends’ authority over Rachel, Chloe’s dogsitter. This is captured within the pool party scene through the decision to construct dominant representations of the dogs and represent Rachel, the human, as an inferior servant…
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Shrek 2. Dir. Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, Conrad Vernon. DreamWorks Pictures. 2004.
DreamWorks Pictures reintroduces us to some familiar faces from fairy tales – with a comedic twist! The world of Far Far Away parodies and subverts traditional ideas of what a ‘happily ever after’ means. In this universe, the monsters of the story are now the good guys, and our frightening but lovable ogre protagonist must fight…
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dir. Michel Gondry. Focus Features. 2004.
Figure 1 Memories are the foundations for the complexity of individuals. We are created by the experiences we face, and to delve into the past is to delve into the system of our personal construction. According to Bowman (2004, p. 85), themes of memory in film generate emotion because, instinctively, to lose our memory equates…
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. Dir. By David Yates. Warner Bros Pictures. 2010.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I (2011) is the penultimate film in the franchise. Harry, Ron and Hermione begin a desperate race to understand the instructions Dumbledore leaves after his death, concluding they must find and destroy the horcruxes that keep Voldemort alive before he discovers their quest. The horcruxes are objects containing…
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Togo. Dir. Ericson Core. Walt Disney Studios. 2019
What does he bring to the breed? The heart of a survivor. [1] The relationship between men and dogs is often explored within film. The contrast between rambunctious, troublesome animals and dominant, controlling men is a source of comedy, drama and widely popular with audiences. Seen in the likes of Beethoven[2] and Marley and Me[3],…
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Taxidermia (György Pálfi, 2006, Amor Far Filmproduktion).
Hungarian cinema leaves us feeling stuffed! Figure A – Lajoska Balatony surrounded by stuffed animals. Taxidermia (György Pálfi, 2006, Amor Far Filmproduktion). Pálfi’s 2006 body horror Taxidermia, follows the story of three generations of men in three acts; each concerning a different afflicted and animalistic perversion. It begins with Morosgoványi Vendel, a sexually perverse man…