“One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” In The Little Prince the depiction of foxes defies conventional animality as they generally symbolise…
read moreThe Little Prince uses the animated medium of a children’s film to reconfigure the representation of the snake. A ‘common trope’ also applied here, is to present snakes as a…
read moreWhen Julia Ducournau’s debut feature film Raw (2017) was shown at Toronto’s Film Festival, paramedics were called to the scene after cinema-goers fainted during the screening. Raw tells the story of highly gifted 16-year-old…
read morehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ1rmOYLr2U [1] Ernest and Celestine[2] (2012) is a French animated film that presents the unorthodox relationship between a bear and a mouse. Introduced as a struggling musician, Ernest is starving and on…
read moreThe animated film Ernest and Celestine[1] (2012) uses animals to offer a socio-political examination of French society. A predator-prey construct is conveyed through the division of social classes in the species contrast between…
read moreThe release of Mon Oncle (Gaumont, France) in 1958 saw the return of Monsieur Hulot to cinema screens, following the successful Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot five years previously. The…
read moreAu Hasard Balthazar (dir. Robert Bresson, 1966) juxtaposes the human treatment of animals with animal camaraderie between different species, emphasising a human/animal divide and how we think of animals as one…
read moreWeekend (1967), dir. Jean-Luc Godard (watch the full film with English subtitles here) Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend follows the distinctly middle-class experience of Roland and Corinne as they take a trip to Corinne’s…
read more