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Jumanji. Dir. Joe Johnson . TriStar Pictures . 1996.
Ever felt like your life was just one long game, and everything to happen was caused by the roll of a dice? No? Well try living 26 years inside Jumanji, a game where all of your psychological fears and anxieties manifest in the shape of wild animals, whether they are excessively oversized mosquitos and spiders,…
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Arrival. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. Paramount Pictures. 2016.
When I think of science fiction films, I immediately think of two things: aliens and explosions. Arrival plays with these expectations of the genre, asking the viewer to look at aliens in a way they’re not used to. Taking Villeneuve’s vision of the alien to be a non-human creature, it is appropriate to categorise the aliens in Arrival as…
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Barnyard. Dir. Steve Oedekerk. Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon Movies. 2006.
Steve Oedekerk’s Barnyard uses witty puns and gags in order to satirise the idea of the animal as a fixed definition, in that an animal can never truly be anything more than a representation of the attributes that humanity typically associates with its species.
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Wuthering Heights. Dir. Andrea Arnold. Curzon Artificial Eye. 2011.
Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 romance/tragedy novel Wuthering Heights highlights the desolate and savage nature of the moors in which the love story takes place, and the violent nature of those who live within them (notably Heathcliff). This wildness is conveyed to the audience through the use of animals, particularly violence against…
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Grizzly Man. Dir. Werner Herzog. Lions Gate Films. 2005.
A fascinating aspect about Werner Herzog’s exploration of the life of Timothy Treadwell and his relationships with the wild grizzly bears of Alaska is his investigation of the way Treadwell interpreted the animal world, and the extent to which this reveals aspects to his character. A scene which exemplifies this interpretation is when we’re shown…
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Coco. Dir. Lee Unkrich. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 2017.
Helping Miguel Rivera navigate the Land of the Dead as he seeks to find his great-great-grandfather is Dante, the stray Xoloitzcuintli dog. However, when it is revealed that Dante is instead a “mythical” and “powerful” alebrije or spirit guide, this subsequently exposes a tension between his two identities. This scene in particular sees Miguel use…
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Wiener-Dog. Dir. Todd Solondz. Amazon Films/IFC Films. 2016.
In the opening scenes of Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog, we see the unnamed titular character in a very recognisable form of cage as she waits her collection from an animal shelter. After having been killed by a passing lorry in the film’s climax, Wiener-Dog’s taxidermied body is placed in a glass box and becomes part of…
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A Fish Called Wanda. Dir. Charles Crichton. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (US) and United International Pictures (UK). 1988.
The murder of three small dogs one after the other is not what most people would think of as funny. Yet this exact progression becomes a running gag in Charles Crichton’s heist comedy film A Fish Called Wanda, where stuttering animal lover Ken’s failed attempts to kill an old woman (who is witness to the…
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