Tag: Adventure

Batman Begins. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros. 2005.

Why does Batman dress like a bat? In the words of Batman himself, “bats frighten me. It’s time my enemies shared my dread.” In Batman Begins, the boundaries between human and animal are psychologically breached through Bruce’s lifelong phobia of bats. This all-consuming dread leads to Bruce’s attempt to confront this fear through exposure therapy.…

8th January 2022
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. Dir. Jim Stenstrum. Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. 1998.

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island[1] is subversive both in terms of subverting what you’d expect from a typical Scooby outing (substituting criminals in masks with genuine monsters) and subverting ideas of what it truly means to be villainous. Immortal werecats Simone and Lena (fig. 1) sacrificed their souls to their cat god to exact revenge against…

6th January 2022
The Lion King. Dir. Jon Favreau. Walt Disney Pictures and Fairview Entertainment. 2019.

‘There’s a stampede, in the pride lands’, Zazu’s memorable line is word-for-word identical to the 1994 animation. But where the animation focused on a simple plot, Jon Favreau’s recreation with CGI animals creates depth by building more of the animals’ characterisation into the story, I will question how this creates problems with humanising certain animals…

6th January 2022
The Little Prince. Dir. Mark Osborne. Paramount Pictures. 2015

The 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 certain bringer of death. The image of a reptile being posed as ‘cold-hearted aggressor’ is familiar as it goes back to Adam and Eve –…

6th January 2022
The Good Dinosaur. Dir. Peter Sohn. Disney Pixar. 2015.

Ever wondered what life would be like if dinosaurs never became extinct? Well, you’ll never have to wonder again thanks to The Good Dinosaur. In this alternate world human-animal relationships are reversed as the dinosaurs are civilised and positioned above humans hierarchically. In doing so, this film evokes questions surrounding the ethics of human practices…

3rd January 2022
Turner and Hooch. Dir. Roger Spottiswoode. Touchstone Pictures. 1989.

Charles Darwin once stated ‘It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog’. [1] In the case of Turner and Hooch (1989), Hooch’s love for Turner and vice versa takes its time and only arises onside the development of a perfect police office-police dog understanding and partnership.…

29th January 2021
The Prince of Egypt. Dir. Brenda Chapman, Simon Wells, Steve Hickner. DreamWorks Pictures. 1998.

Following the life of Moses, The Prince of Egypt tells an adaption of the story of the Book of Exodus. In the opening scene of this animated musical, the audience are introduced to Ancient Egyptian culture as a significant importance is placed on their religion through the enormous statues of their gods. These gods, specifically…

26th January 2021
A Whisker Away. Dir. Junichi Sato & Tomotaka Shibayama. Studio Colorido, Netflix. 2020.

In their 2020 film A Whisker Away, Junichi Sato and Tomotaka Shibayama explore the story of 14-year-old Miyo Sasaki, who transforms into a cat with the help of a Noh mask. Provided by a mysterious mask seller in a cat body, the mask enables Miyo to be close to her school crush, Hinode, who rejects…

21st January 2021
Rango. Dir. Gore Verbinski. Paramount Pictures. 2011.

“Rango’s” animated Western storyline is narrated by an owl mariachi band with thick Spanish accents who tell the story of a nameless pet chameleon. The anthropomorphic chameleon sees himself as an exceptionally gifted actor in his terrarium with a wind-up goldfish and a damaged Barbie doll as his characters in his plays. After an accident,…

21st January 2021
The Call Of The Wild. Dir. Chris Sanders. 20th Century Studios. 2020.

The Call of the Wild is a 2020 American adventure film directed by Chris Sanders and adapted from Jack London’s 1903 novel of the same name and tells the story of a domestic dog finding his inner wild wolf. Set during the late 19th century in Canada’s Yukon centralizing the Klondike Gold Rush, the film…

20th January 2021