ZooScope

Tag: HAR: Animal Agency

  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. EMI Films. 1975.

    This iconic scene fully exemplifies the film’s absurdist representation of the violence of the crusades, particularly the disproportionate violence of the Western invaders. It explores this using the similarly lopsided power-dynamic of the animal-human relationship, the surreal treatment of which exposes the arbitrary hegemony, and divine mission of the white Christian crusaders as a lie.…

  • 28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2002.

    You wouldn’t expect one of British cinema’s most poignant and idyllic moments to lie in the centre of a post-apocalyptic horror film, yet it does. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later cuts in the melancholy scene at its centre, with four wild horses providing respite for the film’s central four characters by subverting the film’s primary genre…

  • Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures . 1996.

    Do you want a second chance, Cole?” In other words – Do you want your body experimented upon to benefit our research again, Cole? The film cuts to a scene where Cole is injected and pinned to the time machine… or rather, torture machine. Cole never gets to answer the question – he has no…

  • The Wolf of Wall Street. Dir. Martin Scorsese . Paramount Pictures. 2013.

    The Wolf of Wall Street is a biographical dark comedy that follows the life of criminal stock broker, Jordan Belfort. The presence of animals in the film draws attention to human-animal relationships and their differences. More specifically, this scene uses a goldfish to highlight these differences, as well as the film’s message about the greed and…

  • Frozen. Dir. Adam Green. Anchor Bay Films. 2010.

    Adam Green’s dramatic thriller Frozen features the return of the wolf to terrorise three friends who become stranded on a ski lift in a New England ski resort. The wolf’s homecoming becomes symbolic, in light of Robin Wood’s definition of the horror film monster, of the ‘deadly return of all that a culture both represses and oppresses’[i].…

  • Gone Girl. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox. 2014.

    Stereotypically, cats are represented as sly, sexy, intelligent, manipulative and mysterious creatures, and all of these characteristics are embodied in Gone Girl’s (dir. David Fincher, 2014) complex anti-heroine Amy Dunne. In order to understand Amy’s immensely complicated character, who only exists in flashbacks during the film’s opening scene, the film projects Amy’s character onto her husband Nick’s…

  • The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming, King Vidor, George Cukor, Richard Thorpe, Norman Taurog. MGM. 1939.

    The Wizard of Oz showcases, through its many varying forms of animal representation, the ways in which filmmakers deal with the challenge of creating animal characters, and how these different methods are used to craft personality traits such as the moral essence of the character. We can see this with regards to the flying monkeys, particularly…

  • Mad Max: Fury Road. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros. 2015.

    Miller’s use of post-apocalyptic colour is deliberate and ground-breaking. Mad Max: Fury Road is saturated with reds and oranges. Immediately following a fight scene that results in a lead-character casualty, the colouring changes to a palette of deep blues and blacks. This immediately creates an association around the characters within of death; alongside the Crow…

  • Jurassic Park III. Dir. Joe Johnston. Universal Pictures. 2001.

    “This is how you make dinosaurs?”       “No. This is how you play God.” [1] Jurassic Park III revolves around the dinosaurs of the island ‘Isla Sorna’; genetically modified and inevitably abandoned in a previous movie of the franchise. It follows a wealthy family who have lost their son on the island, and try to pay their…

  • White Dog. Dir. Samuel Fuller. Paramount Pictures. 1982.

    Sam Fuller’s final Hollywood film, White Dog (1982), is based on Romain Gary’s 1970 ‘nonfiction’ novel of the same name and tells the story of aspiring actress Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol), who after accidentally hitting and injuring him with her car, adopts a seemingly lovable white German shepherd. The plot is complicated when, after two…