ZooScope

Tag: Butterfly(s)

  • Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!. Dir. By. Peter Lord. Columbia Pictures. 2012.

    Aardman never shy away from the ludicrous. So when a crew of incompetent pirates endeavour for protagonist The Pirate Captain to win the Pirate of the Year Award by relying on the commercial value of his prized dodo companion Polly (who should have been extinct for 150 years and is believed to be a parrot)…

  • Crimson Peak. Dir. Guillermo Del Toro. Legendary. 2015.

    “It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all” Guillermo Del Toro’s gothic romance Crimson Peak is a carefully designed visual masterpiece that centres around American heiress Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), an aspiring author who becomes romantically involved with English baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) when he visits New York seeking investment…

  • American Honey. Dir. Andrea Arnold. British Film Institute. 2016.

    Prior to American Honey, Arnold’s filmography was distinctly British, primarily focused upon the harsh reality of poverty in Britain. However, American Honey deviates from this pattern, as it follows protagonist Star (Sasha Lane) on her journey with a travelling magazine sales crew across America. Star dices with danger, leaping headfirst into risky situations, whether it…

  • American Honey. Dir. Andrea Arnold. 2016.

    Andrea Arnold’s films are renowned for their nuanced focus upon human behaviour. However, as Michael Lawrence recognises in his analysis of her 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Arnold ‘privileges the natural environment and its non-human inhabitants as characters in their own right’.[1] This scene is no different, as even within the interior setting Arnold utilises…

  • Alice in Wonderland. Dir. Tim Burton. Walt Disney Pictures. 2010.

    The film draws on the viewer’s knowledge of the Disney original in the tea party scene, making it a ruin of what it once was, and presenting the Hatter as even more ‘mad’. He is seen for the first time in a close up shot, slowly looking up towards the camera, vacantly staring into the…

  • Cinderella. Dir. Sir Kenneth Branagh . Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 2015.

    During Ella’s journey from a happy, sweet child, to the mourning servant of her stepfamily, to cherished wife of the King, her fundamental characteristics are consistent. Her mother tells her to ‘have courage and be kind’. The message is not subtle: this exact phrase is repeated another 9 times in the film. For the sceptics…

  • The Fox and the Child. Dir. Luc Jacquet. Pathé. 2007.

    Luc Jacquet’s The Fox and the Child depicts an unnamed girl (Bertille Noël-Bruneau) exploring the French countryside and following its animal inhabitants. She develops an obsession with the titular fox and it becomes more trusting, but the girl disastrously oversteps the boundary and attempts to make the wild animal her pet. The film is interested in binaries…

  • The Fox and the Child. Dir. Luc Jacquet. Pathé. 2007.

    When asked in an interview how he approached making The Fox and the Child (2007) following the popularity of The March of the Penguins (2005), French director Luc Jacquet replied: I went into my childhood; into a memory I have of having looked into the eyes of a wild fox when I was a kid. I also noticed that…

  • A Bug’s Life. Dir. Dave Foley. Walt Disney Pictures. 1999.

    The notion of capitalism is undeniably present in A Bug’s Life [1] and is a vehicle that allows the ants and grasshoppers to be considered anthropomorphic beings. Hence the parallel to the class system that exists in human society: ants being the underclass and grasshoppers being the bourgeoisie, exploiting the ants for theirlabour. Thus, A…

  • Wasp. Dir. Andrea Arnold. None. 2003.

    Andrea Arnold’s realism focuses itself around the lower rungs of the British socioeconomic hierarchy, where the housing estates are run down, children roam the streets instead of the school ground, and poverty seeps into the lives of the protagonists we follow. This is exactly the case in her 2003 short film Wasp, which follows young…