ZooScope

Tag: Dogs

  • Brigsby Bear. Dir. Dave McCary. Sony Pictures Classics. 2017.

    Brigsby Bear is about a young man named James Pope. James is a fanatic of a show called Brigsby Bear Adventures. James’ world changes one day when the police find him and take him away from his family. He discovers that what he thought were his parents were his kidnappers, and the police reunite him with his…

  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Dir. David Yates. Warner Bros. Pictures. 2007.

    In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Harry contends with his isolation as a result of the ministry of magic, and a large portion of his fellow students, believing him to be lying about his experiences at the end of his last school year. These experiences include the return of the dark wizard, Voldemort,…

  • I am David. Dir. Paul Feig. Lion’s Gate Films. 2003.

    I am David (2003) is a film adaptation of a children’s book of the same name by Anne Holm. The protagonist David must journey north alone after escaping a Bulgarian prison camp, in order to reach Denmark which he has been told is safe. As he is walking through a vineyard in Italy, he is startled…

  • Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Dir. Adam McKay. DreamWorks Studios. 2004.

    Anchorman, starring Will Ferrell as the eponymous Ron Burgundy, is a tongue-in-cheek comedy that parodies 1970s American culture through its extremely self-conscious, gross-out style. The absurdity of Ron’s character is epitomized by the heavily exaggerated ‘man’s best friend’ relationship he has with his dog Baxter, whose most significant moment in the film comes when he…

  • 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…

  • The Witch. Dir. Robert Eggers. A24. 2015.

    Robert Eggers’s 2015 independent horror film The Witch encounters human-animal relations in reference to a manmade issue – religion and the occult. I argue that such a representation of humans living alongside animals in the context of a restricted, puritanical environment of their own making exists because of how the characters decide to build their own isolation.…

  • Pom Poko. Dir. Isao Takahata. Toho. 1994.

    Pom Poko[1] is a film that follows the tanuki of Tama Hills trying to halt development of their woodland through their folkloric transformation powers. In terms of how it shows the animal; the film establishes the idea that animal-human relationships are characterised by a conflict of two worlds that are equally alien to each other.…

  • The Wild. Dir. Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams. Buena Vista Pictures. 2006.

    The Wild YouTube video of the film’s theatrical trailer: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE3mEgqqlCM> ‘Start spreading the newspaper.’ Disney’s 2006 animation, The Wild, by first-time director and ex-special effects artist Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams, is a family comedy film centred on a group of zoo animals: Samson the lion, Bridget the giraffe, Nigel the koala and Larry the anaconda. Along with their…

  • The Wild. Dir. Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams. Buena Vista Pictures. 2006.

    ZooScope ZOOM: The Wild  Above: ‘This isn’t Happiness’ – 07/04/2014 front cover illustration of The New Yorker by Peter DeSeve shows a vegetarian lion eating salad whilst looking distractedly at a zebra. Living in a world of cultural ethics clearly has its difficulties for a wild predator. Image from https://uk.pinterest.com/kmeyer/peter-deseve/ ‘The core paradigm of many narratives engaging…

  • Paddington. Dir. Paul King. StudioCanal. 2014.

    The 2014 film ‘Paddington’ appears to champion inclusivity and acceptance of migrants over merely wanting to observe or distance ourselves from animals and people that are different from us, just as Millicent does with her taxidermy. In essence, Paddington is a migrant, ‘an outsider trying to find a new home’ [1] in England after the…