Tag: Feature Length
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I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Dir. Charlie Kaufman. Netflix. 2020.
“There’s just something… ineffable. Profoundly, unutterably, unfixably wrong here.”
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Big Miracle. Dir. Ken Kwapis. Universal Pictures. 2012.
”And we ache for them cause they are so much like us”. Rachel Kramer. The film Big Miracle is a drama directed by Ken Kwapis and distributed by Universal Pictures in 2012. It is based on the book Freeing the Whales written by Tom Rose in 1989, which narrates the 1988 Operation Breakthrough to rescue…
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Kubo and the Two Strings. Dir. Travis Knight. Laika. 2016
Figure 1: Kubo lifted in the air by wings made of origami birds. Kubo and the Two Strings follows a boy whose life is made even more extraordinary when a perilous adventure, which his mother has tried to save him from, accidentally finds him. Kubo can tell stories using the magical music of his shamisen…
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Garfield. Dir. Peter Hewitt. 20th Century Fox. 2004.
This 2004 family comedy revolves around Garfield, a lazy, lasagna-loving cat who has the perfect life with his owner, Jon. Accustomed to luxury treatment, lavish meals and relying on his quick wit to get his way, the film opens on Garfield’s extravagant morning routine and his devious antics around the cul-de-sac. Unsurprisingly, Garfield is at…
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How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Dir. Ron Howard. Universal Pictures.2000.
For as much as this film teaches us about the meaning of Christmas, it equally teaches us about the relation humans hold with animals, through both interaction and perception. The protagonist, The Grinch, lives in a cave at the top of Mount Crumpit with his dog Max, after running away from his adopted home in…
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An American Tail. Dir. Don Bluth. Universal Pictures.1986
“There are no cats in America“ Don Bluth’s An American Tail is a 2D animation family film in which the human drama of religious persecution, poverty and immigration at the end of the 19th century is narrated through the eyes of a Russian Jewish family of mice, the Mousekewitz, and particularly through Fievel, the seven-year-old…
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Hocus Pocus. Dir Kenny Ortega. Walt Disney Pictures. 1993
Thackery Binx is one of the central figures of Hocus Pocus, and in doing this the film considers the status of domesticated animals within society and cinema. Hocus Pocus acknowledges cats’ role as a domestic sphere defenders. Binx is specifically transformed into a cat because of the meanings we associate with them in our society,…
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The Handmaiden. Dir. Park Chanwook. 2016. CJ Entertainment. South Korea.
Content Warning: This post contains images of a sexual nature including artistic depictions of bestiality.
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Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Dir. Raja Gosnell. Walt Disney Pictures. 2008.
In Beverly Hills Chihuahua, the superiority and entitlement of animals are used as tropes to represent Chloe the chihuahua and her furry friends’ authority over Rachel, Chloe’s dogsitter. This is captured within the pool party scene through the decision to construct dominant representations of the dogs and represent Rachel, the human, as an inferior servant…
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Lamb. Dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson. Sena. 2021
Like a lamb to the slaughter, the slow-burn, absurd surrealness of A24’s Lamb (2021) leads the audience to an end that blends both chilling twists and heartbreaking loss as the complications that are inevitable with blurring binaries between human-animal relations come to fruition. In a playful, sardonic reconfiguration of oppositions between captivity and freedom, wildness…