ZooScope

Tag: Fish

  • Carnage. Dir. Simon Amstell. BBC. 2017.

    What would the world be like if everybody was vegan? According to Simon Amstell’s vision of the future in Carnage, it’s a peaceful utopia in which the young vegans of tomorrow frolic in fields and enjoy food much more, knowing that nothing was taken from an animal, albeit one in which the older generations of ex-meat-eaters…

  • Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. Dir. Andy Serkis. Netflix. 2018.

    The film ‘Mowgli’ is a recent adaptation by Andy Serkis of the beloved Kipling story ‘The Jungle Book’. It is a fantasy adventure film and a beautifully aesthetic hybrid of live-action, CGI and motion picture that remains true to the original story in its exploration of the darker elements of the tale that follow the…

  • A Fish Called Wanda. Dir. Charles Crichton. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (US) and United International Pictures (UK). 1988.

    The murder of three small dogs one after the other is not what most people would think of as funny. Yet this exact progression becomes a running gag in Charles Crichton’s heist comedy film A Fish Called Wanda, where stuttering animal lover Ken’s failed attempts to kill an old woman (who is witness to the…

  • 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…

  • Finding Dory. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Disney Pixar. 2016.

    Dory is the iconic name for the blue tang, (or scientifically known: palette surgeon fish) from the motion picture, Finding Nemo. Much like its predecessor, Finding Dory personifies marine life by animating fish with character and emotions in order to get the audience to engage in a more sympathetic mindset to sea life and overall motivate a movement…

  • Shrek 2. Dir. Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, and Conrad Vernon. DreamWorks. 2004.

    The second film in the Shrek franchise, Shrek 2 focuses on a pair of ogres, Shrek and Fiona, and their life as newlyweds: it’s time to meet the in-laws. Fiona’s human parents, King Harold and Queen Lilian, are unpleasantly surprised by the fact their daughter and her husband are ogres, and their marriage has a few magical…

  • Noah. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Paramount Pictures. 2014.

    God says to Noah: Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.…

  • Aladdin. Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. Disney Studios. 1992.

    Ron Clements’ and John Muskers’, Aladdin (1992) [1]  follows the life of a poor street dweller and his sidekick monkey, Abu in the fictional city of Agrabah. After being coerced into entering the subterranean ‘cave of wonders’ by the villain Jafar and his accomplice parrot, Iago, Aladdin retrieves a magic lamp containing a genie. With the…

  • Two Brothers . Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Universal Studios. 2004.

    ean-Jacques Annaud transports us to the richly beautiful Cambodian jungle in the early 1920s , where two tiger cubs, Sangha and Kumal, are born to their stable and loving family unit. Their playful brotherly bond creates many adventures until violence and greed removes the two from the wild and forces them into the human domain…

  • Ponyo. Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Toho. 2008.

    ‘What? She is captured by a boy? This is very bad. Is it already dead?’ yells Ponyo’s father Fujimoto when realising his precious daughter is being kept as a pet fish. The line raises an interesting question, does cinema represent animal domestication as kidnapping or an addition of family member? Hayao Miyazaki’s animated fantasy film Ponyo retells…