Tag: HAR: Pet Keeping

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

The Wizard of Oz is about a small-town girl in the big city–the Emerald City. Dorothy lives on a farm in Kansas with her dog Toto. When she is knocked unconscious during a hurricane, she wakes up to find herself in the magical world of Oz, filled with a myriad of unusual creatures. She must travel…

14th January 2019
Gone Girl. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox. 2014.

On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne receives an unexpected phone call from his neighbour, who has spotted his indoor pet cat wandering outside the house. When Nick returns, not only does he discover that his cat has been misplaced, but his wife, Amy has disappeared too. Leaving a staged crime scene…

13th January 2019
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…

13th January 2019
Mon Oncle. Dir. Jacques Tati. Gaumont (France), Continental Distributing (USA). 1958.

Mon Oncle (1958), as many of Jacques Tati’s films, focuses on the character of Monsieur Hulot, a bumbling but lovable man who fights a constant battle against the modern architecture and consumerist culture of post-war France. His use of the old cultural form of silent comedy to do so means that the film is predominantly…

18th December 2018
Barnyard. Dir. Steve Oedekerk. Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon Movies. 2006.

Steve Oedekerk’s Barnyard uses witty puns and gags in order to satirise the idea of the animal as a fixed definition, in that an animal can never truly be anything more than a representation of the attributes that humanity typically associates with its species.

14th December 2018
Coco. Dir. Lee Unkrich. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 2017.

Helping Miguel Rivera navigate the Land of the Dead as he seeks to find his great-great-grandfather is Dante, the stray Xoloitzcuintli dog. However, when it is revealed that Dante is instead a “mythical” and “powerful” alebrije or spirit guide, this subsequently exposes a tension between his two identities. This scene in particular sees Miguel use…

14th December 2018
Wiener-Dog. Dir. Todd Solondz. Amazon Films/IFC Films. 2016.

In the opening scenes of Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog, we see the unnamed titular character in a very recognisable form of cage as she waits her collection from an animal shelter. After having been killed by a passing lorry in the film’s climax, Wiener-Dog’s taxidermied body is placed in a glass box and becomes part of…

13th December 2018
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…

13th December 2018
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. Dir. Rupert Wyatt. 20th Century Fox . 2011.

The scene which I believe most questions anthropocentric notions of human superiority in ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ is the moment when Caesar verbally expresses his frustrations, in defence against his oppression and abuse. The film depicts animals gaining agency against being controlled by humans in many forms, such as pet-keeping, animal testing…

13th December 2018
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…

12th December 2018