Animals In Narrative Film And Television

This book explores fictional representations of animals in animated and live-action film and television and examines the way these representations intersect with culture, race, gender, class, disability, and health issues. Contributors analyze the narrative functions of familiar animals as well as fantastic and hybrid creatures.

This book explores fictional representations of animals in animated and live-action film and television and examines the way these representations intersect with culture, race, gender, class, disability, and health issues. Contributors analyze the narrative functions of familiar animals as well as fantastic and hybrid creatures.

If, as many argue, movies and television have become Western culture's premier storytelling media, so too have they become, for most members of society, the primary source of encounters with the natural world—particularly wild animals. The television fare offered nightly by national and cable networks such as PBS and the Discovery Channel provides millions of viewers with their only experience of the wilderness and its inhabitants. The very films that so many viewers take as accurate portrayals of wildlife, however, have evolved primarily as a form of entertainment, following the established codes and conventions of narrative exposition. The result has been not the representation of nature, but its wholesale reconstruction and reconfiguration according to film and television conventions, audience expectations, and the demands of competition in the media marketplace. Wildlife Films traces the genealogy of the nature film, from its origins as the "animal locomotion" studies that mark the very beginnings of motion pictures themselves, to the founding of the Animal Planet cable channel that boasts "all animals, all the time." The narrative and thematic elements that unite wildlife films as a genre have their roots not in the documentary film tradition, but in the older traditions of oral and written animal fables as reflections of human society. Derek Bousé contends that classic wildlife films often portray animal protagonists living in families modeled on an ideal of the human nuclear family and working in communities that resemble an ideal of bucolic human society. In these stories—presented as documentaries—animals are motivated by human emotions and conduct relationships according to human customs. This imposition of culturally satisfying narrative patterns upon the lives of animals has not only led to the misrepresentation of the natural world; it has promoted the notion that our values, our moral vision, our models of society and family structure derive from nature, rather than being cultural formations.

Screening the Nonhuman draws connections between how animals represented on screen translate into reality. In doing so, the book demonstrates that consuming media is not a neutral act but rather a political one. The images humans consume have real world consequences for how animals are treated as actors, as pets, and in nature. The contributors propose that altering the representations of animals can change the way humans relate to non/humans. Our hope is for humans to generate more ethical relationships with non/humans, ultimately mediating reality both in terms of fiction and non-fiction. To achieve this end, film, television, advertisements, and social media are analyzed through an intersectional lens. But the book doesn’t stop here. Each author creates counter-representational strategies that promise to unweave the assumptions that have led to the mistreatment of humans and non/humans alike.

How do mainstream film, television, advertising, videogames and newspapers engage with topics such as vivisection, hunting, animal performance, farming, meat eating and animal control? This book explores social, economic, ethical and cultural aspects of relationships between popular media forms and key animal issues.

How cross-species companionship is figured across a variety of media--and why it matters.

This book aims to show how film can increase awareness of the plight of farmed animals without exploiting them. Much has been written on the rights of animals, be they in the wild or circuses, hunted, experimented on, used for entertainment, or slaughtered and consumed. However, there has been little that has examined in any detail the filming of farmed animals, and nothing on a declaration of rights for such animals, thus leaving them in a limbo of neglect. Stephen Marcus Finn offers a manifesto on how to foster the rights of farmed animals in filming and sets out to rectify this lacuna.