Animal voices
by Bruce Campbell

In a spate of recent movies, through the miracle of computer animation, animals have been talking back – in fact, they’ve been loquacious to the point of distraction, as if we’d uncorked millenia of unspoken animus. This is not new to art and literature, of course, in which animals have routinely intervened in human affairs to re-route our passions, acting as guides to truth or tempters to ruin. But movies have seized on this with a remarkable frenzy. We may not be far from the VeggieTales version of Balaam’s ass.

At the level of the box office, it’s fun, but what’s really going on? When horror and science-fiction films of the 1950s depicted Blobs and Things and other experiments run amok, this was critically understood as an expression of our cultural neurosis about our growing dependence upon technology along with fear of our nuclear capabilities. The rise and fall of Westerns synchronized with the waxing and waning of our confidence in our ability to act as a global sheriff, rounding up the bad guys and suppressing primitive cultures. As this line of criticism goes, it’s not that the writers meant it, or that audiences were conscious of it, but the popularity and timing tell us that something was going on.

Perhaps with these current films, we are sorting through whether animals are "trying to tell us something." We may have grown increasingly insecure with our beliefs about animals at just the point when we’re trying to sort out when and whether fetuses are human, and how we will proceed with cloning and organ harvesting, and whether we’ll transplant animals’ body parts for our own. At the same time we focus more than ever before on meaning at the cellular level, the more the boundaries between us and the animal world have become flexible on the celluloid level.

We’re in new territory, and we’re desperate for answers. We’ve been comfortable with believing that humans were humans and animals were animals, but we’re no longer comfortable with the distinction as we’ve framed it – in life or in film.

Bruce Campbell is a media review editor for The Witness.