Animated Empathy

How animation taught me to love animals...

Image from I Heart Crafty Things

If I am asked about what film or television series helped me to develop my current empathetic attitude towards animals, I won’t respond with a single one project, but rather a particular art form that I have always enjoyed: animation.

The reason for that being: animation is not bound by the strict bounds of reality that binds things tightly together in this, the “real” world. Anything that can be conceived through draftsmanship, whatever form it may take, is its raison d’etre. It makes the impossible possible.

And the greatest of these impossibilities made possible, I feel, has been the various ways and means by which it has literally given a voice to the many members of the animal kingdom who in the real world have none at all. Or, at least, none that human beings can understand. Which is why we have exploited them mercilessly in the real world, but, in animation, they become more than capable of getting revenge on us in both subtle and blatant ways.

Consider the following:

Long ago, in a world devoid of mass media, humans had a simple relationship with animals. They were either companions, or threats to our existence, or sources of food and survival. We had no ability, and no need, to consider that they might suffer the same sort of pain, or have the same sorts of emotions, or indeed live lives that might be remotely like ours. In those kill-or-be-killed times, sympathy towards animals was often considered a source of weakness in human beings, and so, even when they did have sympathies towards animals, they were kept private for fear of being ridiculed.

Now, the situation has drastically changed. Many people today are actively involved in gaining protections and civil rights for animals, for lack of any other political concerns. They are convinced that these beings do, indeed, have very human emotions, and suffer in very human terms when they are hunted, killed or overworked in factory farming conditions. Some people treat their pets as the children who they do not or will never have.

Many factors over the 20th and early 21st centuries have contributed to this sea change, but one of the most significant, I feel, has been the adoption and continued presence of animals and other non-human beings in the art form of animation.

Why is that?

Because of the uniqueness of the art of animation in personifying the voiceless.

How many famous cartoon characters can you name of the top of your head? And, of them, how many of them are animals? Animals that, in our world, would be mute victims of our often savage attempts to exterminate them or eat their meat for our food?

Exactly.

If you have experienced an animated cartoon, you are experiencing an alternate universe in which justice commonly prevails, and whoever is exploited here can gain victories. Even though the vast majority of their situations are played for laughs, these stories commonly support the plight of the underdog and the repressed. We enjoy these films for their humor, but the audacious resourcefulness of their characters in reversing, deflating and changing up scenarios which would have no good resolution in real life. How many Looney Tunes films, for example, are a clever reversal of the old scenario of the hunter and the hunted, with the latter suffering far more painfully than the former?

And how many of these films show these animals if they were human beings, with erect spines and backbones and powerful, full-throated vocal chords- as the unchallenged equals of the human beings who in our world would effortlessly dominate them?

Once you’ve seen that, it’s impossible to again view such animals as mute victims, for knowledge and fear of the facts they might possibly turn the tables?

I can only speak for myself in this regard, but I’m sure that more than a few of today’s animal rights campaigners conceived the idea of animals having a true voice through animated films, and nowhere else.

One thing I know for sure, however:

These films taught me, above all, that no one should be thought of as being irrelevant or threatening to society, because there just might be an opportunity for them to prove their worth if they are allowed a chance. Since animals in the real world do not speak our language, we have often assumed, falsely, that we “know” what is best for them. Animation showed me the folly of that idea. Rather, we need to understand the way they communicate with us, rather than the other way around, to fully develop a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with them.

Because, when they assert themselves against us, and we fight back, there are always good reasons for it.

You just have to find the right kind of stories- and films- to prove that this is true.