Let’s admit it. We have all watched films that feature pets, usually endowed with the power of speech, struggling to be reunited with their owners. They tug at our hearts as we drip in sobbing despair, and we love it. I have cried each time I have watched Duwayne Duhnam’s Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993) or Lasse Hallström’s Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2008), even though I know what’s coming and how it will end. I ask myself now why we are fascinated by the film portrayal of the hardship of animals? Furthermore, do we feel it is necessary to anthropomorphize an animal so that we can better relate to it? Or, do the film makers need an easy way of allowing the animal to tell us how it feels by giving it human language?
Two films that strike me as particularly interesting from the perspective of these questions are Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2014). These films tackle the theme of the relationship between animals and humans by taking completely different approaches that have to do with how language and behavior are used in conjunction with camera and filming techniques to convey the expression, perspective, and in the end, the very “psyche” of the animals portrayed in the films.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes starts with the story of Caesar, an ape raised by humans after its mother was killed. Caesar becomes a member of the human family as a pet. Though Caesar starts to exhibit very high levels of intelligence, he also becomes more aggressive towards humans and eventually has to be placed in an animal sanctuary. The film then takes a dramatic turn in both the plot and filming techniques. It becomes clear that Caesar not only has human intelligence, but also has human language. When Caesar bellows “No”, stunning zookeepers and apes alike, he essentially moves from non-human to human. Naturally, mayhem ensues and the primates invade the city, and by the end of the movie the audience knows that the apes will dominate not only the planet, but the humans themselves.
Director Rupert Wyatt captures the evolution from primate as pet to primate as human then to primate as dominator by shifting the camera from a more “personal” approach that incorporates medium and close up shots, to extreme wide shots and long aerial takes. The coloration of the film also shifts dramatically from warm toned frames to underexposed and darkly colored sequences. This shift in coloration helps the audience move from the warm, fuzzy “pet” feel at the beginning of the movie to the dark, violent feel, created by the apes, who in a god-like fashion, begin changing the nature of the world. As the movie progresses so does Caesar’s humanity. He now begins to exhibit the unique human qualities of revenge and spite. Ironically, although the intent of the apes’ rebellion is to obliterate the human race and its cruel traits, as they do so they themselves begin to take on these very traits. Wyatt brings home this concept by showing us the war between the two species through extreme long shots, creating an acute representation of the kind of war humans wage against each other. In this movie there are no sentimental buttons that are being pushed. Rather, this is a war movie in which humans battle their endearing “pets” only after the pets have been infused with the human qualities that make them able to engage in human war. As in Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, the Rise of the Planet of the Apes uses language as a vehicle to jolt our consciousness and to humanize our pets. The goal of the former is to create a mirror for empathy, the goal of the latter is to strike fear in our hearts.
In contrast, the director of White God does not use human language to communicate the feelings of the pets. This Hungarian film recounts the horror and abuse suffered by a dog after it is forcibly removed from its owner’s care and abandoned on the streets of Budapest. This sequence of events is not unlike what happens to Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and the end result, the revolt of animals against humans, is also similar. However, the similarity ends there. In White God, the audience never hears the dogs speak. In place of language, Director Kornél Mundruczó incorporates Franz Listz’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 as the sole method of “communication” between humans and animals. Mundruczó also films the animal revolt against humans in a drastically different manner. The camera is almost exclusively positioned at the eye line level of the dogs, playing an integral role in capturing the action and allowing the audience to interpret the emotional experience of the dogs at a personal level. Most of the shots are handheld and quickly cut, which only intensifies the difference in perspective between humans and animals. The entirety of White God is also filmed in a particular coloration and lighting that does not change when the dogs revolt against the humans. This choice creates homogeneity in the perspective of the dogs acting like dogs without having to take on human characteristics to achieve their goals. This film has no need to create a human-like scenario or obvious human character traits to bring the point home. The audience itself must decide to anthropomorphize the dogs or simply witness the action as pack mentality fighting in unison against a common enemy.
In the end, I cannot conclusively state if our desire to anthropomorphize our pets comes from a place of love or insecurity. When our pets are endowed with the traits that we consider make us human, we are at once touched and horrified. Yet, what I do know is that the anthropomorphization does not have to be blatant to be effective, we are perfectly capable of creating our own illusion of what our pets’ intentions really are.
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