Blog
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Animating Animal Activism: Five of the Best Short Films You Can Watch Right Now
Move over Mickey Mouse and Fritz the Cat. In no particular order, I’d like to offer up five contemporary animated shorts that each offer powerful opportunities to explore the lives of non-human protagonists. Animals have, for obvious reasons, proven extremely popular subjects in animation. Whether these features possess either the intent or ability to actually…
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“Are We Ready to Go in the Water Again?” the Legacy of the Jaws Effect
Before Luke Skywalker learnt to use the Force and before Superman taught us that a man can fly, Jaws (1975) used the toothy imagery of a great white shark to usher in the birth of the blockbuster. It was the mid-1970s, and Hollywood’s major studios no longer sat at the top of the food chain.…
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“Ruh Roh, Raggy!” Scooby Snacks and the Polarising Effects of Meat-Free Dog Food
Thanks to Scooby-Doo, I am greatly looking forward to my current students’ graduations. Although their taught sessions are now behind them, their enthusiasm has led them to carry on with screenings regardless, picking their own films for us to watch together and bicker about afterwards. I have begun to tease them relentlessly for the fact…
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Renouncing the Hunt in Predator: Badlands (2025)
The business of trophy hunting is booming. The wildlife hunting tourism market is projected to be on the cusp of crossing over one billion dollars in value across the next few years (Coherent Market Insights 2025). This growth has been largely attributed to a rising interest in the display of wild animal body parts to…
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Argentine Dogma: Dogo Argentinos and Bombón, El Perro (2004)
While preparing this article, I learnt that the national animal of Argentina is a small, rust-coloured bird called the rufous hornero. At first glance, it might seem an unassuming representative for a country in possession of such a complex culture. This is a nation whose history can be traced through numerous indigenous civilisations and pre-Columbian…
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Turtles All the Way Down: Marine Conservation and The Red Turtle (2016)
Those who know me best probably assume that, of all the films released to general audiences in 2017, Guillermo del Toro’s Academy Award-winning The Shape of Water surely secures the top spot in my heart. Not so. It was pipped at the post, remarkably, by another film about a human protagonist forming a romantic relationship…
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Tykes in Flight: Social Mobility and Falconry in Kes (1969)
The recent release of H is for Hawk (2025) has encouraged me to revisit Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), an extraordinarily empathetic production that needs little introduction. As well as helping to cement British social realism as one of the country’s most significant cultural movements, Loach’s body of work provides UK cinema with a degree of…
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Comic Cryptids and Eco-Sustainability in Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
I’ve always had a soft spot for cryptozoology, the pseudoscientific field of fascination with unsubstantiated creatures. Who can resist the romantic allure of the Loch Ness Monster that supposedly dwells in the Scottish Highlands, the chupacabra of Hispanic America, or Point Pleasant’s own Mothman? Cryptozoology’s marriage of ‘kryptós’ and ‘logos,’ translated directly to ‘hidden knowledge,’…
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Capturing Animals in Motion
Have you seen this image before? If you have, it’s almost certainly because someone has attempted to illustrate an example of early photographic motion to you. These distinct silhouettes of a galloping horse are what we first call to mind when we think of cinema’s birth. Before we imagine Louis Le Prince’s family at a…
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Frankenstein (2025) and Vegetarian Monstrosity
Guillermo del Toro loves monsters. If there is any connective thread that runs through the director’s work, it is the very-same that the zealous Frankenstein uses to stitch together the patchwork flesh of his own creation. Whereas the latter would become horrified by the monstrous appearance of his life’s work, del Toro hopes to enthral…
Creature Features: Animal Welfare on Screen 