The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture

1: The Bear Who Wasn’t: Bestial Ambivalence

26 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 1 The Bear Who Wasn’t Bestial Ambivalence The Animal/Human Divide In Chuck Jones’s adaptation of Frank Tashlin’s children’s book The Bear That Wasn’t (Chuck Jones, USA, 1967), a bear emerges out of hibernation into a Metropolis-style factory, where he is viewed as “a silly man, who needs a shave, and wears a fur overcoat.” Though he maintains he is a bear, his protestations are ignored and he is put to oppressive, repetitive work in the factory, until he too denies his own identity. Finally, reminded of his intrinsic place in the natural order by the passing of a flock of migrating geese and the onset of autumn, he escapes the human world and goes back to hibernation. Tashlin’s pessimistic tale was written in 196, and in its depiction of an inhumane hierarchy of foremen, managers, vice-presidents, and presidents, and even downbeat zoo animals, it shows a hopeless view of humankind as it seeks to rebuild the postwar world. Jones’s kinder, inevitably counterculture-tinged adaptation in the 1960s shows the same degree of alienation between human and animal, but when the bear returns to hibernation adds the punch line that “he wasn’t a silly man; he wasn’t a silly bear either.” This critique of authoritarian regimes and urban modernity shows humankind in a poor light precisely because it has become divorced from any notion of the natural world. The president of the company, like all those who work for him, cannot recognize a bear and conceives that “bears are only in a zoo or a circus.” This fundamental lack of BEST I A L A MBI VA LENCE 27 contact draws the line between nature and culture on the most severe terms and conditions, rendering human and animal as absolutely separate . While this is clearly a false distinction, and the terms nature and culture demand much closer scrutiny and definition, such an assumed divide provides the opportunity to interrogate the ways in which such an intrinsic difference can be both maintained and reconciled. If Tashlin and Jones, not surprisingly, signal that such a schism leaves humankind all the poorer, and present animals with a greater degree of dignity and resolution, then it becomes clear that the animal/human divide and the nature/culture divide are key thematic aspects of cartoon narratives . Animated films address these apparent divides in a variety of ways. The model in Figure 1.1 shows how these seemingly oppositional tendencies can be engaged with. It is important to address some of the tensions between perceptions and definitions of animal and human. At its most extreme, on the one hand, this acknowledges the seemingly irreconcilable difference of animals, while on the other, its opposite, the sociocultural assimilation of animals as pets, man’s best friends, and quasi-humans. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish three types of animals: First, individuated animals, family pets, sentimental oedipal animals each with its own petty history, “my” cat, “my” dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us in to narcissistic contemplation , and they are the only kind of animal psychoanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little brother behind them (when psychoanalysis talks about animals, animals learn to laugh): anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. And then there is a second kind: animals with characteristics or Animal Human Irreconcilable “difference” Assimilation “The other dimension” Totemism Wild systems Anthropomorphism Nature Culture FIGURE 1.1. The Animal/Human Divide 28 T HE A NIM AT ED BEST I A RY attributes; genus, classification, or State animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths, in such a way as to extract them from series or structures, archetypes or models (Jung is in any event profounder than Freud). Finally, there are more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity , a becoming, a population, a tale. . . . Or once again, cannot any animal be treated in all three ways? (Deleuze and Guattari 200, 265) These definitions represent the view that animals can operate as highly domesticated creatures, endowed with quasi-human qualities and histories, while also being symbolic or metaphoric creatures (which are ahistorical yet tied into a historiography of human evolution and development); and purely abstract creatures (which are wholly “other” in their “lived” experience, and in the ways that...