The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture

2: Of Mice and Men: What Do Animals Mean?

60 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 2 Of Mice and Men What Do Animals Mean? Lascaux and Beyond The animal story has a rich tradition in art and literature. Animated film has embraced this tradition in a number of ways, both adapting narrative elements and design idioms. The animal story has proved attractive to animators and animation storytellers because it inevitably works as part of a surreal, supernatural, or revisionist reinvention of human experience, but perhaps even more importantly has reflected the ways in which social and cultural intervention in relation to animals has evolved and developed historically. Describing what he argues are the special conditions by which animal painting evolved in England, for example, Basil Taylor notes: These two hundred years [1750–1950] saw, besides the continuation of many existing sports, the emergence of fox-hunting and racing and, consequently, the systematic breeding of the thoroughbred , the hunter and the foxhound. They saw the foundation of modern biological and zoological study, the true beginnings of comparative anatomy and the scientific improvement of farm livestock in all its varieties. They saw a new enthusiasm for country life and an entirely new attitude to the animal creation in general. In no other country were conditions so appropriate for a school of animal painters and nowhere else were the demands met by such a vast and popular output. (Taylor 1955, 12) W H AT DO A NIM A L S ME A N? 61 This brief description alone demonstrates how creative expression and aesthetic outlooks became bound up with advances—though this might be a questionable term in some cases—in the engagement and development of animal cultures. Indeed, it might be argued that these become the very terms and conditions by which the naturalcultural emerged, essentially through the evolution of visual and textual narratives across converging disciplines, which defined the animal in the public imagination. This, of course, all becomes part of Erica Fudge’s holistic conception of animal history and crucially points up that “animals are present in most Western cultures for practical use, and it is in use—in the material relation with the animal—that representations must be grounded” (Fudge 2002, 7). In addressing the uses to which animals have been put and, significantly, how animal representation has functioned, Fudge believes that this properly enables the fullest recognition of the issues at stake in using and depicting animal forms and locates animals as sites of social inquiry and change. She suggests, “If it is to impact upon questions about the ways in which we treat animals today, if it is to add to debates about factory farming, cruel sports, fur farms, vivisection , and the numerous other abuses of animals in our cultures, then the history of animals cannot just tell us what has been, what humans thought in the past; it must intervene, make us think again about our past and, most importantly, about ourselves” (Fudge 2002, 15). Animated film has been a distinctive part of animal history by virtue of its consistent and enduring representation of animals in the modern era, and while some of its social and cultural relevance at the political level has been in many ways overlooked, it has nevertheless operated in the ways that I have already suggested as a sometimes reflective, sometimes literal, sometimes subversive intervention both in arts and animal cultures. In an appealingly alliterative way, Desmond Morris has suggested a typology of ways in which humankind has defined animals, and the ways he believes they have been treated and used. He notes, “[Humankind ] has viewed other species of animals in many lights. He has looked upon them as predators, prey, pests, partners and pets. He has exploited them economically, studied them scientifically, appreciated 62 T HE A NIM AT ED BEST I A RY them aesthetically and exaggerated them symbolically. Above all, [humankind] has competed with them for living space, dominated them, and all too often exterminated them” (Morris 1977, 260). This brief overview usefully delineates a range of contexts in which implied real-world narratives become the stimuli for fictional treatment and/or visualization. It is easy to see potential dramatic conflict in the tensions between predatory beasts and those they prey upon, the impact of pests or vermin on the urban environment, the functional imperatives of animals in the service of humankind, and the seemingly emotional bonds played out with pets in...