Animals in TV and Film Today
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What historical role have animals played in Hollywood films?
For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. Hollywood, TV and movies. They used to rely on scene stealing dogs, heroic horses, the occasional bear and definitely monkeys. These animals were in and they acted with humans. But in the age of CGI, are animal actors becoming extinct? That is the question we're about to answer here with media and culture studies professor at the College of Staten Island, CUNY in New York, Cynthia Criss. Cynthia, welcome to the show.
Thank you, David. Happy to be here.
I watch a lot of reruns of 90s sitcoms, and one thing that's so present in them that just isn't today is real animals and actors acting with them. And you're kind of scratching your head like, was this all done ethically? I mean, that's maybe a different question to ask, but it was such a presence in TV and film for the last hundred years, wasn't it?
Yeah, you know, animals have been part of cinema since cinema's history, since cinema's prehistory. If you think about something like the photographer Edward Muybridge's images of horses, dogs, any animal that you can think of in motion to try to figure out, you know, what is their gait? You know, there's a whole story about Muybridge and why he started that series. But animals in motion, live animals on screen has been there since the beginning.
I mean, the greatest actor that ever lived may have been that dog in the sitcom Frasier, I gotta say. When you look at the industry, and it's probably different dogs, it probably wasn't all one same dog, but when you look at the industry today, are these animal actors disappearing? Are they being depicted by CGI animals? Is the number of animals that we use, whether fake or real, is it just decreasing?
Well, compared to a decade that you're talking about, like the early 1990s or let's say the 1950s, whatever, there's so much more media being produced right now that I would hesitate to quantify. But there is a big displacement of live animal actors with computer-generated ones, with ones that are created by super talented, amazing visual effects artists. And This has been true.
Are animal actors becoming extinct due to CGI?
It's been a growing trend since about the mid-1990s. Jurassic Park is a real breakthrough in that regard, where we start to see animals, whether they're very, very realistic or whether they're quite imaginary, appearing in a really realistic aesthetic in screens and opting for those animals, those digital animals, instead of going to one of the Hollywood rental agencies and hiring a trained animal.
And for certain animals, like especially ones that aren't domesticated, like chimpanzees, or I think of velociraptors, it's very cruel to depict them on screen. I'm joking, of course, but when we think of certain animals, I think attitudes have changed. Like it's not great to be kind of like using these animals in film. That's one thread of it. But for domesticated animals like cats and dogs who are, you know, trained around us, know us, live with us, where I'm sure there are people that would consider that cruel. I'm not one of them. Why are these depictions dropping? Like, why aren't there dogs like Lassie or the dog from Frasier in TV as much?
Well, I think that there's a number of reasons for this. And one is that there has been a history of activism by groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals against the use of animals in film and TV. So, you know, productions risk if accidents happen on the set, if anything bad happens. you know, certainly risk garnering really, really unwelcome and negative, but deserve negative attention when that kind of stuff happens. And it does happen. You know, animals can be injured on set and animals can even die on set. You know, I remember reading an anecdote once from somebody who wrangled insects for film and TV and she said, you know, If there's a cockroach in my kitchen, I'm going to squash it.
But if I take a thousand cockroaches to a movie set, a thousand cockroaches go home. And that's someone who is trying to practice animal acting, animals appearing on screen in an ethical fashion, right?
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