Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Animals and the Media

We have all grown up watching the Lion King and the Little Mermaid and Free Willy. We have visited Seaworld and seen Shamu jump and flip around. We have grown up with such a pastoral view of nature from these films. Yet sublime usually comes up, and it usually creeps in with the same main characters. Bears and sharks, for example, are almost always portrayed as the "evil" ones. The media has selected a select few animals and always portrayed them in a negative connotation, thus influencing human's (especially American's) views on animals.

Movies that focus on animals have the good guys and the bad guys, like all movies should. However, these movies are like a sequel in that the bad guys are usually the same each time. Most water horror movies such as Jaws and Open Water focus on the shark. Land animals have more variety, including animals like bears, lions, and wolves. These animals all have the size factor in common: they are all large, most larger than humans. We naturally feel threatened by these animals, and are impulse is to put them in another category. We create an us versus them mentality where we as humans can band together to take over the tough animals. The media enhances our already fearful mentality of these creatures by always portraying them in movies with ominous music. These are usually the animals that inflict harm upon humans, which is what makes us so scared of them in the first place.

Disney sets up an interesting contrast between the "evil" animals of traditional movies and the "evil" animals of Disney movies. In the Lion King, for example, lions are the main characters. As viewers, we develop an attachment for the lions and they are personified in a way that humans can actually relate too. Although they kill for food, we don't view it as a bad thing because Mufassa explains to us about the "circle of life." By this simple explanation, the killing seems acceptable. There is also no scene in which the lions are seen as acting aggressively towards humans.

Another instance in which nature is portrayed differently in childhood media than normal movies is Shamu at Seaworld. Shamu is a killer whale who does flips and tricks for an audience to watch. Although killer whales are rather vicious and kill even the "evil" sharks, they are portrayed as cartoon-like creatures who are very tame. There is usually a trainer in the pool with Shamu, which gives a tense that killer whales and humans can have peaceful interactions. This however, is not always the case. (See video above.)

I think the reasons that killer whales are portrayed as more friendly than sharks is because of the amount of human interaction among the two. Killer whales for the most part are out in the open sea, and are usually only spotted by humans on whale watching tours or other rare occasions. Sharks, on the other hand, swim closer to shore and have occasional attacks with surfers, often leaving the human either dead or with missing limbs. For this reason, the fear humans have for sharks is greater, which is then made even greater by the view of sharks in the media. Overall, movies and the media have a huge effect on how we view specific animals in nature.

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