Nic Ransome

In dialogue with the nonhuman animal: a case for critical anthropomorphism

The University of Melbourne, Australia

While there is no “entirely separate or ‘stable’ space of ‘screenwriting ethics’” (Maras, 2016), animal studies catalyses significant ethical provocations when used to interrogate family animation feature screenplays that tell anthropomorphic animal stories. Kari Weil (2010) suggests an “ethical relating to animals” in both theory and art, which she calls “critical anthropomorphism”. She further describes this as an approach in which we “may imagine their pain, pleasure, and need in anthropomorphic terms” while always being aware that we cannot “know their experience”. Anthropomorphic animal feature screenplays centre a dialogue between the human and the nonhuman animal: a dialogue rooted in emotional and moral engagement.

Drawing on interviews with screenwriters, I will first address the core paradox of writing nonhuman animals: are they human characters wearing animal skins to mythologise, metaphorise, problematise and sanitise human behaviour, or are they animal characters using borrowed human language and behaviour to communicate arguments about our treatment of, relationship to, and compassion for nonhuman animals? Even zoomorphised characters ask challenging questions about our assumed superiority to nonhuman animals, and our arbitrary classification of species according to anthropocentric morphology and behaviour.

I will then argue that all anthropomorphic animal characters in feature narratives – even those ‘written as human’ – demand for animals in real life what Martha C. Nussbaum (2021, 2023) calls “the right to thrive”. Finally, I will advocate that screenwriters who create anthropomorphic animal characters have an ethical duty to dialogue with, and for, those who have no human voice – to ask us to think and feel deeply about the wants and needs of nonhuman animals, their society and culture, their rights and survival. And then, as we face the unprecedented climate breakdown and accelerating ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene, to act.

Nic Ransome is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, researching anthropomorphic animals in family animation feature screenplays and films from the perspective of animal studies, funded by a Stella Mary Langford Scholarship. His creative element is a family animation feature screenplay centred on anthropomorphic birds. He has most recently been a sessional tutor in Writing for Screen at the University of Melbourne, and previously taught on MA Screenwriting degrees in the UK and guest lectured at film schools internationally. Before commencing his doctoral studies, he was a screenwriter, script editor, film company executive and educator with over 20 years of experience. He was Deputy Editor of ScriptWriter Magazine from 2001-2006.