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I had a pet bird that would sit on my shoulder. I considered our relationship a friendship, but I will never know if it actually was. I have no clue how birds experience the world and therefore tend to project my thoughts, values and morals onto animals. This physical touch is to me a sign of friendship, I assume my bird must have felt the same. The tendency to project thoughts and feelings onto other living beings is what this project touches upon. With this work I question to what extent we can form a connection with other animals that is mutually beneficial and cruelty free.

"A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all animals." (Clark, 2001, p. 13) Is what Ingrid Newkirk states in an interview in 1986. However, where Newkirk puts the focus on similarities, I argue that equality should not be reached through making every species seem the same. Instead, I argue for equity rather than equality when it comes to the treatment of all living beings.

My work, in the form of a short animated film, advocates for considering individual needs of other living beings. In the film my protagonist explores his relationship with frogs and unintentionally harms the frogs in the process. It is a mixture of abstractionism and surrealism, leaving it open for the audience its own interpretations in order to evoke reflections about our anthropocentric relationships with other living beings.

Challenging the Antrohpocentric Mind

I was never a fan of zoos. Growing up with a lot of compassion and empathy for others, looking at animals behind bars or glass windows never attracted me in the way it was designed to do so. It managed to help me educate myself on wild animals and living beings, but I never understood why this containment and putting up for display is needed just to educate the human being.

In my last project, Alien-nation, I wrote a comic about aliens coming to earth, taking over the planet and treating humans with the same norms, social rules and values that we use to treat animals right now. I did research on how we bring animals into picture, why we put them up for display and if there could be a possibility to create a form of education on wildlife in which display is not needed.

In this project I decided to focus more on how the human being positions themselves on earth regarding other animal species, and for what reasons they often place themselves above these other species.

My work invites the audience to engage in this discussion and to evoke thinking about how my audience as individuals value and treat other life forms. It is made with the purpose to educate especially an audience consisting of children.

With my work I touch upon the following research questions:

To what extent we can form a cruelty-free connection or relationship with other animals that’s mutually beneficial?

How do human beings value their own lives and needs in relationship to other species around them?

How can I as an animator explore this topic of connections between human and animal in an educative yet entertaining way?