A Study Of Chinese Animal Movies From The Perspective Of Zoocriticism

Chinese animal films have gone through 40 years since the release of "SAIHU The Dog" in 1982.Chinese animal films,which grow and develop in the torrent of the times,are closely related to the social reality,cultural thoughts and the changes of market ecology,and the animal images and creative concepts are also evolving imperceptibly.From the perspective of zoocriticism,this paper divides the development of animal films in China into three stages: concomitant period(1982-1999),exploration period(2000-2015)and development period(2016-present).Combined with specific texts,this paper analyzes the animal images presented in Chinese animal films in different periods,and tries to reveal the cultural concepts behind the shaping of animal images.The first chapter explores the concomitant period of Chinese animal films.The animal films in this period developed soon and were deeply influenced by the anthropocentric consciousness,and the animals were constructed as "the other".The stories between animals and children and between animals and soldiers are the key objects of animal films in China at this stage,but the ways of expression of the two are slightly different.The former constructs animals as children’s assistants,highlighting the tool attributes of helping and protecting children while showing the partnership between children and animals,revealing the creator’s subconscious human priority consciousness;The latter portrays animals as weapons for soldiers,highlights the tool value of animals with the narrative path of "taming-utilization",and clearly divides human beings and animals into subject and object.The second chapter analyzes the Chinese animal films during the exploration period.In the first 15 years of the 21 st century,animal films in China show a diversified trend in the presentation of animal images,and this paper summarizes three representative categories.The first kind is to construct animals as the weak protected by human beings,which contrasts the powerful strength of human beings with the weak and helpless animals,and conveys the concept of respecting animal life and being kind to animals advocated by the theory of animal sympathy.the second kind is to construct animals as partners of empathy with human beings,and to melt the distinction between human beings and animals at the psychological level through the expression of the inherent attributes such as animal emotion,emotion and empathy ability.The third kind is to construct animals as awe-inspiring totems,taking "Wolf Totem" as an example to analyze the social composition and conscious initiative of prairie wolves,which plays a positive role in reshaping the subject identity of animals.The third chapter analyzes the Chinese animal films in the development stage.After2015,pet economy promotes the combination of animal films and commercial capital,highlighting the emotional value of animals and increasingly obvious anthropomorphic performance become the main features of this stage.The study found that Chinese animal films mainly express the emotional value of animals from two aspects: "cure" and "connection".Animals not only give the motivation of self-redemption to the special groups with physical or psychological disabilities,but also aggregate the atomized unlucky individuals.In addition,this paper makes a dialectical analysis of the increasingly prominent anthropomorphism of animals in recent years,affirming its positive role in showing the similarity between human and animals and thus breaking the binary opposition between human and animals.at the same time,we should also guard against the risk of completely erasing the heterogeneity between animals and animals.