Creating Anxiety and Attitude Changes in Captive Animal Documentary

As a former intern at a Hawaiian marine park, animals living in captivity has always been a subject that I was passionate about. From a young age people are infatuated with lovable representations of wildlife through childhood cinema, cartoons, children’s books, and other media. This love stems from the home with domesticated animals and extends to learning about animals that live in the wild. We crave the dose of serotonin we receive when we are in close proximity to these amazing creatures, and if we cannot be near them in-person, we turn to the screen to learn about their lives and behavior. There is a sense of ambivalence surrounding animals in captivity; we itch to see them, yet some scholars have even compared the captivity of animals to colonialism. As adults, people are introduced to these concerning realities when animal activist documentaries reveal the problems surrounding captive animals in environments they have grown up attending regularly.

There are several techniques used by filmmakers to create anxiety and negativity surrounding animals in captivity such as graphic imagery, emotional narration, haunting music, dark lighting and fast, chaotic cuts to create alarm and put viewers on edge. Interviews are also heavily utilized with former employees and experts in the field to shed light on the injustices that occur beyond the general public’s eye as well as to provide a call to action. To examine this topic through a media studies lens, I discuss the gaze, anthropomorphism and representation to analyze how captive animal documentaries attempt to construct anxiety and attitude change. In this paper I dissect three different films which employ different strategies to achieve this: Nénette (2010), The Ghosts in Our Machine (2013) and Blackfish (2013).