Tribeca Film Festival '25 — Animals in War

Image Credit: Tribeca Film Festival

Mainstream cinema, maybe now more than ever, tends to be seen by the public eye as a purely industrial matter. A film made by big Hollywood studios rarely means more than a good evening and maybe a few laughs. This even goes to a point where it is not rare to hear on the internet or through a friend that a certain movie is ‘the scariest non-horror film ever’ while the film is a depiction of one of the many real life afflictions we mundanely hear about on Instagram with maybe slightly less apathy then we file our taxes. It was then, not surprising, but compelling to me to hear about this film about the Ukranian/Russian war while the sound of distant artillery still rings in our daily papers

The quality of “Animals in War”, an anthology film about the current war in Ukraine, which is portrayed through the eyes of animals, varies vastly from short to short. The opening short, “The Eagle”, stars Sean Penn as a sound producer hiding away in his studio, on the phone with his coworker who does field recording in Ukraine. When Penn’s coworker gets hit by what is implied by an artillery shell the sound of the explosion is so loud that Penn starts screaming, holding his ears in his hands, ending the short. 

This short is not devoid of qualities, and I would even say it is quite interesting between its single room setting which takes place in real time, the fact that there is only one actor on screen, the dynamic between Penn and his man in Ukraine, and the ending that is abrupt enough to be shocking and brought up enough not to seem completely absurd. Unfortunately for this episode of the film, it is only really the shell of a story, if it is even a story. Indeed, though all those elements make for a great scene, its mere existence as a single scene film makes it uninteresting. The lack of contest makes the short remotely weightless for we have neither the investment in the characters nor the context needed for us viewers to feel more empathy toward the characters than toward any other human being we might meet in the street. It feels as distant to us as those aforementioned artillery shells we hear about in the papers. This is not at all due to the subject matter, but rather to the complete lack of interest in storytelling the director shows, as he seems more inclined in creating something more of a depiction rather than a story or environment. The film reaches us not as if we were actually experiencing it but as if we were simply seeing it. In addition to this, the ending, though it is maybe the only interesting part of the film, has a nauseatingly melodramatic quality to it that makes it hard to take it seriously. A great sin for a movie asking us to empathize with the so serious struggle of distant people.

If only the film was about depiction, not narratives but actual depictions of moments in the war in Ukraine. Then, regardless of the filmmaker’s narrative interest, we might have an interesting feature to talk about. If the film was a mosaic of, barely stories, just portraits of daily life under occupation or war, then the film might be a beautiful though horrifying portrayal of a terrible time in history. However these depictions are in no way genuine or interesting, I would even go as far as to accuse “Animals in War” of being a blatant work of propaganda. Indeed, many of the stories end surprisingly well. No matter how much hell the characters go through, the Ukrainian soldiers always go and save them in a particularly heroic manner. For example, in one of the shorts, a child attempting to escape the Russian army in the woods gets miraculously saved by a Ukrainian soldier that seems to come out of thin air. This ironically stands as a wall preventing the film to attain its intended impact, the consistent tendency to take what are genuinely interesting story (I think especially of the story of the goat, where an old woman attempts to hide from occupying Russian soldiers that one of her relative is in the Ukrainian army) and completely sanitize them from anything that would not lead the viewer to think in a nuanced manner. The depiction of the war is incredibly flat, and at times cliche. For “Animals in War”, war is not an earthly hell or the greatest tragic tradition of the human species that sends young people to kill each other and destroy anything in between. No, that would require a vision that acknowledges that war is, in itself, a destructive concept. “Animals in Wars” is much more content with finding something frightening in war, but not too frightening as to make the spectator not want to sympathize with the people living it. 

The role of the animals in the film is oftentimes simply to be hurt or frightened by the fighting and either attempt to survive or just stand witness to war. But this is not done in an observing manner. Instead, the focus of the films are almost exclusively on the animals and sometimes on their human companions. But why? Every week we hear of people that have died, that have lost their home, that have seen their lives destroyed in terrible human machinery. Why should we care about the fate of a rabbit when children are sleeping under bombardments in the next house? The answer, no matter how sad it is, is that it is for propaganda purposes. The American public this movie is made for would care little for another war film they would see about a family attempting to survive. However a dog or a bunny, by their cuteness, immediately grabs the attention of the said public. The film is at the image of most medias about foreign conflict that attempt to communicate with the public, attempting to find sensationalism, cuteness, or anything interesting enough that the audience might give the conflict a little attention or a glimpse of a thought from time to time like a rich man gives a coin to a beggar. And like the rich man who has never known hunger, why would they care more about the suffering of people so distant? A prestation. Pulling a bunny from a hat for the amusement and exclamations of a crowd of spectators. Maybe then will they think just for one second that the war actually exists and is not just something they hear about.

I find something quite disturbing in this concept. Showing a bunny living war, is it really what is needed to convince the average western audience that war is something unjust? Of course this can be explained as a simple appeal to emotions. But it seems to me to be almost insulting to the Ukrainian people. Must they really be cute to show Americans that their existence is worthy of enduring? Does the simple fact that they are being invaded, occupied, and attacked not enough to make the western population even think of looking down from their safe and comfortable position and give them a glimpse of sympathy? On the other hand, one might argue that people have their own problems to care about, and their own countries to think of, and this wouldn’t be without truth. In any case however, this attempt at propaganda is to me nothing more than insulting and dehumanizing. “Animals in War” certainly is a slightly entertaining film, and one that raises many ethical and political questions, however, and unfortunately for it, none of these seem to be the ones the film attempts to raise.