When you make a list of the most iconic animals in cinema history, chances are it’ll be littered with animated and CGI creatures. Much less so with actual animals (that don’t talk, sing, and dance). Such anthropomorphism shows us the natural world through a human lens, and it seems to imply that animals are only worthy of movie stardom when we endow them with human intellect and emotionality.

Various video essayists and video artists have critiqued this tendency (David Claerbout’s take on Disney’s The Jungle Book is an especially creative one). But in this video essay, Rowan Abbott goes a step further. He turns to Affect Theory and haptic visuality and suggests that these concepts might offer a way to truly empathise with on-screen animals. As proof of concept, he offers up the film Eo (2022, Jerzy Skolimowski). That Polish drama refuses to anthropomorphise its circus donkey protagonist, instead using several audiovisual strategies to make the viewer relate to the animal’s feelings of fear, confusion, and pain.

Abbott chooses captions to convey his thoughts (and those of the scholars he cites) rather than using a voice-over. This proves an effective choice, not only because the on-screen texts are elegantly designed and rhythmically spaced out, but especially because this leaves space for an evocative soundtrack. That soundtrack adds to the haptic, even visceral, quality the video essay borrows from its object of study.

In addition, Abbott incorporates haptic footage he made himself (with himself as protagonist, or as a lab animal, so to speak). These sequences clarify the theoretical concepts while underscoring how personally invested the filmmaker is in the subject. The result is a video essay that, like Eo, is both emotionally affective and insightful, both visually creative and conceptually cohesive.