What 5 Animated Movies Teach Kids About Animals
From Class Pets to Fantasy Worlds to Superheroes (and Supervillains)
As we age, our taste in movies changes, sometimes quite dramatically. (I can attest to that.) But we all grow up watching animated films, and some of us still enjoy family-friendly fare. For adults, there’s a sense of safety in the nostalgia, of low stakes and happy endings. It reminds us of childhood innocence, of carefree days when we could focus on doing solely that which made us happy. We didn’t have to worry about social media or making money or what everyone else wanted us to do; there’s a blissful selfishness to childhood.
All the kids watching today’s animated movies will look back at them with the same feelings as I do with Barbie, Scooby-Doo, and Disney Princess movies of the 90s and early 2000s. So what do these films have to say about animals and their place in the world? How are they teaching children to perceive and interact with animals? I’ll be looking into Leo, Storks, The Sea Beast, DC League of Super-Pets, and The Bad Guys to find out.
Spoilers ahead!
Leo (2022) — you belong to me
Leo is an iguana kept as a class pet in a small terrarium with a tortoise, Squirtle.1 After living his entire life at the elementary school, Leo’s ultimate dream is to escape and live wild in the Everglades. A new substitute teacher offers the perfect opportunity to make a break for it when she asks that the children take the class pets home each weekend.
Hijinks ensue as Leo’s thwarted on each attempt to flee. At one girl’s birthday party, he meets some of the animals at the petting zoo in her backyard, and a miniature horse tells him, “We’re fighting the same fight. I mean, the only fun I’ve ever had was biting some of that guy’s fingers off,” referencing one of his handlers. After getting to know the kids, Leo develops a fondness for them, seeking to help them overcome their self-consciousness and become more confident.
When Leo finally does, unwillingly, get dumped in the Everglades, he realizes he can’t cut it as a wild iguana. The movie’s happy ending has Leo and Squirtle back together again in their terrarium.
Like the Abbott Elementary episode “Class Pet,” Leo makes a punchline of the danger animals are put in when spending even just a few days at students’ homes. One child openly wonders if lizards can grow back their heads the same way they grow back tails.
By giving the animals human voices, the filmmakers allow Leo to speak up for himself, so how are viewers supposed to defy the character’s own words when he says how much better life is in a cage? (It’s true that an animal like Leo couldn’t live in the wild on his own, but there are far better ways to keep a captive animal than in a tiny little terrarium. Sanctuaries could offer him more enrichment and all the space he wanted while keeping him fed and protected.)
Child viewers may want a little Leo of their own, drawn in by his cuteness and spunk. They’re not challenged to think about the decades he’s lived in captivity, how desperately he’s dreamt of being free; they see only how he enriches their lives. Kathryn Gillespie reflects on this as she recounts a visit to the Washington State Fair in The Cow with Ear Tag #1389:
“Not too far from the camel rides was a small pen housing a litter of tiny piglets who were nursing from a giant sow. Fairgoers leaned over the fence and cooed at the piglets who snuggled together, napping after their long nursing session. ‘Mommy, they’re so cute!’ a little girl whined, ‘I want one!’ And they were cute—unbelievably so. But I wondered: what gets us from they’re so cute to I want one? What gets us from admiration or appreciation to a desire to own or consume?”
She goes on to explain how we’re taught young to be consumers. Children learn that to be loved is to be given gifts, to have the same gadgets as their friends, to have pets and cool clothes, to get the most likes or shares on social media—offering up for others to consume and judge their faces, their bodies, their homes, their food, their lives. We are taught that animals are just another kind of product to acquire, and they can be consumed as easily as a shirt or phone. The animals’ wellbeing is intentionally factored out of the equation, much like our mental health each time we open up a social media app.
Storks (2016) — this is our purpose
“For as long as can be remembered, storks have delivered babies…from the perch on Stork Mountain. It was an honor and a privilege to serve. It was our duty, our core belief, the driving force of our very lifeblood. It wasn’t always easy. This was our challenge. This was our sacred duty. No matter how tough, or impossible, or brutal, or harsh, or inhumane, or savage, we would triumph over adversity.”
This is the opening narration of Storks, playing over images of storks being harassed by the babies they’re trying to deliver. There’s a pause in the dialogue as a stork is shown being nearly hit by an airplane, dropping their baby, then crashing down onto a road as they swooped to save the tot, then getting run over multiple times by bikes, cats, bowling balls, and increasingly ridiculous things. The narrator, Junior, concludes, “Thank goodness we don’t do that anymore!”
Instead of delivering babies, storks like Junior now deliver tech products from their massive mountain warehouse (looking much like the warehouses of a particularly popular online store). Kids once sent letters to the storks, asking for siblings, which would be fed into a magical machine that took everything the kids’ asked for and spit out a baby. (Best not to think too hard about the logic.) That area of Stork Mountain has since been shut down, but when a new letter accidentally slips in, Junior must transport the baby to her family.
Accompanying him is Tulip, the only human to live on the Mountain. As the plot progresses and the ever-professional Junior finds himself becoming more enamored with the baby, we learn that Tulip was “orphaned” because her stork came to care for her so deeply that he didn’t want to let her go.
Before the entire stork population in the film’s climax, Junior declares, “Baby delivery is our true calling…. This is the heart of what storks were put on this earth to do. This is our mission.” For the storks of this movie, who have relatively free agency, that’s great, but animals in the real world are incapable of making decisions like this. We often simply assume that using them for our own benefit isn’t a form of abuse, since they can’t complain or tell us any differently. Like Leo, the storks are simply cogs in the machine of consumption; their opening dreams of freedom are nothing but silly idealizations.
It’s hard to imagine such anthropocentrism—bordering on human-worship—being woven into the plot if the writers truly believed the storks were free, autonomous beings.
The Sea Beast (2022) — only kind ones allowed
Maisie lives in an orphanage, holding on to the only memories of her parents she has: a book of legends about monster hunters. The “noblest profession,” she dreams of sailing the sea like her parents and killing the giant beasts who torment their shores. She stows away on a ship sent out by the king and queen to hunt down the Red Bluster, the meanest, most elusive beast of all.
After she and legendary monster killer Jacob get stranded, they come to learn that Red isn’t quite so nasty after all. (In fact, Red seems to have some sort of anthropomorphic intelligence, understanding Maisie’s directions to lead the duo back home.) Maisie comes to doubt the legends of her book, the ones that told tales of sea beasts destroying coastal towns—the ones that inspired the thriving hunting industry. Turns out, the monarchs made it all up so they could expand their kingdom. When this is exposed, the public outcry leads to the cessation of monster hunting.
Overall, that’s a great closing message, but are only kind monsters allowed to survive? If the sea beasts truly were predators, would we teach kids that it’s alright to kill animals simply because they could hurt us? Red is sweet, helpful, and intelligent—that’s the only reason Maisie shows her any compassion. But in the real world, will children finish this movie and see “scary” animals as deserving of protection in the same way Maisie comes to see Red? I hope so.
DC League of Super-Pets (2022) — save our owners
This film is a masterclass in anthropocentrism (or whatever kind of -centrism applies to superheroes). The plot is fairly simple: Lex Luthor abducts some heroes, aided by a guinea pig formerly used in his mad science experiments, so Superman’s superdog Krypto teams up with some shelter animals to save them. It offers compelling commentary on how animals like Lulu (the guinea pig) are affected by vivisection, developing a sort of Stockholm Syndrome with her abuser. Despite losing all her hair through Luthor’s many experiments and getting dumped at an animal shelter afterward, she remains devoted to him until—big shock here—he betrays her.
That potentially positive message about animal experimentation is drowned out by how inauthentically the super-pets act. They all, even the shelter animals, speak of humans as “owners.” But Krypto’s deep, loving bond with Superman doesn’t strike me as coming from someone who views himself as a piece of property. They’re family. If I crawled inside Krypto’s mind, it seems far more likely that he would think of Superman as a father, brother, cousin, guardian, or best friend. Maybe even soulmate. The writers clearly developed Krypto’s dialogue from an anthropocentric angle, rather than internalized how a dog, if he spoke in human languages, would refer to his caregiver and partner-in-fighting-crime. (This is further reinforced when Krypto chooses to sacrifice himself to save the superheroes.2)
At nearly every turn, human dominance is reinforced with the animals’ own words, much like in Leo. For instance, Lulu stops at an elementary school to recruit the class pets (all guinea pigs) to join her evil cause. They turn her down, saying they’re quite comfortable with all-you-can-drink water, summers off, and free Spanish classes—as they sit in cages only slightly bigger than their bodies.
Before this, Lulu makes her escape from the animal shelter as it burns down, kickstarting a running joke courtesy of PB the pig. Still trapped in her cage, she shouts, “I smell bacon! Why is my mouth watering? There’s so much to unpack here.” Ah, see, it’s funny because even pigs can’t resist their own tasty flesh. (Logically, of course, a burning pig wouldn’t actually smell like bacon; they’d smell much like smoking human flesh.) Later, as PB and the other animals save the day, she says, “This pig right here is about to go HAM!” Get it? Because of course an animal viewed solely as a food product by most humans would make jokes about her own species’ exploitation.
As I’m writing this, I’m reminded of a trailer for Moana 2 I saw the other day, in which the Disney Princess says something about eating pork, before realizing Pua and another pig (her friends) are sitting right there and can understand her. Moana expresses no remorse for eating Pua’s porcine pals. It’s just an oopsie, and she only says she needs to stop talking about eating pigs in front of them.
What are the children who watch these movies learning? That you can love pigs and eat them, too. That the pigs you love in these stories can joke about being killed, so long as they get to help out the humans they adore. Go on, take a bite. They don’t really mind.
The Bad Guys (2022) — flip the script
A group of five thieves—Wolf, Snake, Tarantula, Shark, and Piranha—sets out to steal the coveted Golden Dolphin award. Upon being caught dolphin-handed, Professor Marmalade—a guinea pig with a heart of gold, who was slated to receive the award for his philanthropy—offers to train the Bad Guys to be good.
In a particularly memorable scene, Marmalade takes the antiheroes to Sunnyside Laboratories, where 200,000 guinea pigs are being “poked and prodded by sadistic scientists.” Calling it a “heist for good,” the thieves liberate all the guinea pigs from their cages.
The film’s big twist shows that Marmalade was the true villain all along, only wanting to free the guinea pigs so he could use them in his evil plot (just like Lulu in DC League of Super-Pets). But it turns out all his talk with the Bad Guys, however hollow it was, worked. They realize that doing good deeds makes them happy, and they work together to defeat the evil rodent.
This is the only movie on this list in which the plot doesn’t hinge on the protagonists being animals, but because they are, it offers unique insights into how fictional depictions of animals influence how we perceive them. The protagonist, Wolf, feels like his badness is inevitable because his species is the villain in every fairytale. He internalizes these stories, assuming that being bad is part of his nature. But there’s a part of himself that longs to be good. At one point he asks Snake, “You ever wonder what it’d be like? The world loving us instead of being scared of us?”
The Bad Guys’ species were chosen specifically because humans are often scared of them. By playing into our preconceived notions about them, the writers subvert the classic fairytale trope by making the cute, small, fuzzy creature a villain, while the ones with sharp teeth or creepy crawly legs become the heroes.
In my mind, this movie stands apart from all the others on this list, even The Sea Beast, because it’s the animals themselves who take the initiative to change rather than relying on humans to save them. And while the Bad Guys had help along the way, their inherent goodness was there all along. Once they realized that, it was entirely their decision whether or not to act on it: to try to be good, or to stay bad.
Kids’ films reflect the worldview of the adults who make them, often with a dash of fantasy to engage young audiences. Writers know that children won’t like thinking about scientific experiments being performed on their favorite animals, so vivisection is often used as a way to signal villainy,3 but writers also know that kids love companion animals, so rarely are ideas about the morality of breeding or having pets addressed.4
Regardless, there are positives and negatives to all these movies, though I had to look a little harder for the good in some of them. Each had at least some small bit of positive, or anti-speciesist, animal representation, and movies and books for kids are among the only stories that regularly feature animals as unique, individualistic characters. While I still find many lacking in terms of their animal rights messages, that just means there’s lots of room to improve.
On my mind: Over the Hedge (2006)
This is a short and sweet little movie about a group of woodland critters who awake from hibernation to find that most of their forest has been cut down and replaced with cookie-cutter suburban homes. To make up for the lack of food, they steal from humans in the nearby development. I expected the plot to focus more on deforestation, but it was really more about consumerism—“For humans, enough is never enough”—and humans’ fear of, and violence toward, “pest” animals. The plot is fairly simple, but overall it’s got a good message at heart.
Characters repeatedly call him a turtle, though he’s obviously a tortoise, with those flat feet and large, domed shell. Lucky for him that they don’t realize their mistake, since they never give him water to swim in.
I swear, I reference my post on “sacrificial animals” more than anything else, by a wide margin. Why are animals constantly throwing themselves into harm’s way to save humans? Why do humans so rarely do the same?
Many adults don’t support animal testing but believe it’s necessary to save human lives. This is a false narrative pushed by the industry. Pandora Pound discusses in her book Rat Trap that of all the animal tests done in the UK in 2021, only 27% were “intended to have a direct relevance for health,” and half of that was merely to study “animal diseases and disorders.” Reports that claim animal research is essential to medical advancements often rely solely on “expert opinions,” providing *zero* quantifiable evidence to back up such claims. Pound writes that “no robust, comprehensive evaluation of the value of animal research for human health has been undertaken.”
For how much I disliked the movie, DC League of Super-Pets actually has a good message about shelter animals. A group of kittens get adopted almost immediately—“Being a rescue animal is easy and fun!” one says—while the other animals languish in cages. That being said, most movies, including this one, don’t address the problem of breeders and the role they play in killing shelter animals.