‘Animality’ review: Ai Weiwei explores our often shocking relationship with animals

Dir/scr: Ai Weiwei. Germany. 2025. 122mins

In China, males armed with poles work as a group to membership to demise the city road canine. A camel market in Egypt sees the animals hobbled, whereas the boys assault the creatures with sticks and whips to additional break their spirit. In Denmark, farmed mink sentenced to demise as a part of the nation’s Covid response claw frantically on the glass window of a cellular fuel chamber. Artist, activist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei has by no means been somebody to shrink back from robust materials within the service of creating his level. However because the level of his newest documentary appears to be that humanity’s capability for cruelty in direction of different dwelling creatures is just about limitless, this can be a regularly stunning and profoundly upsetting viewing expertise.

Regularly stunning and profoundly upsetting 

The image, which explores our complicated relationship with animals, is an extra examination of themes beforehand explored by the Beijing-born, Berlin-based filmmaker. There’s frequent floor along with his 2009 movie Calico Cat, in regards to the rescue of some 400 felines that have been being trafficked to produce China’s underground cat meat commerce (the director subsequently adopted 40 of the animals). Animality additionally has thematic parallels with the scenes of ravenous animals in The Human Movement (2017) which have been shot in “the world’s worst zoo”, Khan Younis Zoo in Gaza.

But the impression and scale of Animality, which tends to dwell on the abusive finish of the spectrum relating to the connection between people and animals, is daunting and tough to completely comprehend. As such, whereas Ai Weiwei’s identify and status will guarantee additional pageant publicity, this image would possibly show to be a troublesome promote to theatrical audiences.

Working with native cinematographers around the globe, Weiwei casts a dispassionate eye over facets of human/animal relations in China, Brazil, Denmark, Indonesia, Myanmar, Norway and Pakistan. Not the entire materials comprises abuse: Tibetan nomadic herdsmen, whose lives are depending on the well being of their cattle, take turns waking throughout a brutal winter’s night time to maintain their animals transferring in order that they don’t freeze to demise. And the Indonesian island individuals have an ancestral respect for the creatures of the ocean, and a code of conduct relating to searching whales and dolphins (not more than six harpoons are permitted on a fishing journey). In the meantime, in Pakistan, the movie exhibits a uncommon occasion of animals getting the higher hand, with a neighborhood blighted by the aftermath of a swarm of locusts.

For probably the most half, nonetheless, whether or not the connection is formed by custom (the searching of migrating birds in a valley in China; the processing of imported donkeys into some type of foul-looking health-giving gelatinous sweet in Chinese language medication) or fashionable industrialised practices (we spend quite a lot of time in a Brazilian abattoir and meat processing plant, watching as cows get dismantled into their constituent components), the animals are likely to get a uncooked deal of it.

The movie’s strategy is impartial and as non-judgemental because it’s potential to be, given the graphic nature of the fabric. There is no such thing as a musical rating; footage is offered with little greater than a title figuring out the areas and, in some instances, a sparse snippet of narration from one of many individuals concerned. However this does imply that there’s a lack of context for lots of the tales. We study, for instance, that lots of the working elephants in Myanmar are susceptible to unemployment, however nothing greater than that – the query of what, precisely, this implies for the way forward for one in all these animals is left open.

Additionally lacking from the movie is any suggestion of what we do with this info. The concept, maybe, is to encourage the viewers to stay ethically and consciously relating to the creatures with whom we share the planet. However such is the violence of a number of the footage, the chance is that it leaves us traumatised, numbed and defeated