Film-makers colonised the animal kingdom a long time ago, dividing it along behavioural distinctions. Dogs are rarely anything other than supportive and upstanding: the Jimmy Stewarts of the animal world. Birds can be symbols of hope and survival, as in Kes (1969) and the anodyne Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973), or manifestations of malignancy, in The Birds (1963) or Damien: Omen II (1978). Bears represent our wild side (The Edge, 1997), while rats are preternaturally perceptive and persuasive, as in Ben (1972) or Sitcom (1998).But let’s not pussyfoot around: it’s cats that get the rawest deal. When the repressed sexual desires of Simone Simon are manifested in animal form, she becomes a panther, not a poodle, in Cat People (1942). And when a clubber starts hallucinating in Go (1999), it feels so right that a sneering moggy should appear as the harbinger of doom, warning the lad of his imminent demise. There have been half-hearted attempts to turn cats into objects of lovable mischief or magic in Disney films like That Darn Cat! (1965) or The Cat from Outer Space (1978), but there is no feline equivalent of Lassie, and for good reason: who would believe in a cat that could actually be bothered to help a party of boy scouts trapped in an abandoned subterranean jazz club?Cats possess characteristics which are the antithesis of what many films set out to preach.

The clue lies in the genre in which animals are most commonly found: family entertainment It’s a distinctly paranoid breed of narrative here. Any element which fails to contribute unequivocally to the survival of the family is seen as a threat, and must be vanquished. In other words, if you’re not with the family unit, you’re against it. Now that the Reds under the bed are dead and gone, the American family must find another potential enemy over which to triumph repeatedly, thereby reinforcing its dominance Cats just happen to fit the bill. They are of the family, and yet somehow not; natural born double-agents.The feline characters in Stuart Little (1999) are as piercing an example of this trend as you will find.

Putting aside that film’s upper-middle class bias (its depiction of a pair of uncultured Italian-American mice is an example of snobbery as extreme as anything in late Woody Allen), it is still a textbook case of how cats are employed as a negative symbol of life beyond the welcome mat and the white picket fence. When a mouse named Stuart joins the Little family, the pet cat Snowbell is understandably enraged, and enlists the services of the undomesticated alley-cats who are, as he puts it, “all jumped up on cat-nip”.Before the film can end, the cats who have congregated to kill Stuart must be thwarted, while Snowbell has to accept Stuart into the family if he wants to remain part of it himself. While the film’s message of inclusivity is commendable, like Cats & Dogs it uses cats not just as a vessel for anti-social behaviour that would be unacceptable in its human characters, but as a symbol for the kind of free will which is incompatible with the perfect American family.The effect of this systematic conditioning is that children see the independence and wilfulness represented by cats as negative traits. Sylvester, in his attempts to snare Tweety-Pie, and Jerry, hankering after Tom, are only obeying their natural instincts, but their devotion to appetite, and by extension pleasure, is an unacceptable force in the context of the family, which is why they must never be allowed to triumph. But compare this with the nature of cinema’s most famous dogs, Lassie and Old Yeller. The entire narrative of Lassie Come Home (1943) is geared toward the beloved dog, which has been sold by its penniless owners, much to the distress of their children, finding her way back home. The point of the journey is the restoration of the family unit, just as the eponymous canine hero of Old Yeller (1957) unites a fractured family in the absence of the father.

A www.Of all the animals featured in movies, it is dogs who have earned the most consistently glowing PR. If a dog poses a threat in a film, it is likely to be through no fault of its own – it might be rabies that makes it turn vicious, as in Cujo (1983), or perhaps its Chum has been spiked with cocaine, as in The Janitor (1981) Dogs are just not bad to the bone like cats Sure, they have off-days. But they have come instead to represent everything that we value about our relationship with animals; where cats signify anarchy, dogs are a harmonious influence, a sign that everything is as it should be.It’s a rare film which uses dogs for something other than comfort. That animal’s place in our affections is so assured that films such as A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and There’s Something About Mary (1998) have found easy short-cuts to shock value by subjecting dogs to protracted torture and injury, while Amores Perros (2000) and White Dog (1978) used feral animals to explore the depths to which humans can sink.It is hardly surprising that animals, like everything else, have been co-opted by movies to provide yet another metaphor for the way we live our lives, or the way we should. So much of cinema is an attempt to bring vision to our blind grope through life, that animals have become another way of judging and redefining ourselves and our behaviour. When everything is translated into the universal language of anthropomorphism, we are left with films like Dinosaur (2000), where the drives and desires of a Stegosaurus or a Tyrannosaurus Rex bear no relation to their species.

The losers in films like this are the audience, left with an emaciated understanding of nature and history that is filtered through the pinhole of a 21st-century North American perspective.’Cats & Dogs’ (PG) is on general release. Jules Buck, the Hollywood producer, died in Paris around the middle of July. He was 83, and there were decent obituaries on both sides of the Atlantic. But there’s a little more to be said, I think, and it begins with the way Buck was never mentioned in John Huston’s grand, confident yet sometimes tricky autobiography, An Open Book. Jules Buck, the Hollywood producer, died in Paris around the middle of July. He was 83, and there were decent obituaries on both sides of the Atlantic. But there’s a little more to be said, I think, and it begins with the way Buck was never mentioned in John Huston’s grand, confident yet sometimes tricky autobiography, An Open Book.
To grasp the significance of that omission, you have to go back to 1942.