CGI animals
It needs to stop.
Once upon a time, animals in movies were real creatures captured on film. They were in the room or on the set with the actors, interacting with them, responding to them, being led or ridden or spoken to, and (in their own way) directed in accordance with the script—albeit, like human actors, subject to their own whims and fancies, and occasionally doing unexpected things, as in the final scene of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink.
Beyond their verisimilitude or personal presence to the actors, part of the power of animals on film is their unique haecceity, or thisness. The wonder of an animal in person, even at the zoo, translates to the medium of film because any animal, however tame, is its own thing, separate and apart from its ostensible human masters. This wonder extends to stunts and set pieces, because any time Indiana Jones hops on a horse or Lawrence of Arabia rides a camel, you know the actor had to take the time to learn—to be taught—how to do such a complex activity as if he’d been doing it all his life. Even something as lowbrow as Sofia’s fight-on-command dog in John Wick 3 is a remarkable testament to the trainers, choreography, and direction, not to mention the (two) dogs themselves. You can’t help but marvel even as you’re laughing.
For the most part, though, real animals in movies have been replaced by computer graphics, and nine times out of ten it’s slop. To add insult to injury, often as not the slop-CGI animals are meant to be objects of wonder. For some reason directors are especially enamored of slop Cervidae—i.e., deer, elk, moose, and other forest folk. They love their fake eyes on their fake heads, staring intently at the camera. We are meant to marvel in awe. Instead we yawn in boredom. “Really? This is it?” we ask.
The teaser trailer for Spielberg’s next movie is only the latest instance, or victim, or culprit of this cinematic crime. And the contrast came to me in stark terms as I watched Martin Scorsese’s film Kundun for the first time this week. Released in 1997 and now unavailable apart from old DVDs—I got mine via university inter-library loan—the film is the story of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, from age four to his exile at twenty-five years old. It marks Scorsese’s first collaboration with famed cinematographer Roger Deakins.
And you know what? In the first hour it features a regular appearance by a rat. A physical, real-life rat that finds its way around the monastery, sipping the monks’ water and tea when they aren’t looking, or when their eyes grow heavy from meditation and prayer. For the child lead, the rat is an object at once of humor, of delight, of terror, and finally of benign respect.
Yet all I could think about as I watched the little rat scurry around was: If Scorsese made this film for Netflix in 2025, that rat would be CGI.
