From literature classics in the 40s to over-the-top animes in the present day, a great number of literature and entertainment works feature animals as pivotal characters to help propagate their story. These anthropomorphized characters act, talk and think like humans as they obtain our abilities, personality traits, and even moral codes. So the question is why do writers resort to the personification of animals rather than making use of the traditional human form? There are many reasons for this. Most often, they want to make new characters appear more familiar to readers through animal stereotypes. Sometimes, the use of specific animals is a reference to history or culture and a gateway to deeper discussions about human society. Other times, …show more content…
Whether animals themselves can have personalities remains a mystery, but many have made a name for themselves when it comes to embodying certain human characteristics. When we think of a pig, its descriptions tend to be things like “lazy”, “greedy”, “dirty” etc and we even describe people with such attributes as pigs. Pigs roll around in the mud in order to use it as sunscreen to protect their skin, what makes them seem “dirty” is actually a show of their resourcefulness. Nevertheless, “the representation still hearken toward an origin in the physical animal” even if it involves misreading (Oerlemans, 3). Such stereotypes, whether true or false, have been ingrained into the animal’s species through stories and word-of-mouth over decades. Writers can then use these famous stereotypes to create foundations for their …show more content…
Having animals as characters introduces a friendlier imagery that helps darker content become more digestible. In Maus, seeing animals dying and tortured in place of actual people makes the event less offensive in the reader’s mind. Not to mention, there is an abundance of them, increasing replaceability and the dulling of our moral radar. We feel sympathy for the mice but it’s so weak that it has little noticeable impact on our moral intuition. Often, we allow the story to progress with no emotional interruptions. With human characters, we see ourselves in them and it makes it hard not to become biased or emotionally involved with certain characters. What Art wants for Maus is to relay his father’s experiences as authentically as possible. He intends to diminish our sense of attachment to the characters by using identical looking animals as characters to help us focus on the significance of the Holocaust itself. With the minimum emotional investment on the reader’s part, individual deaths become less significant and distracting while the frequency of general homicide itself becomes more noticeable, emphasizing the tragic nature of the Holocaust. Similarly, in Aggretsuko, where the main character is constantly oppressed and bullied into doing more work than her paycheck entitles, we see the depressing theme of work-life countered by adorable animal character designs and comedic tones