A few days ago, I overheard a friend talking about a owning a pet raccoon as a child. For him it was the ideal pet, primarily because it had so many human attributes. It cleaned its food, for example, had opposable thumbs, and learned at least simple lessons quickly and easily. I pictured the raccoon friend adopted by the Cajun boy in Louisiana Story (1947), a documentary validating off-shore oil drilling with a claim the drilling would have no ill-effects on the pristine bayous of Louisiana. The film, however, also sets up a common binary in feature films, that between domesticated and wild nature, perhaps also bifurcating that tame raccoon with a wild alligator the boy kills when he believes it has eaten his 'coon.
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) draws on a similar bifurcation. The film provides a new explanation for the ape takeover of planet Earth—cruel laboratory experiments, the testing on sentient animals that PETA and other animal rights organizations argue against, coupled with an accelerated evolutionary process. The animal rights debate goes back a long way, at least to Pythagoras, but it also takes center stage in live-action and animated films from the silent era forward. See, for example, Back to God’s Country (1919) and multiple Walt Disney features, including his first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). All of these films align well with Peter Singer’s argument that animals have rights because they share human traits, especially sentience, the ability to feel pleasure and pain.
In The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Will Rodman (James Franco) adopts an infant chimpanzee, Caesar (Andy Serkis) after his attempts to create a drug to cure Alzheimer’s disease fail. Rodman and his staff had tested the experimental drug on chimps, including Caesar’s mother, but when the new mother runs amuck, Rodman’s boss shuts the project down. Rodman, however, takes his scientist role to extremes and tests the drug on his ailing father (John Lithgow). In this center of the film, the drug succeeds temporarily, curing Rodman’s father’s dementia. Because he has inherited the effect of the drug on his mother, Caesar becomes a welcome and highly intelligent member of the family. But when the drug no longer helps his father’s dementia, Rodman tries again; creating the drug that will lead to the apes’ rise, a drug that increases apes’ intelligence but kills humans.
The scenes in the laboratory and in the primate habitat where Caesar is sent when he protects Rodman’s father from a neighbor most effectively highlight the animal rights elements in the film. In both the lab and the habitat, chimpanzees are tortured, even though they are portrayed as more human than their torturers. In fact, none of the human characters in the film stand out. We are meant to sympathize only with Caesar, a chimpanzee, who has inherited the intelligence his mother gained from Rodman’s drug. More human than the emotionless Rodman, Caesar seems to find it difficult to negotiate between the wild and the civilized, perhaps lending a more ambivalent reading of animal rights in the film.
The Rise of the planet of the Apes reminds me of a film with a more explicitly forceful animal-rights message, The Secret of Nimh (1982). The film is the first feature from Don Bluth after he left Disney Studios to join an independent animation team; a connection that aligns the film further with the earlier Disney animated features. In a seemingly direct reaction to both Disney and Singer’s text, the film argues vehemently against animal testing and experimentation. According to Nicodemus, the rat narrator, scientists from NIMH, which is ultimately revealed as the National Institute of Mental Health, captured and performed dangerous experiments on mice and rats:
In the beginning, we were ordinary street rats, stealing our daily bread, and living off the efforts of man's work. We were captured, put in cages, and sent to a place called NIMH. There were other animals there, in cages. They were put through the most unspeakable torture, to satisfy some scientific curiosity. Often, at night, I would hear them cry out in anguish. Twenty rats and eleven mice were given injections. Our world began changing.
Nicodemus explains the plight of the rat community to Mrs. Brisby, a mouse who comes to the rats for help, telling her that her husband, Jonathan, was a good friend. He points her to a book, and it opens and shines. “Jonathan made possible the rats’ escape from the terrible … Nimh,” The National Institute of Mental Health.
Then, in his magic television, Nicodemus shows her what happened to rats and mice at NIMH and how they ultimately escape. He shows the history of the rat community from ordinary street rats to intelligent animals after lab experiments performed on them at NIMH. After the testing performed on them, “he looked upon the words under the cage door and understood them. We had become intelligent. We could read.” The rats and mice escaped through the ventilation system. Almost all of the mice were sucked down through the vent except Jonathan and Ages. But Jonathan made possible the unlocking of the door and became their hero.
In The Secret of NIMH both rats and mice outsmart humans, the peripheral characters in the film, and the NIMH Institute. Rats are indeed intelligent and agree to help Mrs. Brisby move her house to avoid a farmer while keeping her sick child, Timmy, in his bed. The rat city Mrs. Brisby visits to ask for help demonstrates the rats’ level of intelligence. In the rosebush where the rats live, there is a door and then a lit tunnel. Vines grow and light up. Mrs. Brisby walks past what looks like a red skull to a brightly lit garden where she is greeted by a rat guard. She says she is looking for Nicodemus. The guard attacks her with an electrified spear, but Mr. Ages appears and asks her what she is doing there. The guard chases her away, but she explains that she has seen the great owl who told her to go to the rats, so he takes her to see Nicodemus and calms Brutus, the guard. Nicodemus watches her walk into his home, but he also watches Jenna, a rat consumed by a lust for power. Jenna could do her harm. Nicodemus says, “Jonathan, your wife has come at last…. The amulet is safely hidden, but if he finds it, forgive us.”
When Mrs. Brisby goes to see Nicodemus, opening a door that reveals bright light and a breeze, the intelligence of rats is even more evident. He tells her to come closer. His eyes shine. After telling her the secret of NIMH, Nicodemus gives her the amulet. “It becomes a blinding radiance…. The stone has a power when it is there.” He continues, “You can unlock any door, if you only have the key,” the inscription on the Amulet reads. This is a gift from Jonathan, he tells her. You must move your house to the protected side of the stone, the lee of the stone. Jenna’s desire for power drives much of the rest of the story, but from a cage where she has been placed after successfully drugging the cat, Mrs. Brisby hears the father on the phone telling NIMH they can bulldoze the rosebush.
Although Jenna crushes Nicodemus with Mrs. Brisby’s house when he cuts a rope, ultimately rats and mice join together and defy the humans who would destroy them. Mrs. Brisby runs to the rats, reaches them, and tells them NIMH is coming. With the help of the amulet, she moves her home, and the rats move to Thorn Valley, so the next morning when trucks from NIMH are at the farmer’s house, the rats and mice have left. They are safe. The animals have outwitted NIMH and moved to a safe haven beyond the human world.
In The Secret of NIMH the rights of animals overshadow those of humans, not only because human characters serve only minor roles in the film but also because humans mistreat animals both in the laboratories of NIMH and on the farm. Laboratory testing may have led to positive results—increased intelligence—but it explicitly changed rats and their community without their compliance. And both the farmer and NIMH now want the rats killed, even attempting to bulldoze their home with them in it. The Secret of NIMH, then, explicitly argues against cruel mistreatment of animals both in laboratories and in “the field,” while demonstrating that animals deserve rights because they so resemble us. The Rise of the Planet of the Apes effectively argues against cruel treatment of animals, but whether or not their ultimate retaliation is justified depends on the perspective of the viewer.
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