Microcosmos and the Human World

When insects battle one another in this micro-world, visual representations and background music anthropomorphize insects on folk-psychology and emotional levels. Carnivorous plants devour bees, their sticky long red fronds forming a cocoon around its victims. Two beetles attack one another, their red claws reaching out and brass horns announcing battle as orchestral strings and woodwinds reinforce the rising tempo of the fight. They attack each other again and again, falling and returning like Sumo wrestlers, slamming each other to the ground until the clash ends, and they both fall and crawl away. These beetles seem to envelop human traits as well as emotions as they strategically plan their attacks. 

The battle also begins to close the day, which ends as it begins—with feeding that draws on primitive psychology levels of anthropomorphism that are reinforced by the accompanying human choir. Caterpillars feed on a leaf as shadows lengthen, showing a grasshopper and praying mantis in silhouette. The moon rises, its reflection lighting the pond. A moth appears before the moon looking as large as the Japanese science fiction hero Mothra, and the voiceover returns, telling us, “The night gives way once more. Nothing will stop what’s now in motion…what flutters toward the light. Here, where time is measured out in moments, the day begins like any other, beyond anything we could imagine, and yet beneath our notice.”

The final insect image emphasizes the connections Microcosmos makes between the human and insect world as it illustrates multiple traits and social roles, two higher levels of anthropomorphism. A tall insect emerges from the water, its reflection doubling its size. It brings up its legs like arms with hands and drapes its wings around itself like a cloak, revealing a praying monk instead of mantis. But when singing voices join the instruments in the background, the insect moves its legs seemingly in tune, looking more like a Kabuki dancer until it flies away with a hum.

The overhead shot of the water, grasses in the breeze, and the newly rising sun signify movement from the insect world to our own. A rooster crows. Dogs bark. From the fog of distant hills a pool of children’s voices blend with the end credits, but the film ends with a dissonance, the eerie voice of a child that recalls the praying mantis “monk’s” flight. Although Microcosmos seems to separate the human world from that of insects by shifting the camera back and forth between the worlds above and below the grass of a meadow, its narrative driven visual representations of the day in the life of various insects and the music that accompanies their multiple mundane tasks provides a human interpretation of their behaviors and characteristics that not only anthropomorphizes but also humanizes them, providing a connection between our worlds based on our similarities rather than differences. Margaret A. McGurk of The Cincinnati Enquirer describes it as a cycle of life writ small, declaring, “The cycle encompasses birth, transformation—as in the riveting footage of butterflies emerging from their cocoons—food, combat, death, even sex” (2000), a cycle of which we are all a part.