Narrating Nonhumans: Anthropomorhism and Trans-species Empathy in Our Planet and Gunda

Resorting to “benevolent” anthropomorphism, David Attenborough’s Our Planet (2019) uses voiceover narration to construct a comprehensive understanding of the vulnerability of wildlife, with the intention of inspiring empathy towards the nonhuman beings pictured on-screen. As Alexa Weik von Mossner notes, “the commercialism and sentimentalism of popular films does not necessarily stop them from being effective eco-films; their affective appeal may in fact give rise to both enjoyment and reflection.”2 Though the comfortable immersion offered by conventional wildlife television certainly has its merits, the alluring spectacle it presents, and its strategies of inquisitive inquiry and knowledge production often violently cross a boundary between human and nonhuman experiences. Dedicated to bridging that gap more cautiously, Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda (2020) attempts to resist anthropocentric and anthropomorphic tendencies by refusing to provide viewers with the storied lives of animals and doing away with a coherent narrative frame. An intriguing example of slow animal-cinema, Gunda may facilitate an embodied empathic engagement, and exhibits some potential at inviting more haptic modes of relating to the mediated representation of nonhuman beings. Presenting a comparative analysis of these case studies, this article looks at the filmic techniques employed by “Jungles” (a selected episode of Our Planet) and Gunda in promoting empathic engagement, and explores how the fluctuation of (anti-)anthropomorphic and (anti-)anthropocentric tendencies relates to the potential evocation of empathic responses in the audience.