It’s a simple fact of life that everyone discovers at one point or another: animals just don’t talk. They may find other ways to communicate but they never seem to figure out how English works and speak it back to us when we tell them they’re cute, or that they’re being too loud, or that they can go walkies later after Daddy’s done his taxes. But filmmakers, lawless manipulators of reality that they are, just don’t seem to get it. Movies have been full of talking animals for the better part of a century, cracking wise and wondering aloud just what the hell their human overlords are on about. And sometimes enslaving us in a post-apocalyptic future (oh, hey there, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, we didn’t see you come in).
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But which talking animal movie is the best talking animal movie? That’s what we’re here to find out in this week’s installment of Best Movie Ever, featuring CraveOnline‘s film critics William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold, Fred Topel and Brian Formo. We asked them to vote for the film they’d single out if they were forced to choose only one, and limited their choices to films in which animals talk but aren’t anthropomorphized, a la Fritz the Cat or Kung Fu Panda. So that’s the limitation on their criteria. Interaction with humans, whether the humans understand them or only the audience can hear the animal’s thoughts, is also encouraged.
Check out which films they chose and vote for your own favorites at the bottom of the page. And of course, come back next Wednesday for another all-new installment of Best Movie Ever!
William Bibbiani:
I hate to start us off with a bit of a cheat, but although the film I have chosen is technically a short, well, we already popped that cherry in Best Movie Ever with our article about Time Travel, in which Chris Marker’s La Jetée earned not one but two separate votes. So I don’t feel bad about selecting a theatrically released cartoon, especially since it’s one of best and certainly one of the funniest ever made. Steven Spielberg even called it “the Citizen Kane of animated film.”
One Froggy Evening, directed by Chuck Jones, tells the story of a construction worker who finds a cardboard box containing a singing, dancing frog. He tries to share his discovery with the world, and get rich quick in the process, but the damned stupid frog won’t sing for anyone else but him. His repeated attempts to get the frog to sing for someone, anyone else make him destitute and eventually get him institutionalized. It would be a pretty depressing story were it not off-set by the joyous and outlandish theatricality of “Michigan J. Frog,” whose renditions of “Hello! Ma Baby!” and “I’m Just Wild About Harry” are as infuriating as they are hilarious.
Animals don’t talk, people, and if they start do start talking to you it’s best to either keep it to yourself or, even better, seek psychiatric help as soon as possible. It’s not a subject for family-oriented movies. It’s a nightmare situation that’s perfectly captured in all of its ludicrous glory in this, one of the all-time great Looney Tunes, and easily the best talking animal movie ever.
Fred Topel:
It has to be one of the original Apes franchise, right? I mean, that or Babe. There actually haven’t been a whole lot of good talking animal movies. I mean, I can’t remember a single funny line from the entire Dr. Dolittle franchise and Cats & Dogs? Please. I asked if The Lion King or Finding Nemo would count but no, we’re sticking to movies where animals talk in our world, not just in their own.
Babe is a delight but Planet of the Apes isn’t just, “Oh cool, monkeys speak English.” It makes a pretty profound impact when the roles are reversed. Most of us are nice to animals, some even treat our pets better than other people, but man’s cruelty to animals is an unfortunate fact of life and nature. What better way to demonstrate that than the metaphor of putting intelligent primates in charge, and seeing them be cruel to the humans? There was no doubting that the original Apes were humans in costumes, but the distinctive makeup is a landmark of cinematic imagery.
But I’m Franchise Fred. I don’t just want an amazing original movie, I want to see in what other directions the story can go. My favorite is Escape from the Planet of the Apes, where Cornelius (Roddy McDowell), Zira (Kim Hunter) and Milo (Sal Mineo!) return from the future to present day Los Angeles in 1971, and lay the seeds of the Ape evolution in a wildly entertaining paradox. If Planet of the Apes was a reversal of species dominance, Escape From was a reverse of the reversal. It borders on Inception levels of metaphor, and it’s just great fun to see the deadly Apes from the original become the sympathetic heroes, and to see those maniacs doom themselves to the future we already know.
Witney Seibold:
Talking animal movies exist in a weird ghetto of children’s entertainment that I don’t think they will ever shake off. Talking animal movies – especially those of the live-action variety – are usually the kind of slick, gentle, and obnoxious kiddie fare that parents hate having to sit through with their kids. You have your Bingos, your Racing Stripes, your Air Buddies. Occasionally, a Babe will break through, proving to be sweet and heart-swelling and wonderful, but films like that can be overwhelmed in the imagination by the image of a rapping kangaroo or a sassy horse played by John Candy.
My selection for the best talking animal movie is actually one of the more downbeat and depressing movies I think I have ever seen, which is astonishing, given the fact that it’s about talking rabbits. Martin Rosen’s 1978 feature Watership Down, based on the novel by Richard Adams, is a harrowing tale of survival. It’s about a warren of rabbits, living in a gentle tribal community, having to leave their doomed home, and travel to a new land where they may be safe. Along the way are rivers and snares and other horrible risks. Rabbits die. What this film does is take the notion of the cute and kid-friendly talking animal and raise it into something mystical and poetic. In a prologue, the rabbits are referred to as Princes with a Thousand Enemies. They are prey, but they survive. And in Watership Down we get to see their struggles and hear their voices. It’s a great animated film that isn’t discussed often enough. It’s rated PG, but don’t show it to little kids; it will scare them.
Brian Formo:
If you look up the keyword “talking-animal” on IMDB there are exactly 666 results. Which is perfect because my pick for best talking animal movie involves a dog possessed by a demon. That’d be Spike Lee’s summer of slums, sex, sweat and Satan in Summer of Sam.
Okay, so that talking animal moment is only a few seconds in the movie. And it seems like it comes from an entirely different movie. But it comes directly from the confessed killer, Son of Sam’s (Michael Badalucco) testimony, who said that his neighbor’s dog was possessed by a demon and ordered him to kill. The dog is voiced by John Turturro. When this scene happens in the movie it feels entirely out of place and bizarre and bad. Tuturro’s voice wouldn’t fit that type of dog, it’s too nasally. Wait, what am I saying? Dogs don’t talk. That scene should feel bizarre and laughable because it’s a dog and dogs don’t talk. There’s no realistic voice to fit it except the barking that occurs at the very beginning of the film, that drives Son of Sam, shuttered in the sweltering heat, insane.
Lee’s film is exciting, overlong and hazy: just like the summer heat. One of the murder victims tells his lover that he wants to make love to her on her parent’s lawn like a dog in heat. Vinny (John Leguizamo) tells his fake-London friend, Ritchie, (Adrien Brody) that he’s going to be the next victim because he’s been cheating on his wife (Mira Sorvino) because he loves doing it doggystyle and can’t bring himself to defile her in that fashion. Ritchie’s parents force him to move into the garage like an animal because they need their whole lay of the apartment for their own primal necessities. Ritchie masturbates at a theatre for extra money and women are routinely cat-called throughout the film because the men have been trained to bark their desires. Now that I think about it, there are plenty of talking dogs in Summer of Sam. And they’re all in heat.
