Fabulating animals–human affinity: Towards an ethics of care in Monster Hunt and Mermaid

Abstract

While independent filmmakers have shown their concerns with ecological crises in light of China's accelerated industrialization, urbanization and economic development through alternative poetics and politics of filmmaking, commercial blockbusters also begin to speak to this emerging topic. Monster Hunt (2015) and Mermaid (2016) are not only fictitious tales of imaginary creatures but allegories of animal rights and environmentalist movements in China. Beyond the cute images of the radish-like creature Wuba and the cruel extermination of mythical mermaids, these two comic films address to eco-critical issues such as animal welfare, the dilemma of meat-eating, conservation of nature and endangered species, urbanization and the destruction of natural environment as well as the critique of speciesism and anthropocentrism. By studying the inter-species affective sphere mediated by kitschy visual narratives, this paper argues that the themes of domestication and abandonment, environmental destruction and preservation and the portrayals of sentient nonhuman animals have been expressed and contested in the cinematic rendition of an ethics of care through the cute and the cruel to attract public awareness of animal rights and environmental protection. Behind the façade of profit-making entertainment, how does popular cinema critically reflect on the precarious conditions of nonhuman animals and their agency in the ever-developing China? To what extent do popular representations challenge or sustain an anthropocentric vision of bioethical issues? What is the limit of care amidst the inter-species entanglement?