Fabulating Animals–human Affinity: Towards an Ethics of Care in Monster Hunt and Mermaid

Abstract

While independent filmmakers have shown their concerns with various ecological crises in light of China’s accelerated industrialization and urbanization through alternative poetics and politics of filmmaking, commercial blockbusters also explore stories about growing ecological awareness. Films such as Monster Hunt (Raman Hui, 2015) and Mermaid (Stephen Chow, 2016) are not only comic and grotesque fables of imaginary creatures but allegories of animal rights and environmentalist movements in China. In addition to analyzing the fantastical representations of the nonhumans in these two films, this chapter examines how the popular imaginary of inter-species affinity illuminates the current debates on the animals–human relationship in contemporary China. By studying the inter-species affective sphere fabulated and mediated by the kitschy visual narratives, this chapter 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. Through a close reading of these two popular films, this chapter aims at provoking contemplation of the impact of economic development on the wavering yet intimate relationship between the natural environment, nonhuman animals, and human beings, as well as examining the potential susceptibility of such representations. Developed from the broad, inclusive, and interdisciplinary “scholarly perspective” and “academic ‘movement’ ” of ecocriticism, ecocinema studies somehow goes beyond the humble notions of studying, exploring, and making critical analysis of the poetics and politics of filmmaking, film aesthetics, and film reception, but beginning to investigate the possibility of how the cinematic medium might initiate social changes concerning human impacts on ecological systems, nonhuman species, and the physical environment. When Walter Benjamin insightfully announced the decay of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, signaled by the emergence of photography and cinema, the questions of reproducibility, authenticity, the cult, and habitual distraction are actually the defining principles of these modern mediums. Thematically, the way Monster Hunt embraces the universal value of cultural diversity and feeling for others is rather ambivalent. Under the man-made ecological crisis, the merpeople can be read as the victims of development and expansion of economic interests.