Anthropomorphic Research Articles

“All creatures great and small, welcome”: Animating accessible world design

AbstractUsing four animated texts about anthropomorphic animals—Zootopia (2016), Sing (2016), Sing 2 (2021), and Zootopia+ (2022)—this article explores two related questions: How can animated films featuring cities for anthropomorphic animals rethink accessibility? How is accessibility sustained and/or adapted through continuations as seen in franchises and transmedia storytelling? I argue that the two series I analyze offer two different approaches to accessibility and the maintenance of it, one which works better than the other. This comparison suggests that accessibility needs to be an integral part of world design from the very beginning in order to stay stable over time.

Children’s Narrative Retells: The Influence of Character Realism and Storybook Theme on Central and Peripheral Detail

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Anthropomorphized animal characters have been associated with negative influences on educational outcomes for young children, for example story comprehension and prosocial learning from moral tales. In this study we investigate how character realism and moral theme influence young children’s recall of the story content. Retells were examined for length, syntactic complexity, and centrality as indices of memory and understanding. Participants were 171 children (age 3–7 years) from 6 rural schools in the Northwest of England. We found no significant influence of story character on the measures under test. Retells with a prosocial sharing theme had higher syntactic complexity and greater centrality than those with a busy theme. Practice or Policy: The results suggest that animal characters are not necessarily an impediment to coherent representations of stories. The central message from a prosocial themed story appeared to be more strongly retained than that of a closely matched story with no prosocial lesson. This suggests story theme to be a potential influence that should be considered when testing children’s narrative comprehension.

Understanding the Continuance Intention for Artificial Intelligence News Anchor: Based on the Expectation Confirmation Theory

The Metaverse accelerates the development of the meta-human industry and human-AI interactions in both traditional media outlets and online platforms. As a typical application of meta-human, artificial intelligence (AI) news anchors have been gradually utilized for program reports instead of newscasters in China. In this paper, through the lens of expectation confirmation theory, we establish a conceptual model consisting of perceived anthropomorphism (ANT), perceived intelligence (PI), perceived attractiveness (PA), perceived novelty (PN), information quality (IQ), confirmation of expectation (CE), trust (TRU), and satisfaction (SAT) to explore continuous intention (CI) of watching news reported by AI anchors among online users. By leveraging on a sample of 598 eligible questionnaires, the partial least square structural equation model is employed and the results show that the holistic continuing intention for AI news anchor is positive but not robust. Further analysis indicates that SAT, PI, and TRU can predict CI directly, meanwhile CE, ANT, and PA associate with CI through the mediation of satisfaction. In addition, trust and satisfaction serve as serial mediators between IQ and CI. There is no direct relationship between CE & CI, ANT & CI, and PN & SAT. Nevertheless, user gender and previous experience can moderate the relationships of ANT & CI and PN & SAT, respectively. It can be seen that the proposed model can explain 80.1% of the variance in CI. The implications are intended to provide references for further commercialization of AI news anchors.

The ritualistic death in (and of) the male friendship: Dismembering embodiments of inter-male homosocial relationships in Beastars

Bromance in media often poses as a farce, but, oddly, also fortifies queer intimacies among men. According to Michael DeAngelis (2014), bromance acts with a dual function: ideologically and mythically. It plays a crucial role in representations of male-to-male friendship through its paradoxical capacity to both reinforce hegemonic norms and refuse heteronormative ideal for men. Imaginative illustrations of the antinomy of bromance is seen in anime, or Japanese animated cartoons whose most popular genre, shonen, depicts the hybridized goal of bromance to solidify male homosociality that often gets borderline homoerotic (if viewed through a queer lens). To demonstrate the hybridized capacity of bromance in media, this study presents a metaphorical analysis of the bromantic inter-male homosocial bonds in Beastars (Matsumi, 2019-2021), an anime featuring anthropomorphic animals. From an analysis based on bromance media studies, three thematic metaphors emerged: proximity, perversity, and concealment. These metaphors illustrate a reverence to “soft masculinity,” an East-Asia-formulated androgynous male performance which indirectly dismantle hegemonic representations of men by preventing the figurative death of the male-on-male friendship at the hands of the heteronormative gaze.

At Risk? A Critical Reflection on Youth that Identify as Furries in South Africa

Youth is a broad developmental age-range, marked by contextual and behavioural risk factors. Marginalised youth cohorts may be additionally at risk. International studies indicate that “furries,” briefly defined by their interest in anthropomorphic animals, may be one such cohort. However, little is currently known about furries in the South African context. Using the social identity approach as a theoretical underpinning, this article draws on research that formed part of a broader master’s dissertation mixed-methods study. Firstly, using quantitative analysis, this article presents the demographic prototype of furries collected from 98 furries by means of the “ZA Fuzzbutts SFW” group chat on Telegram and the “ZA Furries” online forum. This demographic profile provides the first empirical data to map a prototypical profile of the South African furry. Secondly, the article uses qualitative data to explore the risks of bullying and discrimination that this predominately youth cohort is subjected to, with specific focus on the occurrence of bias-based bullying. The study found that the prototypical South African furry is a 25-year-old white, non-heterosexual male who has completed high school, has at least some tertiary education, and is employed. Furries in South Africa also appeared to be bullied more in high school than their peers. While evidence showed that discrimination against furries exists in South Africa, it did not appear to be a primary factor in bullying.

Tracing the Bunny

Since the 2010s, “we, the rabbit” has gained currency as an internet slang term referring to China, Chinese ethnicity, and the Chinese Communist Party. The recent popularity of the rabbit as a metonym for the nation is boosted by the varied multimedia forms of bunny characters appearing in historical narratives, web comics, games, and most important, the patriotic animated series Year Hare Affair. Juxtaposing commercial ambitions with a nationalist agenda, Year Hare Affair narrates historical events by personifying countries as anthropomorphic animals. Taking the viral rise of Year Hare Affair as a case study, this article delineates a genealogy of the bunny characters in Chinese popular culture. The transmedia forms of bunny characters, including those appearing in texts, comics, animated programs, and games, provide room for the construction of unstable meanings revolving around the bunny. Consequently, while such animated series align with official narratives of history, they also tone down the weight of those narratives by employing a variety of narrative devices, including parody, game-related motifs, and space-time manipulation. Through these diverse representations, the political message is sometimes enhanced and sometimes playfully challenged. Read in this light, the bunny's evolving trajectory in contemporary popular culture speaks volumes about the dynamics between digital aesthetics and politics, as well as the multiplicity of discourses generated as they meet.

Апокалиптические настроения в анималистической карикатуре Ж. Гранвиля

J. Grandville’s ironic depictions of humanized animals were popular with French audiences, whose contemporaries and morals became the object of denunciation. The perennial tradition of comparing man and beast was accentuated in the 18th and 19th centuries as new scientific theories appeared. These theories called into question the primacy of man and relegated him to the animal class, thereby greatly complicating the philosophical discourse on the animal being, in which French artists were also involved. In Grandville’s caricature, the juxtaposition of civilization and natural savagery moved to another level, serving not only to play on the commonplaceness of fellow citizens, topical scientific statements and physiognomic studies, but also to channel apocalyptic moods. By creating an otherworldly, mirror image of the human world in his zoomorphic drawings, the master concealed behind humour the speculation about its collapse. Fatalism is perceived in the images of beasts that have replaced humans, have taken their place and have governed their state; in the incorrigibility of characters and patterns of behaviour (predator — prey); and in the physical destruction of the world. This is most fully expressed in the “Un Autre Monde” cycle, whose goal was the need to create a new universe to replace the obsolete globe. Despite the obvious tragedy of such a vision, Grandville presented a sense of doom and imperfection in the form of amusing anthropomorphic animals.

Типология детских образов в современной бурятской детской литературе

The aim of the study is to determine the main types of children’s images that are typical of modern Buryat children’s literature. The scientific novelty lies in the creation of the first typology of children’s images in Buryat children’s literature. As a result, it was determined that children’s images in modern Buryat children’s literature can be classified by three references: in relation to human nature, to historical time and to folklore and literary tradition. Any image can be characterized from these three aspects. For each reference, all images are divided into two mutually exclusive groups: the image of a human child and the image of an anthropomorphic animal cub, the image of a modern child and the image of a child from the past, the original image of a child and the image borrowed from the previous tradition. Each of the two types in each pair can be combined with any other types, with the exception of the “image of a child borrowed from the tradition” type: this type occurs only in combination with the types “image of a human child” and “image of a child from the past”.

Witty Winds: Japanese Contributions to a Phenomenology of Laughter and Irony

ABSTRACT This paper explores philosophically the experiences of laughter and irony, focusing on Japanese sources but with a cross-cultural outlook. I ask whether globally unfavorable attitudes towards the comic in the European canon might have left unexplored or misunderstood several insights offered by the bodily and spiritual dimension revealed by laughter, and examine them through Japanese sources. Following a short but poignant triad of examples in Kuki Shūzō’s work, the paper analyses three instances of Japanese laughter and irony: the orgiastic laughter of the gods luring Amaterasu out of the Heavenly Cave in Kojiki; the anthropomorphic animal scrolls of Chōjūgiga, and the “Tiger Cubs Crossing” stone garden in Ryōanji, Kyoto, concluding how each one of them offers an important insight on the bodily and conceptual phenomenological cluster of laughter and irony. I conclude with a further exploration of laughter in Zen, a religious tradition with a unique stress on the spiritual potential of humor, following Nishitani’s reading of Mumonkan and his connection to the experience of “emptiness”.

Can classic moral stories with anthropomorphized animal characters promote children's honesty?

Moral stories featuring animal characters have historically been used to cultivate virtues in children. The present study examined whether moral stories with anthropomorphized animal characters are effective at promoting honesty in 3- to 6-year-old Singaporean children (N = 228). Honesty was assessed using the temptation resistance paradigm. Results showed moral stories had no effect on the honesty of 5- to 6-year-olds. In contrast, for 3- to 4-year-olds, the effectiveness of moral stories differed based on the type of character. Compared to a control story where wrongdoing occurred but truth-telling did not, moral stories featuring humans were effective at promoting honesty in 3- to 4-year-old children, while moral stories featuring anthropomorphized animals (elephants in Study 1; rats in Study 2) were not as effective as the moral stories featuring humans. The current study sheds light on how to modify classic moral stories to maximize their usefulness at promoting honesty.

Children Prefer Familiar Fantasy, but not Anthropomorphism, in Their Storybooks

ABSTRACT Children’s storybooks often contain fantasy elements, from dragons and wizards to anthropomorphic animals that wear clothes, talk, and behave like humans. These elements can impact children’s learning from storybooks both positively and negatively, perhaps due in part to their ability to capture children’s interest and attention. Prior research has found that children prefer realistic to make-believe stories, but little is known about children’s preferences for anthropomorphic characters. The present study examines U.S. children’s preferences for fantasy and anthropomorphism in storybooks. Seventy-two 4- to 6-year-old children (M = 65.74 months, SD = 10.84 months) were presented with 10 pairs of books (fantasy/anthropomorphic vs. realistic) and asked to select which book they liked better and why. Children chose fantasy but not anthropomorphic animal stories significantly more often than expected by chance. Children’s preferences were not related to age or gender, and they most often justified their choices with references to the storyline. Implications for creating and selecting media are discussed, since children learn best when learning materials align with their interests.

흥미의 발생과 지속을 위한 문학과 미술의 연계

Objectives This study aims to find ways to induce interest in elementary school students and to continue and deepen them through the connection between literature and art. Methods The familiarity of ‘anthropomorphized animals’ were related to students' interests, and the curriculum and textbooks of the Korean language and art were analyzed to derive implications for educational design for understanding and expression that cannot be dealed with only through written language. Results It was confirmed that the Korean language activities of Baekseok's poem <Frog`s One Pot Rice> remained in linguistic understanding rather than deepening students' interest and expanding their experiences. Literature and art can mutually contribute to the concreteness of emotions and expressions by sharing the context surrounding the work. It was suggested that educational convergence activities can be carried out through the use of the body's senses, character and stage making, and imaginative play, as well as activities related to verbal play and content understanding using materials of poetry. Conclusions By an educational convergence plan for literature and art activities through the medium of ‘anthropomorphized animals’, specific directions were suggested to lead, maintain, and deepen the interest of elementary school students.

Measurement and Correlates of Zoophilic Interest in an Online Community Sample.

Sexual interest in animals (zoophilia) is a scant investigated topic owing partially to difficulties in assessing the behavior outside of a clinical setting. While there have been previous attempts to categorize individuals with a sexual interest in animals into classification systems, this requires extensive clinical interviews and psychometric testing. Previous classifications also lack clarity on the adjacent concept of furryism (i.e., interest in anthropomorphized animals) and how it may be related to zoophilia. As there are currently no validated psychometric measures of zoophilia, individuals with a sexual interest in animals are a challenging population to research and may be underdetected in clinical settings. The central aim of the present study was to examine the measurement and correlates of sexual attraction to nonhuman animals through the development and refinement of psychometric and visual stimulus measures of animal sexual interest. Participants included 1,228 respondents (72% zoophilic and 35% furries; 67% men and 22.9% women) recruited from the online community. The results indicated that a Sexual Interest in Animals-Self-Report (SIA-SR) scale had four distinct subscales with excellent discrimination for self-reported zoophilia. Moreover, endorsement of sexual interest in horses and dogs from visual stimuli was most common among the individuals in the sample, while dog and horse sexual and romantic attractiveness ratings also had the largest and most consistent associations with SIA-SR scores and self-reported zoophilia. The results contribute to a greater understanding of the sexual interest patterns for persons with zoophilia and have implications for theory, future research, and clinical practice.

The Feast of the Fishes: Satire, Slavery and Romantic-Period Children’s Literature

The pseudonymously authored The Feast of the Fishes (1808) is one of several ‘papillonades’ published for children in the early nineteenth century. Like other papillonades, this short poem depicts anthropomorphic animals in order to offer a satirical perspective on the conventions of polite society. The poem’s playful mock-heroic tone is, however, undermined by its depiction of a shark in pursuit of a slave ship. The image of sharks following slave ships was a potent symbol in abolitionist discourse, but its appearance within this comedic context makes its intended impact difficult to discern. In what spirit is this disturbing image offered? How are readers to make sense of the scarcely veiled horror of what is being depicted both verbally and visually? Addressing these questions, this article reassesses the generic identity of children’s literature and its relationship to the satirical and political discourse of the Romantic period.

An Analysis of Olympic Mascot Design Toward Attitude and Purchase Intention

Olympic mascots are important marketing tools for the Olympic Games, as they can communicate the meaning of the games. However, there is limited understanding on how to effectively design Olympic mascots as a marketing communication tool. This study focused on understanding how design elements of Olympic mascots influence fans’ perceptions, attitude, and purchase intention. An online experiment, featured in a 2 (design types: anthropomorphic animal, abstract) × 2 (Olympic brand cues: presence, absence) mixed subject design, was conducted. The results showed that animal mascots received significantly higher ratings than abstract mascots in terms of design perception, attitude, and purchase intention. This study demonstrates how the visual design of Olympic mascots influences consumer perception, attitude, and behavior. Our research has bridged this gap by exploring the effects of Olympic mascot design and Olympic symbols as an important marketing communication tool.

Can the Non-Human Subaltern Speak? Addressing Injustice through Parakeets, Penguins and Blue Macaws

"Anthropomorphic animals have formed a staple part of the human imagination across space and time, creating a liminal space that offers scope for eco-critical narratives in which anthropomorphic animals offer a counter-gaze to human activities and environmental injustice. The purpose of this study is to look at the characters of Rio, Happy Feet, and Delhi Safari to highlight how talking animals in each of the three animated films voice environmental concerns, and to delineate linguistic factors which regulate the dynamics of power, agency, and care. The article looks at Delhi Safari, which centres on the non-humans’ use of the human tongue to voice their woes before human authority. At the same time, it aims to delineate human attempts to talk to birds in Rio and delve into the very idea of endangered animals being companion species. It seeks to shift from linguistic modes of communication to analyse the narrative and meta-narrative messages conveyed through the dancing penguins of Happy Feet. Finally, the article hopes to address the use and misuse of care by both humans and non-humans, look at the implicit anthropocentrism in such a depiction, and consider the possibility of a truly post-human form of environmental ethics. Keywords: eco-criticism, linguistic, environmental, post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, non-human, critical animal studies, semiotic, contact zone "

Becoming (Non)Human. Animal Representations in the ATU 514 Fairy Tale

"Within the rising ecocriticism in literary studies, a valuable resource for reconfiguring what it means to be (non)human is found in fairy tales, featuring animal agency, transspecies interactions, hybridities, and shapeshifting. With this in mind, the present paper tackles the nonhuman imaginary in the Romanian version of the ATU 514 tale type, i.e. shift of sex, which clearly deviates from the heroic pattern, since the protagonist is the emperor’s daughter, who is cross-dressed and then metamorphosed into Prince Charming. But does this relaxation of gender norms generate a similar disruption of the position of the animal in magical thinking? In a close reading of the fairy tale corpus, human-nonhuman animal relations are examined bidirectionally, focusing on the one hand, on the master initiator’s transbiology (the emperor disguised in animal form) and on the other hand, on two opposite anthropomorphic animals (the wise guide vs. the villain, the horse vs. the genie). Through a hybrid methodology, these transgressive possibilities are explored by combining ritualistic-anthropological, corporeal, and psycho-social aspects with current posthuman concerns. Overall, the analysis of such ontologically ambiguous narratives reveals one of the ways in which these old tales can still be read today to subvert traditional anthropocentric structures. Keywords: animal studies, fairy tales, posthumanism, ATU 514 tale type, human-animal relations "

Engaging the Ethics of the Future: The Aftertimes as Emotional, Material and Temporal Accumulation in the Spanish Animation Film Birdboy: The Forgotten Children

In this essay I analyze the critically acclaimed movie, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, a dystopic animated film based on the graphic novel Psiconautas. It takes place on an island populated by anthropomorphic animals, most of them young, who live in a time after an industrial accident destroyed the livelihood of its inhabitants. Birdboy and some of his friends try to escape their reality either by taking drugs or by attempting to abandon the island, but they are hunted by police, by the gang of rats that inhabits the dump, and by their hallucinations. In the end, although they do not achieve their goals, Birdboy and his friend Dinky reunite in an inner paradise. Drawing on various theoretical approaches, such as Hannah Arendt’s notion of new beginnings and Timothy Morton’s sustained project of ecological critique, I study the ways Birdboy represents time and engages with the ethics of the future. Birdboy’s universe is marked by emotional, physical, and temporal accumulation. The interconnection of sentient and non-sentient beings on the island shows the impact of legacies and the difficulty of creating radical new beginnings. Birdboy’s story is ultimately a call for responsibility for the future rooted in the awareness that everything leaves a trace.

Furry fandom, aesthetics, and the potential in new objects of fannish interest

Furry fandom has received little critical scholarly attention to date even though furries have populated the same spaces as other fandoms since the 1970s and engage in the same practices, including cosplay, fan art, and fan fiction. Yet furries deserve further study, particularly in light of the fandom's unique uniting feature: the object of fannish interest is an aesthetic. By deploying an aesthetic of anthropomorphic animals as text, furries broaden the notion of what an object of fandom can be and shed light on the sorts of transformative potential engagement that objects can have for fans. This argument, situated via a history of furry fandom in the 1970s, draws on fan-made sources, including today's furry art, to demonstrate how furry aesthetic manifests in real situations—and how furry aesthetic has the potential to broaden beyond studies of fans to queer and animal studies.

Frying nemo? Experimental evidence on anthropomorphism, animal ethics, and food choice

Recently, it has been suggested that a shift towards diets with a lower carbon footprints, especially ones that emphasize the consumption of plants, is necessary to keep global heating below 2 °C. To address demand for animal-based products, we analyze if the effectiveness of anthropomorphic food labeling as a strategy for promoting plant-based diets is contingent on strong animal ethical beliefs. To this end, we conduct a stated choice experiment with Chilean university students (N = 1538). We manipulate the visual display of the main component of the dish attribute of the choice tasks, using anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic icons to frame the choice of meal options. Our results, which are based on a mixed logit model of the choice data and a linear regression analysis of its individual random parameters, suggest that displaying anthropomorphic icons reduces the likelihood of choosing beef or chicken over vegetables. However, the data provides insufficient evidence to claim an influence on the choice of fish over vegetables. The ethical intuitions that anthropomorphic animals evoke are related to a reduction in the consumption of beef and chicken but do not appear to affect preferences for fish. Our findings support the hypothesis that strong ethical concerns reinforce the effect of anthropomorphic nudges on beef consumption. The results for chicken and fish were inconclusive.