Creatures That Portray Humans
Most people in the industries of professional illustration, cartooning, and animation refer to these types of creature characters as talking creatures or funny animals. However, the mainstream news media and members of furry fandom sometimes refer to this variety of talking creatures as furries. The earliest example of talking creatures portraying humans, as opposed to talking creatures portraying creatures, was in Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra (Fables of Bidpai), which was set in a world of talking creatures who represent human morals and behavior. A good Western example of the genre is Henryson's Fabillis. The webcomic "Anima: Age of the Robots" (Anima (webcomic)) uses anthropomorphism to portray an alternate world as modern as ours, but inhabited by creature-lookalikes. The intelligent robots they have made rebel and threaten the creatures. This serves as a warning to mankind's thoughtless pursuit of technological advancement. The graphic novel Seven Years in Dog-Land uses talking dogs from a land of dogs to portray human society's ills and their abuse of the environment.
Read more about this topic: Talking Animals In Fiction, Analysis
Famous quotes containing the words creatures that, creatures, portray and/or humans:
“Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Upon the creatures we have made,
We are, ourselves, at last, dependent.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyse the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior—bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper—it’s possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother’s impending visit.”
—Mary Arrigo (20th century)