BECOMING ANIMAL NOW

One of the more visual and spiritual films that made its Toronto premiere at the Planet in Focus Film Festival was the film Becoming Animal.   It is an extensive collaboration between Emma Davies, radical writer and philosopher David Abram, and Canada’s own Peter Mettler who is a visionary filmmaker.  The film which would have many filmmakers and its audience calling it experimental is rather an audiovisual journey to the Grand Teton Park in North America which allows you to immerse yourself into the film.  It makes you question whether or not you are looking upon other animals such as elk or snails or whether or not they are looking at you as if you are an animal yourself.  Through the soothing and meditative voice of David Abram, this cinematic journey actually makes you question your interconnectedness with the rest of the world which includes all the elements of the Earth that film focuses on in Grand Teton Park.  This cinematic visual storytelling will let you become more aware of your position and behaviour on this Earth and make you look at your own ecological footprint in your own surroundings.  With this type of platform comes an understanding of how we can reassess ourselves to better our environment.

Like a single cell in an organism or a star in the galaxy, David Abram emphasizes, through his visual storytelling, that there is much intrinsic value in everything that surrounds us.  Even though the written word and technology was supposed to give names to everything and were to bring everyone closer together has actually brought us away from the natural world.  Technology has made us look at things a lot more different and this is the reason as to why Becoming Animal was made.   Rather than looking at the importance the sound of water is making and what it means to us and how we connect to it, we are just enjoying the visual and sound.  Rather than looking at the behaviour of elk and how it is important to study their behaviour and how we can learn from it, we just enjoy watching them move.  Rather than listening to the sound of the wind like the Earth is breathing or communicating with us, we just notice that it is windy.  These anecdotes that Becoming Animal presents in the film takes your mind and soul to become like the water, or the wind or the elk and to see how humans behave.  This may sound like its unheard of but it is the only manner to which we can understand our connection to the environment.

It may be ironic that Emma Davies, David Abram, and Peter Mettler are using technology to warn you about the disconnect that we have had with the natural world because of technology.  But since our dependency of technology has surpassed to levels where even humans are becoming inhuman and evolving to a human of the future where we would look at humans of today as an animal, this is the only manner to which we would understand what Becoming Animal is all about and the primary message that the film is conveying.  When Abrams discusses that people’s vehicles start to look like them more and more, we must become aware that perhaps our phones and our tablets or computers start looking like us as well.  If our technology starts to resemble humans rather than us resembling the natural world around us then all red flags shall be raised meaning it is time to start doing things is now.  Becoming Animal questions us existentially in ways that we have never seen before.