Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

Napoleon Dynamite

Napoleon Dynamite. Jared Hess, 2004.

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Edition screened: 20th Century Fox DVD, released 2007. English language. Runtime approximately 86 minutes.


Summary: Indifference to animal cruelty.


Details: At 16:10 Napoleon watches the elderly farmer across the road raise a shotgun to a cow’s head. A passing school bus blocks our view of the killing, and instead we see the reaction of the grade-school children on the bus and hear the gun blast at 16:23 and.


Napoleon repeatedly mistreats his grandmother’s pet llama, seemingly a gentle and kind animal, by flinging the animal’s food into the ground. Napoleon also takes a job at an egg-laying facility where the horrible conditions in which the chickens are kept is a background for some quick physical comedy.


Napoleon Dynamite does not show injury to animals, but the creators clearly think the terrible ways animals are treated in the real world is good material for some quick comedy.


The drawings and music in this film indicate that the creators know about Daniel Johnston. 


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