I'm pretending Jessica is talking about 2001.

Bwah! Maybe I was...

speaking of source material. Have you read the original Bambi?

It's right up there with Johnny Got His Gun as most effective anti-war screed ever. I've got a 1945 edition translated from the French. (Felix Salton, fyi)

I sincerely do not know how Disney when from Salton's words to Bambi splay-legged across a pond. Nor, how they glossed over what happened to the real Thumber. I'm not even kidding when I say it is brutal.

Oh no! Bambi is sad enough as it is!

Seriously. But the original is painful. One of those things you are glad you read because it really makes you think, but not an annual favorite, if you know what I mean.

Hm. It's been a while. Must re-read.

ACK! No. I can't watch Bambi. I can't watch anything with animals, unless I know it is Happy! Shiny! I just can't deal.

Even Marley & Me-- leaving aside the fact that I cannot abide either Jennifer Aniston or Owen Wilson, there's just no way I'd go see that movie, what with all the warnings of the heart-string tugging at the end.

Let's put it this way-- during Independence Day? When the big fireball was roaring down the tunnel? I was frantically yelling in the theatre for the puppy to JUMP out of the way. Lewis was sitting next to me muttering, "Millions of people have been incinerated and you're worried about the dog."

I'm with Barb. The most traumatic moment of Apocalyspe Now, for me, involved an animal, not humans!

I don't know what it is, but animals in peril onscreen reach my emotions far more directly and uncomplicatedly than people in peril.

StY is ADHD, and as a very young child he failed to be sympathetic towards other children, long after that developmental point should have been reached. He would hit and kick and laugh about it, unable to imagine how it would feel being on the other side of the battle. But an animal on tv in peril? Tears would roll. It was one way I was able to help him learn sympathy for humans.

I liked Wall-E a lot, especially compared with Robots, which left me feeling a niggling sense of ooog. But I did watch both with distracting kids that led me away from any analysis. I'd like to see it again to try to view it critically.

Though I kept thinking my brother's laptops were rebooting throughout the dvd.

Barb, Sophia I've thrown books about fucking brutal genocide across the room for mentions of animal cruelty. It rather embarrasses me, because I find the human-on-human brutality offensive, but I can endure it. Critters-not-of-the-eating? I go nonlinear. And that disturbs me about me. I guess I could claim it a protectorate thingie, but that's a stretch.

I, too, have major issues with movies that mess with animals. I think it's because they don't really have the ability to make choices that would lead them to whatever fate. The deal, as far as domesticated animals are concerned, is that we take care of them, in exchange for them warning off predators, or killing mice, or whatever.

Conversely, the dog jumping to safety in the nick of time ahead of the blazing fireball was the moment that Independence Day made me yell "OH COME ON!" when I'd already suspended enough disbelief to buy alien invaders, Margaret Colin being Jeff Goldblum's ex, and the Air Force ever letting Randy Quaid into a cockpit without a rag and windex to clean the canopy.

I'd have had Fido's flaming skeleton finish his leap into that maintenance tunnel.