From the kennel with love

Let us pass over the Rin Tin Tin, Rex, Lassie, Beethoven, White Fang and the Disney-esque Pongo, Aristocats and Cheshire Cats who already have Oscars in our childhood hearts. Let's also overlook today's four-legged stars, who do the catwalks together with humans (see Richard Gere with Hakiko). And let's focus on the quadrupeds that have played a fundamental role for some great directors and actors, giving, in fact, voice to an expressive urge or helping its expression.

In Addio al linguaggio Jean-Luc Godard in 2014 had used his beloved dog Roxy to convey a feeling of frustration and loss of orientation in the world, the realisation and acceptance of an overwhelming sense of incommunicability, produced by the shattering of the civilisation of the word. Leading the director's astonished observation of digitisation, of the looming era of narcissistic and aestheticising images, are the wanderings of Roxy, who lapses into the relationship between a man and a woman who love each other but do not understand each other. Her magical presence brings back the profound meaning of existence in a radical and experimental film that entrusts animals with the task of saving the world, brutalised and embodied, as immanent creatures, unharmed by vanity and close to truth.

In the same year, an innovative and revolutionary Hungarian director, Kornél Mundruczó (author of the unforgettable film about the Holocaust, That Day You Will Be, 2021), sent a political message to the ultra-right-wing government, led by Viktor Orbán, through the story of a pack of stray dogs that retaliates against the imposition in Hungary of a tax on the owners of non-purebred dogs, effectively inviting them to get rid of them. White God - Symphony for Hagen is the title of that strange film that won Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Another Luc, without the Jean, whose surname is Besson, after asking Matteo Garrone to use the same title of one of his 2018 films, brings Dogman, a black fable with a strong personal charge, to our screens in 2023. The protagonist is a paraplegic outcast (Caleb Landry), who lives in symbiosis with a pack of dogs that he trains and through which he intervenes to solve cases of injustice. Besson's lonely childhood, lived in symbiosis, after his parents' divorce, with his dog Socrates, is featured in the film.

The other Dogman, Garrone's, has the same thriller vein as Besson's, but is originated by the chronicle, the crime of the dog groomer, whose protagonist is a dog groomer, who juggles between a legitimate job and dealing. Just as in The Embalmer (2002), the film that had launched Garrone, where again the starting point was animals, but here stuffed. It was, on the other hand, a physical nostalgia that inspired Tim Burton for Frankenweenie, in which his dog Pepe takes the form of Sparky, hit by a car, who comes back to life thanks to his master's galenic experiments. Gothic stop-motion style and a lot of sweetness from the director most fond of the poetry of the afterlife.

Wes Anderson, on the other hand, uses The Isle of Dogs to entrust his harshest, most metaphorical and pessimistic film to animation, dear to childhood, in which four-legged creatures reproduce human ferocity, which goes beyond defence and hunger, in the island-dump, where the dogs are confined. Of opposite sign, Flow-A World to Save by Gints Zilbalodis, where animals are the protagonists of an escape during a biblical flood and have animalistic movements. This is what makes it special, for its detachment from the prevailing Disney-style humanisation.