Comedy | 15 October 2021

"Animal Antics" is an absurdist take on the effects of the Anthropocene, from the perspective of a woman and her talking dog Whoopsie on a trip to the zoo. The film is set a few years into the future, when 'The Wild' is no more, its last animal remnants confined to safari parks and zoos. As Sarah and Whoopsie do the rounds of the cages and pens, the dog leaves a trail of increasingly off-beam, off-colour comments, revealing itself as both absurdly precocious and deeply prejudiced. Whoopsie's remarks reflect less on man's best friend than humankind itself, our preoccupation with supremacy and dominance at the expense of the world in which we exist. A hybrid of Desmond Morris, Johnny Morris and Chris Morris, Goddard's film is a surreal, black-comic tour de force in which the anthropomorphic antics of man’s best friend offer up a deathly accurate mirror of mankind's very worst traits.