By Cynthia Chris, City University of New York
According to The Hollywood Reporter, it’s a trend that’s been building for at least 25 years, and it’s largely due to a mix of activism and technological advances, which I’ve observed in my studies of animals on screen.
But even before these recent events, there were calls for Hollywood to radically reduce its dependence on animal actors.
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its sequels have used motion-capture, with humans performing the movements of characters later rendered as chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutangs.
Undoubtedly, there are trainers who care deeply for their charges and uphold best practices in animal husbandry. But it stands to reason that the fewer captive animals, the better, and recent advances in AI have made visual effects and CGI even more realistic and easier to model.
The team behind the 2025 version of Superman, for example, sought to create a realistic dog, right down to each scruffy patch of fur. But they needed it to defy gravity and other laws of physics. So they incorporated just enough live animal in preproduction to animate a mostly CGI creature, with director James Gunn’s own dog serving as the ‘model,’ or ‘reference,’ for the superdog, Krypto.
Future opportunities for trainers and their charges appear to rest on just how good visual effects can get. For some animal activists – not to mention the animals that have no say in their work – that day can’t come soon enough.
