An engagingly oddball and gently philosophical examination into the relationship between humans and animals, Sally Jacobson and Tuva Bjork’s breezy, thoughtful and amusing Unanimal muses on how we have looked at animals over the years. Ironic, amusing and gently insightful, Unanimal offers an alternate way to look at how we share the planet.
The addition of actress and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini as narrator (she offers punchy insights now-and then, rather than dominating the film) helps reinforce the film’s more quirky qualities as it veers through the challenging and often absurd relationship between humans and animals.
The film skips across the world as it details animals and their interactions with mankind, sometimes dwelling on the uncomfortable (the skinning of a turkey is not an easy watch) as well as the amusing (from pandas to swimming polar bears), and while never offering firm conclusions or withering commentary it ultimately suggests that we should stop looking at animals, and let them look at us.
A series of vignettes set the tone. A cat gives birth to a bunch of kittens; an elderly couple play with their dog; a man explains the resilience of his cockroach; a woman bonds with her menagerie in her sitting room, which includes dogs, cats, two parrots (named Jackie and Jakob) and a small horse; and a dog named Yoda (with a camera on his collar) that walks through a city with his chatty owner.
The film then pivots to black-and-white archival archive footage of vast herds of elephants on the plains and of hunters heading into the bush to kill them, before changing tack again with footage of a large cargo plane landing at a Finnish airport as pandas Lumi and Pyry arrive from China and are delivered to Ähtäri Zoo, Finland’s oldest natural wildlife park.
A group of young French women in wetsuits who work with dolphins at a water show muse that “animals are true, they are sincere” before the film cuts to a dog show; sheep being judged; horses being sold for thousands of euros and then being loaded onto large cargo airplanes (where they exercise and are well looked after) to take part in buggy racing events around the world.
A police dog is wrangled by its handler; dogs chase rats in garbage; rats roam through a maze, and a pig is inseminated before the film reverts back to panting domestic dogs. In the narration Isabella Rossellini tells the story of a hospice in Rhode Island where a cat named Oscar jumped up and lay down by a patient a few hours before that person died. The cat did the same thing with 25 more patients before patient deaths, and as a response staff began contacting families as soon as their ill relatives start to receive special attention from the cat.
To an extent Unanimal might be perceived as slight and certainly it could easily have been expanded and driven by a narrative arc, but the film is ironic, amusing and gently insightful. What’s more, it aims to deliver its message in creative fashion as it muses on how humans have developed into the dominant ‘animal,’ leading to increasingly complex relationships with the myriad birds, beasts and insects we share the planet with.
Sweden-France, 2025, 72mins
Dirs/cinematography: Sally Jacobson, Tuva Bjork
Production: Story, Cinephage
International sales: Open Kitchen Films
Producers: Victor Ede, Tobias Janson, Melissa Lindgren
Scr: Sally Jacobson, Tuva Bjork, Zara Kjellner
Editor: Neil Wigardt
Music: Marek Hunhap
With: (narrator) Isabella Rossellini
