Anthropomorphic Animals, A Primer

I've decided to do a periodic feature of something that's long interested me: anthropomorphic animals that themselves have animal companions. More particularly, the animal companions (often pets) are themselves not anthropomorphic, serving as a bizarro parallel to our own world. Imagine it like a human having a human pet that doesn't act as a human, but more like a wolf boy. I find the anthropomorphism/normal companion situation fascinating and somewhat unsettling.

This feature will, over time, explore various examples of this phenomenon, mostly in TV and film. For now, however, I'd like to just get into some common characteristics of anthropomorphic characters. I'm going to refer to anthropomorphic animals as "anthros" for the rest of this post for simplicity's sake.

There are many variations of anthros, but in generally they share a few characteristics:

• human thoughts and actions
• often they have the ability to walk upright
• they can usually speak (in whatever language the audience uses)

There are also many variations on the anthro theme. For example, though the anthros often can walk on two feet regardless of the representative animal's anatomy, there is wide variation among anthros when it comes to whether they wear clothes or not. Even when anthros wear some form of clothing, they often will wear a shirt and remain pantless. I suppose this trend goes to the fact that, while anthros are given almost fully humanized qualities, they remain based on animals whose nudity doesn't matter.

Additionally, the mental capacity of anthros exists on a continuum. Some anthros are fully capable of interacting with human characters. Others are able to only communicate through animalistic sounds and human-like gestures. In between these two extremes is the section of anthros that can communicate only with fellow anthros. These may be animals that appear wholly normal to humans but in fact speak in human language when communicating with one another. 

Anthropomorphic animals are most often represented through cartoons--likely because of the difficulty in representing live-action animals as having human characteristics without the use of expensive CGI--but this is not a requirement. As this feature continues in future posts, it is my hope that I can analyze anthropomorphism in an interesting way. As I said in the opening, I'm most interested in anthros that themselves have pets (that are usually not anthropomorphic, or are at least less human than their owner). 

Next in the series: Rocko and Spunky from Nickelodeon's Rocko's Modern Life nicktoon.