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Part of
Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 52–70

Chapter 4
Exploring animality and childhood in stop-motion animation Prokofiev’s Peter & the Wolf

| University of Glasgow | Roehampton University

This chapter presents animality as a way to illuminate interconnected relations between children and animals in film through an analysis of stop-motion animation Prokofiev’s Peter & the Wolf (Templeton 2006), adapted from a symphonic fairy tale by Sergei Prokofiev (1936). It argues for animality as a core concept in preserving animal essence and credibility while exploring how animal characters integrate the human and nonhuman. Interdependence between animals and children is considered through notions of “significant otherness” (Haraway 2003) and “childhoodnature” (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Malone, and Barratt Hacking 2020). The chapter also examines how the film’s material qualities accentuate its production of animality.

Keywords: stop motion animation, animality, childhoodnature, natureculture, the Anthropocene
Article outline
  • Understanding animality
  • “Childhoodnature” and “after childhood”
  • Animals in animation
  • Visual and musical depictions of animality
  • Companionship, playfulness, humor, and death: Preserving animal integrity
  • Developing childhoodnature encounters and celebrating animality
  • Conclusion
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.04gho
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