Comments on: The Bechdel Test & An Animal-Friendly Film List

By: Because the world needs more vegan superheroes, » V for Vegan: easyVegan.info

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:51:19 +0000

[...] more cow flesh in my chili, but I just couldn’t help it. For reals! After a few months of contemplation, and a few more spent trolling the internets, I realized that POP! might actually fill a (gasp!) [...]

By: Biff! Bam! Kapow! (And welcome!) » POP! goes The Vegan.

Biff! Bam! Kapow! (And welcome!) » POP! goes The Vegan. — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:56:13 +0000

[...] it might be fun to collect all my movie reviews in one place, thus creating a sort of “animal friendly film list.” Though slow to come to fruition, the idea quickly ballooned, resulting in what you see [...]

By: Kelly G.

Kelly G. — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:46:59 +0000

@ neil – I smell a group blog!

By: neil

neil — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:08:27 +0000

Now, on the idea of the vegan test list itself…
I’m not convinced on its usefulness. Personally, I think the Bechdel test serves a purpose because some people seem to think sexism doesn’t exist anymore and having a very low bar test like Bechdel’s failing so often is a way to raise questions about that (as you said, it’s more about representation of women than feminism/sexism, but still).

For animal rights, I’m not convinced that we’re far enough along that it’s useful to start raising questions, because I think it’s obvious that animal rights are, well, not really an issue for most everybody. I guess my feeling is that what the list would prove is already very obvious to everybody: rights of animals suck and that’s represented in the media too.

Of course, it would have other uses (e.g. CJB’s example on the bunny shoot scene), but for that I think just a blog post per movie for example would do just fine. No fancy database needed :-)

By: Kelly G.

Kelly G. — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:22:27 +0000

Thanks for the clarification, neil!

By: neil

neil — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:25:15 +0000

The database appears to be mostly user-generated; users can add a movie to the existing list (”suggest” might be a more accurate term, as it has to be approved by the site admin),

Just to clarify, I approve all actual movies that are submitted, the approving is just to prevent spam.

By: CJB

CJB — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:58:00 +0000

I agree with Eric as well.

Just last night with friends I thought about this while watching Bruno. I expected to be offended by Bruno but I had no idea there would be a hunting scene in which a rabbit was shot!! It was so upsetting that I would from this point on check a database before going to a movie in the future.

By: Kelly G.

Kelly G. — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:31:45 +0000

That’s a good point, Eric.

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:10:23 +0000

My thought is that the very basic minimum standard for an animal-friendly film list would be that the film does not exploit animals in order to be produced. In other words, if an animal is used by the filmmakers in a live action film, the film fails.

By: Kelly G.

Kelly G. — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 02:15:50 +0000

I’m loving the Bechdel Test Movie List! I’d love to contribute more than the three films I initially added, but it’s ridiculously hard to remember whether the two women in the film (assuming there were two) actually spoke directly to one another. Gonna have to keep a notebook on the coffee table from here on out.