The Cultural Aftershock of the Anthropocene: Natural Habitat Shorts and the Animated Realm of Zoo-Phenomenology

In The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (2016), Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz challenge the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a sudden de- historicised awakening, advocating for a re-politicisation of its extensive history. Despite the long-standing past of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, the cultural and political aftershock of this concept — termed by Lynn Keller (2017) as 'the self- conscious Anthropocene'— is considerably more recent. Over the last two decades, a vast body of academic work has been inspired by the Anthropocene and significant attention has been devoted to our relationship with non-human animals (Gabardi 2017; Haraway 2016; Lorimer 2015; The Human Animal Research Network 2015; Tønnessen, Oma and Rattasepp 2016). Whilst ample critical work delved into animal representations in literature, art, and popular culture (see Kalof, Mattes and Fitzgerald for an extensive bibliography), animation received limited scholarly attention (Bliss 2017, Peterson 2013, Phillips 2016, Wells 2008, Whitley 2012). My presentation aims to address this gap by offering an ecocritical investigation of a selection of short- animated videos of the series Natural Habitat Shorts (NHS), created by Brennan Brinkley, Tyler Kula and Nicole Low. These animations for adults, which can be watched on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, actively contribute to ‘the nonhuman turn’ (Grusin 2015) of popular culture. They evoke a ‘multispecies storyworld’ (Herman 2018), where humans are notably absent and animals occupy a primary position, serving as the exclusive experiencing subjects in the depicted events. Most notably, NHS attempts to grant access ‘to the actual biological, communal, individual, and even personal realities of other beings’ (Waldau 2013), interweaving all-too-human situations with the factual nuances of the phenomenological life experienced by a variety of animal species. In NHS, the imaginative reintroduction of wildlife into humanity’s habitat not only deconstructs cultural misconceptions about the non-human, but also, by extending narrative boundaries into the realm of zoo-phenomenology, challenges human-centred perspectives and pushes ethical boundaries.