Animal (2021 TV series)

Plot

The series is an anthology: every episode is a self-contained story about one animal family, filmed on location and shaped into a narrative arc with a beginning, a crisis, and a resolution. Season 1 covers big cats, dogs, marsupials, and cephalopods.

Season 1

The first episode, narrated by Rashida Jones, follows the big cats. In Botswana's Okavango Delta, a mother lioness raises her cubs in a landscape transformed by the 2019 drought, which left weakened, desperate prey everywhere and produced conspicuously fat lions by 2020. Her story builds to a night hunt staged with the night-vision simulation technology Plimsoll had developed for Night on Earth. She makes a kill, then a family of hyenas arrives to take it from her. She holds her ground until the rest of the pride arrives and drives them off.

A leopard cub in Mumbai gets his first killing lesson when his mother delivers him a maimed but living adult warthog. With his small jaws he cannot nail the cat's classic choke-hold, and mum has to step in. The lesson carries real stakes: leopards are solitary, and an injury could leave a mother unable to feed herself. Mumbai's leopards survive largely by stealing food from bins outside people's homes after dark. The episode also follows a snow leopard pursuing an ibex along the edge of a Himalayan cliff. No animals are named, and the narrative steers away from overemotional sensationalism.

The second episode, narrated by Bryan Cranston, is about dogs. Cranston, a well-known dog lover, explains the hunting strategies of canine packs. The African wild dogs set off pre-sunrise on long missions, sometimes twice a day, to keep their growing pups fed. Their defining trait is cooperation at every level, including at the kill, where the youngest eat first and even sick and elderly pack members get priority.

The third episode, narrated by Rebel Wilson, follows a kangaroo joey growing up in Australia. Its comic set piece is a brawl between two male koalas over a female in a tree, a fight Wilson narrates with relish.

The fourth episode, narrated by Pedro Pascal, is about cephalopods and was widely judged the most colorful and audacious of the season. The production team framed the octopus as an alien, and Pascal's role in The Mandalorian made him a fitting choice to guide viewers through the life of a young giant Pacific octopus. Its problem-solving, camouflage, and intelligence make it, as one review put it, the closest thing we have to alien intelligence on Earth.

Season 2

Season 2, released on March 18, 2022, continues the formula with four more animal families: apes, birds of prey, bears, and dolphins, narrated respectively by Andy Serkis, Anthony Mackie, David Harbour, and Uzo Aduba. Each episode again follows a family through the trials of a year in the wild, from raising vulnerable young to competing for scarce food.

Characters

Because the series refuses to anthropomorphize, its characters are animal families rather than named individuals:

• The lioness of the Okavango, a mother balancing cub-rearing with hunting, whose night hunt and hyena standoff anchor the first episode.
• The Mumbai leopard mother, raising a cub in a city, who must teach him to kill without ever risking an injury that would leave a solitary hunter unable to feed herself.
• The African wild dog pack, a cooperative hunting machine in which even the oldest and sickest members eat first.
• The kangaroo joey and the young giant Pacific octopus, whose separate coming-of-age stories close out season 1.

Interpretations and controversies

The main debate around the series was critical rather than fan-driven: whether celebrity narration adds anything to a nature documentary at all. The Guardian's reviewer asked what Animal contributes to our understanding of the natural world beyond having celebrities do the voiceovers, and found some of the narration flat, concluding that David Attenborough still reigns. New Scientist took the opposite view, calling the series a must-see. Decider noted the show reuses night-vision technology from Plimsoll's own Night on Earth for the lioness sequence, and flagged that the TV-PG rating earns its letters, with tigers mating and big cats feasting on carcasses, blood coating the fur around their mouths; the reviewer thought the first episode might be too intense for children under 9.

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

Netflix greenlit season 2 before season 1 had even aired, and it premiered on March 18, 2022 with new narrators and four new animal families.