Spring Research Project:
Brainstorming Primary Sources
To explore various possibilities to write about, I've considered where animals are present in my life. If I choose something that is prevalent in my life, then I'll be interested in researching it and writing 12 to 15 pages about it.
First, I thought about using an animated Disney movie as my primary source because many of them use animals to teach lessons. Then I could research how animals can teach humans lessons, especially in children's movies. So I browsed a list of Disney animated films and picked out The Emperor's New Groove, in which the main character gets transformed from a human to a llama and he learns a lesson about humility. Following this theme, I had also considered the movie Ratatouille because it displays a mutually beneficial relationship between a rat and a human, and perfectly exemplifies an animal that teaches a human. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there would be enough scholarly sources about these animated movies, so I decided to consider other options.
Since I live in San Diego, I thought it'd be interesting to look at the San Diego Zoo and Seaworld, which display a different relationship between humans and animals than Disney movies do. The act of placing animals in captivity and caring for them show how humans have control over many life forms, including animals. Humans put animals on display in an unnatural habitat while also caring for them. While considering this as a topic, one last option popped into my head.
When I was younger, I went on a trip with my family to Idyllwild, California. While up in the mountains, I learned about Smokey Bear, an iconic figure created by the U.S. Forest Service to tell people about the importance of preventing forest fires. This got me thinking about all the different ways that we use animal symbolism to convey a message -- in advertising, public service announcements, or company logos, to name a few. I think this is something I could write about because animal symbolism is used widely to communicate a message to humans rather than using human iconography. Animal icons and characters are more relatable to a wider audience than human characters would be.
One of the topics we discussed in this quarter was similar to my original idea about how animals teach humans lessons. We studied Marie de France's Fables, which use animal characters to represent human figures to convey a moral lesson. This is similar to the use of animals in Disney movies to teach a lesson to a young audience. However, since we've discussed this idea already, I'd like to research something that we haven't talked about in class before.
One of the difficulties I've already encountered was that I need to be able to find scholarly articles about my topic. I'm worried that if I use an animated film as my primary source, and center my research around it, there wouldn't be a large enough scholarly conversation about that topic. Now that I've shifted my focus to animal symbolism in human culture, I'm more confident in my ability to find scholarly sources on this topic, and I am excited to research this further throughout the quarter.