Animals

This Canadian documentary follows filmmaker Jason Young's attempts to take up an agricultural lifestyle and raise his own barnyard animals—with the goal of slaughtering them for food. Young's initial reluctance to harm the cows, pigs, sheep, and rabbits in his care is overcome much quicker than he anticipated, and during the course of the film, he castrates one pig, kills another (which becomes the main course at a barbecue), clubs a rabbit to death, and prepares to fatally shoot a calf. Ultimately, Young can't pull the trigger on the calf, but he is able to load it into a truck and drive it to a slaughterhouse for its merciless demise (which Young has no qualms about capturing on camera). The film's graphic depiction of animal killings will easily put anyone off meat, which may or may not be the point of it—although the film makes it equally clear that farm animals should not be equated with domestic house pets. But its harrowing depiction of how tonight's dinner makes the journey from living-breathing creature to butchered carcass nonetheless plays as an indictment of man's cruelty to animals, even if Young isn't willing to specifically call it that. In fact, it is often difficult to understand just what Young had in mind with this film: is it pro-animal, pro-farming, or just pro-Young? The imagery here will upset many people, but the film's inability to find a central point may bother viewers even more. Not a necessary purchase. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)