‘Animality’ review: Ai Weiwei explores our often shocking relationship with animals

Dir/scr: Ai Weiwei. Germany. 2025. 122mins

In China, men armed with poles work as a team to club to death the urban street dogs. A camel market in Egypt sees the animals hobbled, while the men assault the creatures with sticks and whips to further break their spirit. In Denmark, farmed mink sentenced to death as part of the country’s Covid response claw frantically at the glass window of a mobile gas chamber. Artist, activist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei has never been someone to shy away from strong material in the service of making his point. But since the point of his latest documentary seems to be that humanity’s capacity for cruelty towards other living creatures is pretty much limitless, this is a frequently shocking and profoundly upsetting viewing experience.

Frequently shocking and profoundly upsetting 

The picture, which explores our complex relationship with animals, is a further examination of themes previously explored by the Beijing-born, Berlin-based filmmaker. There is common ground with his 2009 film Calico Cat, about the rescue of some 400 felines that were being trafficked to supply China’s underground cat meat trade (the director subsequently adopted 40 of the animals). Animality also has thematic parallels with the scenes of starving animals in The Human Flow (2017) which were shot in “the world’s worst zoo”, Khan Younis Zoo in Gaza.

Yet the impact and scale of Animality, which tends to dwell on the abusive end of the spectrum when it comes to the relationship between humans and animals, is daunting and difficult to fully comprehend. As such, while Ai Weiwei’s name and reputation will ensure further festival exposure, this picture might prove to be a tough sell to theatrical audiences.

Working with local cinematographers around the world, Weiwei casts a dispassionate eye over aspects of human/animal relations in China, Brazil, Denmark, Indonesia, Myanmar, Norway and Pakistan. Not all of the material contains abuse: Tibetan nomadic herdsmen, whose lives are dependent on the health of their cattle, take turns waking during a brutal winter’s night to keep their animals moving so they don’t freeze to death. And the Indonesian island people have an ancestral respect for the creatures of the sea, and a code of conduct when it comes to hunting whales and dolphins (no more than six harpoons are permitted on a fishing trip). Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the film shows a rare instance of animals getting the upper hand, with a community blighted by the aftermath of a swarm of locusts.

For the most part, however, whether the relationship is shaped by tradition (the hunting of migrating birds in a valley in China; the processing of imported donkeys into some kind of foul-looking health-giving gelatinous candy in Chinese medicine) or modern industrialised practices (we spend a lot of time in a Brazilian abattoir and meat processing plant, watching as cows get dismantled into their constituent parts), the animals tend to get a raw deal of it.

The film’s approach is neutral and as non-judgemental as it’s possible to be, given the graphic nature of the material. There is no musical score; footage is presented with little more than a title identifying the locations and, in some cases, a sparse snippet of narration from one of the people involved. But this does mean that there is a lack of context for many of the stories. We learn, for example, that many of the working elephants in Myanmar are at risk of unemployment, but nothing more than that – the question of what, exactly, this means for the future of one of these animals is left open.

Also missing from the film is any suggestion of what we do with this information. The idea, perhaps, is to encourage the audience to live ethically and consciously when it comes to the creatures with whom we share the planet. But such is the violence of some of the footage, the risk is that it leaves us traumatised, numbed and defeated