'Animal is a mirror. A story that aims to ask questions about who we are rather than offering us answers about who he is. Thus, portraits of ordinary people in turn reflect a tired and silent man who seems to want to live without finding the world in which to do so. Is he the one that's broken or is it the world? And what can you hold on to to keep going? Through the different testimonies we will discover the project that he is willing to carry out to its last consequences. To do this, he resorts to several lawyers, until he finally finds one who agrees to bring a strange petition to the UN: his client wishes to renounce the status of Human Being.'
Animal is a book about man, a man we never get to meet during the story, one who has struggled to find his place in the world, one who doesn't know what he's supposed to do in life and who makes an extreme decision. He wants to renounce his status as a human being, and become an animal.
Whilst this concept is pretty interesting, and raises some big questions about what it means to be human, and what it means to exist in a world you don't feel that you belong in, it never really felt like it reached the point where it was really able to address any of these issues. This is largely because it felt like Colo, the writer and artist on the book, was trying to keep the central plot a mystery.
The book is written in a way that reminds me of a documentary film, with much of it given over to talking heads, as some unseen person is talking to people that have interacted with the central character at some point. These range from family, lovers, friends, to people who only have a passing familiarity with the man. They talk about how he seemed like a quiet man, one who kept to himself a lot, but one they never saw doing what he did.
This is how much of the book talks about this man, 'what he did', 'what he chose', 'what he wanted'. It's not until the final pages that the book even spells out that this man is trying to legally denounce his humanity, to be stripped of his human rights. The book either expects you to know this coming into it, or is revealing it in the final pages in an attempt at a shock revelation, but sadly, by then this 'mystery' had become so dull that I really didn't care too much.
The book seemed so intent on talking about the mans mission without saying what it was that it quickly became quite old, and any sense of mystery was quickly replaced with annoyance. I wanted the book to really go into this subject, to look at things from a bigger scope, to question what it means to be human, but it never really did. The fact that the book ends as a cliffhanger, without revealing if this man gets his wish or not, and what the effect of his case was on the rest of the world, resulted in me feeling like I'd wasted my time somewhat.
Okay, we do get a small sense of what this man was like, and his life, but by the end it felt like much of what this book covered could have been done in a fraction of the pages, and that the real bulk of the story, the part that piqued my interest has been relegated to a second volume. Whilst this might encourage some people to go and buy the second book, make them eager to read more, it did the opposite to me, and I found myself bored with the story. I'd love to pick up the next volume of Animal and get into the rest of the story, but I honestly don't know if it'll only cover another fraction of the narrative before stretching things out for another volume.
Whilst the central story of Animal is an interesting one, I felt like it never quite met the heights it could have, that it never lived up to its promise. Sadly, this means that I'm not sure I want to carry on with the book or not. I think a larger volume, one that encompasses more of the story, would serve the authors vision better than what we have here.
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