![]() ![]() ![]() It also demonstrates how natural imagery is being depressed by material culture and how urbanisation, due to human action and desire, is overtaking nature through the loss of habitat, misplacement of animals and clinical control of ‘wilderness’. The symbolism of a concrete turtle struggling to support a heavy platform with a plant pot sitting comfortably on top instantly establishes a physical hierarchy of the human-animal relationship where humans objectify and manipulate animals as material and aesthetic commodities to establish themselves at the head of the hierarchy of life. As the first ornament presented, it is significant as it epitomises the human perception of animals in the film as something with little value beyond aesthetic. Perhaps most haunting is the concrete turtle almost identical to Verne. On entering the garden, Verne’s horrified realisation of being an animal in a human environment is immediately captured close up by a low-level camera shot when he is confronted with towering animal ornaments. Some three hundred and fifty years on Over The Hedge tries to find a compromise between the harmonious existence of humans alongside animals but again struggles to do so. However, this begs the question of how humans should interact with nature Marvell warns away from ruining nature’s originality but offers no alternative. Marvell warns against meddling with natures order as its wilderness is absolute. Here in much of the same way as Over the Hedge, human manipulation over the natural environment becomes so refined that the ‘flowers themselves were taught to paint’. This concept reworks ideas in Andrew Marvell’s pastoral poetry such as The Mower Against Gardens which explores the garden as a space for the brutal control of nature. A far cry from the overgrown animal-populated wood, the suburban garden represents a natural environment controlled by humans, a place where that which is considered wild or ‘other’ is disciplined.ĭivided by the hedge, an encapsulation of the boundary that humans wish to sustain between themselves and living animals, it is in the garden where the cruel human imagination and disregard for animals becomes overtly clear. After Verne, an anxious turtle, breaks through the boundary of the manicured hedge he enters a pristine garden on the periphery of a middle class suburbia. ![]()
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