Hello WF Community, I'm looking for book titles of stories in which animals have human thoughts/actions and abilities. Like Mrs Frisby...NIMH, Animal Farm etc.
There's Watership Down. There's also Planet of the Apes, exploring issues of slavery and racism. It was based on a novel, though I haven't read it and have no idea how good it is. A side noteāPink Floyd did an excellent concept album called Animals, based on Animal Farm.
Of course there are the classics (not novels, each is a series of brief wisdom tales) The Fables of Aesop and Uncle Remus : his songs and his sayings. Both ostensibly for children, but a lot can be learned from them.
search David Sedaris squirrel seeks chipmunk he's done loads of stuff. If possible listen to him read a story, well worth it. MartinM.
In seeking info on talking animals, and in particular their psychological meanings, I discovered this book: The Archetypal Symbolism of Animals by Barbara Hannah (not to be confused with Hanna Barbera, which did many cartoons with talking animals). She was a student of Jung and quotes him quite a bit (I just bought the Kindle version). This might not be the kind of info you're looking for, but it really floats my boat. As a follower of Jung myself I believe folk tales and fairy tales largely originated from dreams, waking visions, or fantasies stemming from the unconscious*, and it make sense that animals in these tales represent our instincts. Just by reading the Look Inside you can at least get a good idea of what the book covers. I can easily believe that dogs in these kinds of tales represent our doggish instincts, and cats our cattish ones, and so on. * And also that people inventing such tales in those pre-scientific times would draw largely from their own instinctive understanding of the world, and would naturally use animal characters to represent whatever it is those particular animals seem to embody.
And of course you can always refer to online collections of Grimm's or Hans Christian Andersen. Here's a nice page featuring a bunch of Grimm's fairy tales: Folk Tales Online. Many of them feature clever or talking animals.
Charlotte's Web. There was also a story, I forget the title, about farm animals with rules they wrote on the side of the barn. But only a few could read(?) and the rules kept changing, becoming more severe and restrictive. Never mind, that's Animal Farm.
Is that the 80s underground spoof porno where the beautiful lady spider gets magnum opus'd and then eats him?