Abstract

This review considers three recent films that focus on the lives of captive exotic animals and the people who keep them: Water for Elephants , a fictional Hollywood feature, and the documentaries One Lucky Elephant and The Elephant in the Living Room . Despite their different motivations and target audiences, all three productions tell the stories of well-meaning people who take wild animals captive—most prominently elephants and lions—believing that only they can keep the animals safe and fulfilled. In each context, these people have profound, if self-interested, emotional attachments to their nonhuman captives. These three films, then, offer captive wild animals as ambivalent figures and cinematic loci for stories of human hubris and redemption