ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media, Creative, and Cultural Industries
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1483941
This article is part of the Research TopicMedia, Racism, Speciesism: Issues and Solutions for Creaturely Racism in the AnthropoceneView all 7 articles
Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism Test (MARS Test) Finds Oscars So AnthropoScenic in Contemporary Animated Films
Provisionally accepted
- 1Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
- 2Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, United States
- 3Lund University, Lund, Skane County, Sweden
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Animation transfers human races into animals, serving as a prime site for speciesism and racism. Testing this observation on recent examples, our quantitative/qualitative study delves into a nine-year (2016-2024) span of Oscar-nominated animated feature and short films. We theorize how to make incisive, quantitative/qualitative, balanced trans-species intersectionality the foundation of critical research on racism and speciesism. We offer the Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism Test (MARS test), a practical tool accessible to scholars, creators, and general viewers for analyzing character portrayals and interactions, helping identify and challenge normalized racist and speciesist storylines. The MARS test is for anyone who is interested in ways film and other media offer questionable implications regarding racism and speciesism that call for accountability.ven the most exciting scholarship to emerge … does not address animality as … a humanist construct that is also or especially … race/ist..." -M. Shadee Malaklou, "Critical Animal Studies has a Race Problem." (2020) "Animals show the truth about a country. … If people behave brutally toward Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all."-Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)
Keywords: Racism1, Speciesism2, Oscars3, intersectionality4, Animated Film5, Anthropocene6, Environmental Justice7, Academy Awards8
Received: 04 Sep 2024; Accepted: 14 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Khazaal, Gorsevski and Linné. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Natalie Khazaal, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 30332, Georgia, United States
Ellen Gorsevski, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, United States
Tobias Linné, Lund University, Lund, 221 00, Skane County, Sweden
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