How about excluding animals that speak in complete sentences? Scooby Doo and Odie are non-anthropomorphic as they have the vocabulary of a baby.
Santa’s Little Helper. I never did watch much of the Simpsons beyond the first few episodes though, so I don’t know that dog was eventually anthropomorphized, but it would makes sense that it wasn’t, for the same reason Pluto wasn’t.
Santa’s Little Helper and Snowball II from The Simpsons are both very much non-anthropomorphic.
Because we can look past or contextualise racism as a way of avoiding having to deal with it, I nominate …
The Warner Bros Minah Bird [cue Mendelsohn music]
Obligatory bipedal - but definitely not walking in a human mimicked way, non-verbal, all-powerful. It stole every scene it was ever in.
I think there are probably between zero and ten famous truly non-anthropomorphic cartoon animal characters. It’s really hard to make a satisfying one IMO. “Truly” to me would mean no human emotions, no speech, no future plans, no human facial expressions, no human-looking eyes… It would be a pretty terrible cartoon, most of the time.
Not true at all.
I have a chihuahua named Lady. When she’s confused, she says “Uh?” in the same tone I say “Huh?” in. When she’s happy she curves the ends of her lips into a smile. When she’s sad, she whines in the same tone I say “Awww” in when I find something cute. When she’s annoyed, she whines in the same tone I say “Hmmph” in. When I leave the bedroom light on at night, she covers her eye with her paw to make it easier to sleep. When she’s mad at me, she sticks her tongue out at me. When we play tug of war, she cheats by ceasing to pull and continuing to hold the hush puppy to make me relax so she can snatch it. This only worked once. When I wake her up at night, she snorts in annoyance.
I really like Bruno from The Triplets of Belleville. He’s a very doggy dog. He lives for two things: to eat and to bark at trains. All of the humor in the movie around him is based on his doggy behavior.
Sounds a lot like my cat. He vocalizes a lot, and you can always tell what’s on his mind from his tone. I found him when he was eight weeks old because he was lost and meowing for help in my building’s stairwell. (He’s now 17.)
I used to have a shaggy little white Havanese, too. She had a feminine personality you wouldn’t believe! Lived to the ripe old age of 18, and I think of her every single day.
The cat adored her—it was love at first sight! She was a bit less taken with him at first, but she eventually came around and they became fast friends.
All the characters you mentioned are anthropomorphic. Scooby Doo and Odie are non-anthropomorphic because they have the vocabulary of a baby.
Yes, I agree, dogs and cats are a lot smarter than those who don’t have any give them credit for.
Chuck Jones’s Rikki Tikki Tavi. A non-humanized mongoose.
Okay, I just looked up a clip of that on YouTube. Now I’m curious- do brown snakes exist?
Well, I can think of one…
That’d only be a problem if the animal was the main character. There’s no reason that you couldn’t have an endearing animal character that just runs around doing realistic animal stuff while the humans all do the human stuff.
Like Odie?
Eh, Odie might not be very human-like, but he’s also not very dog-like. About all he ever does is get kicked off the table. And the focus of the strip, Garfield, is rather anthropomorphized in his behavior, at least, and partly in his posture.
Are you calling Odie stupid? I always thought he seemed kinda smart… more like an idiot than a dumb pet.
Shaun the Sheep, and the rest of his cohorts.
My favorite Garfield comic was a single panel. Jon has taken Odie and Garfield on a picnic. Jon and Garfield are locked out of the car in the rain. Odie is inside the car with the radio on, the picnic basket, and he’s eating a sandwich. Jon says, “Could it be that Odie’s not quite as dumb as we think he is?” Garfield’s thought balloon says, “Could be.”
You could be right. When I used to read Garfield I used to think Odie was always smiling, but now that I have a dog I know that dogs smile with their mouth closed, not open. If their mouth is open and their tongue is hanging out, that means they’re thirsty. So is Odie always thirsty?
Not necessarily. My Lab has a big, goofy open-mouthed grin on his face when he’s happy.