lens of alliance, not solely analogy

Rather, the appearance of animals in some recentfilms highlights the unequal treatment of Black lives in America in a mannerthat continues the fable tradition, and simultaneously emphasizes the human

Theseworks encode various strategies of survival in an era in which Black livescontinue to be devalued

Any resistance must be sanitized soas to be tolerable” for the general audience. 5 But resistance also works not bybeing sanitized, but by being hidden in plain sight, coded as symbols legibleto some but not to all. The use of animal fables has a long-standing historydating back to slavery as providing such a coded language of resistance

Wagner notes that theweaker animals use their wits as a means of overcoming the unequal powerdistribution in the world they navigated

he “speaking animal,” which acknowledgesthe dialectic capacity of the symbolic animal of fables to stage a conversationabout subjugation and resistance, but simultaneously, to point beyond itselfto the reality of animal life.