[ID: Several doodles of Legoshi, Haru and Louis interacting with their daughter Lila, a dwarf rabbit and grey wolf hybrid. First drawing shows Legoshi with a shopping cart and list, carrying baby Lila in a front baby carrier.
Second drawing features real photos of newborn wolves, rabbits and deer. Text reads: "Newborn rabbits and wolves: - blind, deaf, can’t walk. Newborn fawn: - can see, can hear, learns to walk within 30 minutes". Drawing shows Louis looking at a newborn Lila and saying: "Guys, I think our daughter might be disabled?" Haru, off-screen, responds: "Louis , she's a week old." More text on the image reads: "because society expects everyone to reproduce within their own kind, people are taught very little about other species’ babies".
Three more drawings show Haru with Lila at ages 0, 3 and 6. As a baby, Lila already looks big in Haru’s arms. At 3, Lila is way over half Haru’s size and Haru is visibly struggling to lift her up. By age 6, Lila is nearly as tall as Haru.
More sketches show baby Lila with all three of her parents. First sketch is labelled "with mommy" and shows her in Haru’s arms as someone off-screen says: "Oh, your baby is so big!" Second sketch is labelled "with daddy" and shows her in Legoshi’s arms as someone off-screen says: "Oh, your baby is so tiny!" Last sketch is labelled "with papa" and shows her in Louis’ arms as someone off-screen says: "Oh, your baby is—! Uh, is that your baby sir?" Louis says "Yes she is." as both he and Lila glare at the unseen person. /end ID]
My sister and I beat Reanimal, and I wanted to get my thoughts down on what I think really happened/the story is about. Mostly because I'm not fully satisfied with the theories I've read so far on reddit and wanted to articulate something a little different.
First off, I'm not willing to consider any interpretation that starts or ends with "the kids are trapped in purgatory/hell/a dream/any form of unreality," mostly because I find that cheap and unsatisfying. But also because I think there are some meaningful reasons in game why that's not the case, even if reality may or may not be skewed by the perceptions of the kids. The most important of those being, the game is called REANIMAL, as in, Reanimated Animal. If something, or more importantly someone is dead and in hell, you can't consider them to be or have been reanimated. CASE CLOSED!!
But more seriously, my sister and I were very into trying to dissect 1) the movie in the theater, 2) the behavior of the kids, and 3) the behavior of the "NPCs" in the final area of the game, so that's what's under this cut, major game spoilers.
The other reason I think it's not "hell" is because if anything at all happened in the "real" world, it was the kids throwing the Sister down the well. At the very end, we see the well overflow, hinting that this is the beginning of the flood that overtakes the rest of the world. If the well was real, that means the flood is real, and thus the world the kids are trapped in is real. CASE DOUBLE CLOSED.
*ahem* moving on. I'm just going to lay out what I think happened first and then walk through my reasons using the three points I just mentioned.
The kids are war orphans. This seems pretty evident, based on the fact that the only time they react with familiarity to their surroundings is when they enter the war-torn city at the end. At some point they fled or were evacuated to the countryside, but resources were scarce/diseased. The sister fell ill, maybe died, so the other four conducted a ritual. This is critical imo - the first ritual was to try to save her. They sacrificed a rabbit to bring her back.
But this didn't actually work. It didn't truly resurrect the sister--it's the spirit of the Rabbit that resides in her now (or maybe they're intertwined). I think this is why when you open her secret coffin in the game, it's not a girl that tumbles out, but a rabbit. Her soul is not that of a human girl anymore.
Things start to go wrong. They've done something unnatural and the sister is Not Right, her brother can tell. They decide they have to "complete" the ritual and lure her to the barn. The Sister hesitates inside when confronted with the body of the dead rabbit, because on some level she recognizes it as herself, her original body. They attack and throw her down the well, trying to end the unnatural creature they've brought into the world. She can only see this as a betrayal, of course.
Why are there other rabbitgirls in the well? Because this has happened before. There's some other force in this world that is, for some reason, pushing for animals to consume and or be reborn as people. Reanimal is about prey turning the tables to become predators. The sheep in particular, livestock, are pulling an Animal Farm by manipulating humans (and possibly other animals?) to try to move up the food chain and seize whatever power they can, by any means necessary (yes I just grossly oversimplified Animal Farm). The Sheep-man in the end is very similar to the skeletal sheepman (men?) we encounter earlier, and even the spider to some extent; the spider has a pair of "human" hands and spider limbs, similar to the Sheep at the end, even if its head has caved in. It's possible these all erupted out of sacrificed rabbits at some point. Animals becoming monstrous by becoming more human.
But back to the Sister. Her death and reanimation in the well triggers the apocalypse, and an unceasing curse of reanimation not unlike a zombie virus. The well overflows and floods the world. This causes a lot of destruction but crucially doesn't come close to touching the war, because it's a curse from the animals, and the animals are perfectly happy with humans continuing to murder each other.
In the aftermath, the kids are separated. Bucket, Hood, and Bandages are all killed in various ways, and the Brother kills himself from guilt, but all are reanimated, possibly more than once. Finally, the Brother finds his sister and resolves to find the others, and the game takes place.
The re-animation curse to me explains most of the game's enemies. There are all sorts of weird, cursed animals, and the humans (former humans?) you meet in the city are similar to zombies: mindless and animalistic, not bothering with clothes or even survival, just food. The giant pig in the barn has guts falling out but it doesn't seem to bother them. I have no idea what Sniffer's deal is, but he seems to have found some kind of obsession with creating the skin suits, which are also reanimating despite being devoid of bones and organs. We do see "dead" humans once in a while, but we can never be sure that they are dead for good, as proven in the opening skinsuit section. There is always a chance they'll start moving again.
And then you have the Soldiers. The soldiers outside the war zone behave more or less normally, but on the front lines, most spend their time desperately trying to kill themselves. This to me suggests that they're caught in a loop of not being able to die, and the ones reaching for grenades are becoming ever more desperate not to reanimate. The ones outside combat simply haven't figured it out yet.
I think this is also why at the beginning, Hood tells you to leave. At this point, she's already been killed and knows it, but she probably doesn't know that Brother killed himself. She thinks he's still "alive" and has a chance to leave the cursed zone and escape, whereas she's already dead.
Which brings me to the behavior of the kids. Reanimal is a game with VERY sparse dialogue, so I know it isn't wise to base any theories around things that are NOT said. However, I find their reactions to the Brother and Sister very curious: rather, their non-reactions. When the Sister has a creepy episode, they all shrink back, for sure. Sometimes the Brother will move or speak to comfort her, but only after. They all know there is something very wrong with her. And this to me suggests they remember what they did to her.
It would be easier for a "this is purgatory, they are being punished" scenario if they didn't, like James in SH2, because if they remember, it raises the next question: why are they okay with being around her at all? Are they so helpless and desperate, that hopeful that she doesn't remember that they're just that willing to go along with it? But to that I say, it still works if you assume that the original ritual was an attempt for the Sister's benefit.
Leaning heavily on Hood's reaction at the beginning, she is not surprised to see the Brother and Sister together. Of course she's not: reuniting them was always the goal. Maybe they had hoped/were convinced that "completing" the ritual with the well would allow for the Sister to be resurrected as her full, original self. Seeing her and her Brother together makes it evident that it worked. It's been suggested that the kids sacrificed the Sister as part of a ritual spell, but there's no point in the game where they remark on it having worked or not, only that the siblings came back when they didn't need to, because the pair of them being reunited WAS the ritual, it DID work as far as they can tell. It was the friends that were the sacrifice, from their POV. But when the Sister starts acting strangely, they all know the truth: she still isn't right.
Just, the idea that a boy murdered his sister in cold blood to complete a ritual that is not referenced at any point in the game, as opposed to, say, murdering any of the friends? Like no offense but Bandages is right there, too, lol. It just doesn't make sense to me as anything other than a lazy SHOCK for the ending. Which leads us to the cinema.
The movie shown in the theater shows us the five kids as frolicking rabbits. Corruption setting in with the rotten food, the rabbit falling ill (it's twitching, not dead when the others surround it). I think this is crucial: the Sister is dying, not dead, there is something wrong with her, and THEN the lamb's throat is cut, and everything goes haywire. We see the barn(?) burning down, which could mean the war spiraling out of control. The naked people in the woods are kinda reminiscent of the skin suits in the woods patrolled by Sniffer, we see birds tumbling off a cliff like with the Pelican, and the fox, in addition to being still alive despite being cut in half (displaying the reanimation), reminds us of the Spider, which is also missing its back half. It's not until the end that the lamb bleeds out fully, and the last shot is the empty silhouette on the beach. It's not the lamb or the rabbit but a missing person: the Sister was here, in the waves, but she's gone now, because she's been reanimated. Through diseases, pain, and torment, the rabbit has been reanimalated into the body of a person and is on the loose. The Sister is the Reanimal, used by the Sheep to complete a gnarly curse against mankind.
Anyway, that's my take. Happy to discuss it if anyone is interested!
According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.
every august 18th my notifications break and i go, fuck, tumblr has failed me once again, but it hasn’t. it hasn’t failed me. it’s just the taking the hobbits to isengard-iversary. happy 12 years
I regret to inform everyone that @catchaspark’s reblog was made in 2017 and that Taking the Hobbits to Isengard was actually published 17 years ago, not 12 years ago.
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