Animal Matters: Why We Shouldn't Look Past Film's Materiality in Super Nature
28 September 2026
Mostly shot on the analogue, celluloid format Super 8, Ed Sayers’s new documentary Super Nature is an intimate portrait of human and non-human lives stitched together from footage provided by forty filmmakers across five continents. At its core are his own recordings, which he has gathered from near his home in England. Storytellers in France, Indonesia, Argentina, and beyond contribute short films and audio stories that spiral outwards from Sayers’s footage to form a snail-shell-like, multi-perspective encounter with animals that forms a protective embrace around them.
From its opening shot of grey seals lined up along a Norfolk beach, to the slow majesty of a worm climbing up a silken thread, Super Nature is an aesthetically astonishing film. A dragonfly rests on a leaf, its wings twinkling in the sun. A pink flamingo comically turns their staccato head this way and that on a lake. Bright-striped fish dart between peachy coral. Human filmmakers also appear in the shots; they are animals in ecosystems, too, and are encountered by the non-human animals that they shoot. One kangaroo, for example, playfully nuzzles the camera lens in an extreme close up.
From its opening shot of grey seals lined up along a Norfolk beach, to the slow majesty of a worm climbing up a silken thread, Super Nature is an aesthetically astonishing film. A dragonfly rests on a leaf, its wings twinkling in the sun. A pink flamingo comically turns their staccato head this way and that on a lake. Bright-striped fish dart between peachy coral. Human filmmakers also appear in the shots; they are animals in ecosystems, too, and are encountered by the non-human animals that they shoot. One kangaroo, for example, playfully nuzzles the camera lens in an extreme close up.
A baby seal appears to engage with Ed Sayers in Super Nature. BFI Distribution, 2026.
Plurality of perspective
Unlike natural history documentaries in the mould of David Attenborough’s oeuvre, Super Nature does not attempt to hide the presence of film crews, or focus exclusive attention on one seemingly omniscient presenter. Instead, via perfunctory voiceover interjections, Sayers invites people to notice not only the animals that surround them (‘you go beyond looking at nature to really seeing it’, he suggests), but also the filmmakers’ audio stories (Super 8 does not record sound, so the audio tracks were produced distinctly from their images). Whether massive or minute, humorous or mournful, every contributor’s story is deeply moving and sensitively scored by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres. Her sparkling composition creates a throughline as one man describes how filming insects and other small creatures has helped him recalibrate his sense of scale while living with chronic fatigue syndrome. In another sequence, Zoya, in Grenada, has concerns about the impact of increasingly intense sunlight on marine life. Later, Sayers reveals how overwhelmed he was following the death of his mother. Encountering a seal off the Cornish coast was like ‘a ray of light.’
Thanks to Sayers’s thoughtful curation, the film celebrates plurality of perspective. Super Nature includes Indigenous people and languages (for example, from Indonesia, Norway, and North America). There are conservationists, wildlife documentarians, and people inspired to participate through their love of the Super 8 medium. Every contributor is introduced by name and location, and credited with their crew at the end; every animal species perceived by the production team gets a ‘featuring’ credit, too. Sayers’s acknowledgement of others’ knowledges and skills (his voiceover directly engages with contributors’ stories), and recognition of the animals as performers (they appear in the end credits like cast members) is unconventional, and the film is all the better for it. Although Sayers’s own footage repeatedly draws the documentary back to an English centre before expanding out into new territory—there are unfortunate connotations here of the imperial metropole and empire--Super Nature’s self-reflective construction is indicative of the production team’s ethically conscious approach. For as the film’s press release attests, they deliberately commissioned footage from local people to minimise their own travel.
Unlike natural history documentaries in the mould of David Attenborough’s oeuvre, Super Nature does not attempt to hide the presence of film crews, or focus exclusive attention on one seemingly omniscient presenter. Instead, via perfunctory voiceover interjections, Sayers invites people to notice not only the animals that surround them (‘you go beyond looking at nature to really seeing it’, he suggests), but also the filmmakers’ audio stories (Super 8 does not record sound, so the audio tracks were produced distinctly from their images). Whether massive or minute, humorous or mournful, every contributor’s story is deeply moving and sensitively scored by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres. Her sparkling composition creates a throughline as one man describes how filming insects and other small creatures has helped him recalibrate his sense of scale while living with chronic fatigue syndrome. In another sequence, Zoya, in Grenada, has concerns about the impact of increasingly intense sunlight on marine life. Later, Sayers reveals how overwhelmed he was following the death of his mother. Encountering a seal off the Cornish coast was like ‘a ray of light.’
Thanks to Sayers’s thoughtful curation, the film celebrates plurality of perspective. Super Nature includes Indigenous people and languages (for example, from Indonesia, Norway, and North America). There are conservationists, wildlife documentarians, and people inspired to participate through their love of the Super 8 medium. Every contributor is introduced by name and location, and credited with their crew at the end; every animal species perceived by the production team gets a ‘featuring’ credit, too. Sayers’s acknowledgement of others’ knowledges and skills (his voiceover directly engages with contributors’ stories), and recognition of the animals as performers (they appear in the end credits like cast members) is unconventional, and the film is all the better for it. Although Sayers’s own footage repeatedly draws the documentary back to an English centre before expanding out into new territory—there are unfortunate connotations here of the imperial metropole and empire--Super Nature’s self-reflective construction is indicative of the production team’s ethically conscious approach. For as the film’s press release attests, they deliberately commissioned footage from local people to minimise their own travel.
Dice Rose carries a Super 8 camera through desert landscape. BFI Distribution, 2026.
Super 8 and near-extinction
A recurrent theme in Super Nature is the poetic nature of the film format itself, with many contributors referring to the creativity demanded by Super 8’s short duration (a reel lasts a mere 150 seconds) and the absence of digital playback and editing. Super Nature’s nostalgia for celluloid is an attractive one, and Sayers includes some of his own childhood home movies to emphasise Super 8’s propensity to return us to a more innocent past. It does make for a mesmerising experience; light dances on water, shimmers on scales, and bleaches the colour-saturated film. Just a few years ago, Sayers points out, ‘people were moving on from film’, owing to their preference for digital (Super 8 was first popularised by Kodak in the 1960s). ‘Some people loved it so much’, though, he reassures the audience, ‘that when they realised they were going to lose it forever, they refused to let it die’. Thus, he equates film with near-extinct animals.
However, tempting as it is to romanticise the relationship between Super 8 film and the animals that people shoot with it, the gruesome history of celluloid film stock’s production is anything but romantic. Thus, Super Nature’s lack of engagement with the materiality of its own filmic media means that it encourages us (whether consciously or not) to look past the history of animal harm on which the film industry has long depended. It’s just such a trap that Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa argues we should avoid in The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (2023). He refuses to study animal films ‘as encounters’ (his italics) that focus on animal agency or effects on human viewers. Instead, he proposes an ‘infrastructural approach’ that puts animal films in their historical and institutional contexts. Given that all films on celluloid are implicated in the use of animal products, I’m wary of singling out Super Nature. However, the documentary’s framing of animal lives and the Super 8 medium as interconnected invite an exploration of film stock’s history and physicality, which I turn to now.
A recurrent theme in Super Nature is the poetic nature of the film format itself, with many contributors referring to the creativity demanded by Super 8’s short duration (a reel lasts a mere 150 seconds) and the absence of digital playback and editing. Super Nature’s nostalgia for celluloid is an attractive one, and Sayers includes some of his own childhood home movies to emphasise Super 8’s propensity to return us to a more innocent past. It does make for a mesmerising experience; light dances on water, shimmers on scales, and bleaches the colour-saturated film. Just a few years ago, Sayers points out, ‘people were moving on from film’, owing to their preference for digital (Super 8 was first popularised by Kodak in the 1960s). ‘Some people loved it so much’, though, he reassures the audience, ‘that when they realised they were going to lose it forever, they refused to let it die’. Thus, he equates film with near-extinct animals.
However, tempting as it is to romanticise the relationship between Super 8 film and the animals that people shoot with it, the gruesome history of celluloid film stock’s production is anything but romantic. Thus, Super Nature’s lack of engagement with the materiality of its own filmic media means that it encourages us (whether consciously or not) to look past the history of animal harm on which the film industry has long depended. It’s just such a trap that Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa argues we should avoid in The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (2023). He refuses to study animal films ‘as encounters’ (his italics) that focus on animal agency or effects on human viewers. Instead, he proposes an ‘infrastructural approach’ that puts animal films in their historical and institutional contexts. Given that all films on celluloid are implicated in the use of animal products, I’m wary of singling out Super Nature. However, the documentary’s framing of animal lives and the Super 8 medium as interconnected invite an exploration of film stock’s history and physicality, which I turn to now.
Silver-washed fritillary butterfly in close-up. BFI Distribution, 2026.
Animal materials and film
Many scholars writing at the intersections of Film Studies and animal ethics note that Eadweard Muybridge’s proto-cinematic Animals in Motion (1872-1899), which includes a sequence of photographs that dissect a horse’s gallop into frame-by-frame parts, is indicative of film’s instrumentalization of non-humans. For, as a product of nineteenth-century industrialisation in the Global North, moving image apparatuses appropriated animals’ images, physicality, and patterns of movement. In About Looking (1980), cultural theorist John Berger goes further in positing that people in imperialist cultures, such as those in Britain, began turning animals into spectacle in the 1800s to mask human-caused animal population declines in the wild caused by overdevelopment. Hence in England, for example, people kept increasing numbers of commoditised animals as pets and in zoos, and the popularised figurative animals in literature, art—and films (p14-21).
If we look beyond animal representations on film, we find that that the manufacture of film is far from cruelty-free. Since the 1890s, celluloid’s production has relied on plastics made from fossil matter (crushed and liquified animal remains), with photosensitive chemicals bound to the plastic layer using gelatine. Kodak, the film stock manufacturer credited in Super Nature, does not release much information publicly about its fabrication processes. A YouTube video posted by science influencer SmarterEveryDay in 2022 reveals some insights. In a tour of Kodak’s factory in Rochester, New Jersey, he confirms that the company’s film stocks have a polyester (plastic) base (How Does Kodak Make Film? (Kodak Factory Tour Part 1 of 3) - Smarter Every Day 271). However, when it comes to discussions about the chemical primers that Kodak uses on the base, the video is vague. Cutting back to his studio, the presenter says that Kodak told him, ‘you might have an anti-static layer, you might have a conductive layer. They said you might even put gelatine over the top, it varies depending on what the final use of the product is.’
What reads to me like Kodak’s reluctance to acknowledge that their products contain gelatine (‘you might put gelatine over the top’) is peculiar. For to the best of my knowledge, there is no celluloid film stock currently available to buy, Super 8 or otherwise, that does not contain gelatine (artists like Edd Carr and Francesca Duran have experimented with plant-based primers, but these are not mass produced). However, gelatine is an animal-derived product; perhaps people don’t want to think about the mass slaughter of cows when they buy their next roll of film. What we encounter in Super Nature’s Super 8 shots, then, are animals imprinted in and on animal remains.
In Animal Capital (2009), Nicole Shukin proposes that a historic discovery about the relationship between film-stock quality and bovine diets led to the increased biopolitical control of animals used in supply chains in and beyond the film technology sector (p111). She reveals that in 1925, an emulsion scientist working for Kodak traced organic impurities in photographic gelatine back to the cows’ feed. He found that ‘cattle who had eaten mustard seed yielded better film speeds, because a sulfuric substance in mustard oil accentuated the light sensitivity of silver halide crystals suspended in an emulsion’ (p109). Of course, since 1925 animal welfare and slaughter regulations have changed. But gelatine’s use as a base on film stock continues, and while Super Nature cannot be expected to exist outside of the film’s industry longstanding exploitation of animal matter, there’s something unsettling to me about literally look through the violence without naming it.
Many scholars writing at the intersections of Film Studies and animal ethics note that Eadweard Muybridge’s proto-cinematic Animals in Motion (1872-1899), which includes a sequence of photographs that dissect a horse’s gallop into frame-by-frame parts, is indicative of film’s instrumentalization of non-humans. For, as a product of nineteenth-century industrialisation in the Global North, moving image apparatuses appropriated animals’ images, physicality, and patterns of movement. In About Looking (1980), cultural theorist John Berger goes further in positing that people in imperialist cultures, such as those in Britain, began turning animals into spectacle in the 1800s to mask human-caused animal population declines in the wild caused by overdevelopment. Hence in England, for example, people kept increasing numbers of commoditised animals as pets and in zoos, and the popularised figurative animals in literature, art—and films (p14-21).
If we look beyond animal representations on film, we find that that the manufacture of film is far from cruelty-free. Since the 1890s, celluloid’s production has relied on plastics made from fossil matter (crushed and liquified animal remains), with photosensitive chemicals bound to the plastic layer using gelatine. Kodak, the film stock manufacturer credited in Super Nature, does not release much information publicly about its fabrication processes. A YouTube video posted by science influencer SmarterEveryDay in 2022 reveals some insights. In a tour of Kodak’s factory in Rochester, New Jersey, he confirms that the company’s film stocks have a polyester (plastic) base (How Does Kodak Make Film? (Kodak Factory Tour Part 1 of 3) - Smarter Every Day 271). However, when it comes to discussions about the chemical primers that Kodak uses on the base, the video is vague. Cutting back to his studio, the presenter says that Kodak told him, ‘you might have an anti-static layer, you might have a conductive layer. They said you might even put gelatine over the top, it varies depending on what the final use of the product is.’
What reads to me like Kodak’s reluctance to acknowledge that their products contain gelatine (‘you might put gelatine over the top’) is peculiar. For to the best of my knowledge, there is no celluloid film stock currently available to buy, Super 8 or otherwise, that does not contain gelatine (artists like Edd Carr and Francesca Duran have experimented with plant-based primers, but these are not mass produced). However, gelatine is an animal-derived product; perhaps people don’t want to think about the mass slaughter of cows when they buy their next roll of film. What we encounter in Super Nature’s Super 8 shots, then, are animals imprinted in and on animal remains.
In Animal Capital (2009), Nicole Shukin proposes that a historic discovery about the relationship between film-stock quality and bovine diets led to the increased biopolitical control of animals used in supply chains in and beyond the film technology sector (p111). She reveals that in 1925, an emulsion scientist working for Kodak traced organic impurities in photographic gelatine back to the cows’ feed. He found that ‘cattle who had eaten mustard seed yielded better film speeds, because a sulfuric substance in mustard oil accentuated the light sensitivity of silver halide crystals suspended in an emulsion’ (p109). Of course, since 1925 animal welfare and slaughter regulations have changed. But gelatine’s use as a base on film stock continues, and while Super Nature cannot be expected to exist outside of the film’s industry longstanding exploitation of animal matter, there’s something unsettling to me about literally look through the violence without naming it.
An Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin swims underwater and looks to camera as if smiling. BFI Distribution, 2026.
Rose-tinted lenses
Super Nature does sporadically attend to the complex power dynamics that typify humans’ relationships with animals, including in recognising that people kill animals for food. In Indonesia, Mang and Dika, for example, record footage of their dives to spear fish. Part of an Indigenous community of nomadic sea people, they are constrained by a government that says ‘we must settle in villages’, and affected by declining fish numbers. Then in a segment about Yellowstone, USA, we learn that 1.5 million bison were killed by colonialists one winter in the 1800s ‘to starve and subdue the Native American Indian tribes.’ Clearly, people do eat animals. But in Super Nature, only Indigenous people dependent on locally sourced prey that they kill by traditional methods appear to consume meat or dairy products. The effect is to romanticise humans’ direct consumption of animals.
Moreover, while the film does not shy away from visualising the impacts of human plastic waste and global heating (for example, through a sequence aboard a rubbish-collecting ship in the Great Pacific Rubbish Patch), it never explicitly names the problems that cause them. We need ‘dreamers’ to come up with ways to ‘reverse the damage we do’, Sayers argues. But he never suggests that we stop causing damage in the first place. Consequently, in its focus on abstracted plastic detritus floating in the ocean, Super Nature lets capitalism, extractivism, and overdevelopment off the hook.
In a world of conservative natural history documentaries with huge ecological footprints that erase the knowledges of Indigenous people, it’s imperative that we support careful, ethically oriented filmmaking like Super Nature, and the gentler production practices it advocates. It is a beautiful film, a wondrous one even, and it affords its audiences possibilities for sadness and hope. At the same time, I can’t help feeling that we risk limiting our futures when we acquiesce to the comfort of rose-tinted lenses that invite us to gaze through, rather than engage with, the past.
Super Nature does sporadically attend to the complex power dynamics that typify humans’ relationships with animals, including in recognising that people kill animals for food. In Indonesia, Mang and Dika, for example, record footage of their dives to spear fish. Part of an Indigenous community of nomadic sea people, they are constrained by a government that says ‘we must settle in villages’, and affected by declining fish numbers. Then in a segment about Yellowstone, USA, we learn that 1.5 million bison were killed by colonialists one winter in the 1800s ‘to starve and subdue the Native American Indian tribes.’ Clearly, people do eat animals. But in Super Nature, only Indigenous people dependent on locally sourced prey that they kill by traditional methods appear to consume meat or dairy products. The effect is to romanticise humans’ direct consumption of animals.
Moreover, while the film does not shy away from visualising the impacts of human plastic waste and global heating (for example, through a sequence aboard a rubbish-collecting ship in the Great Pacific Rubbish Patch), it never explicitly names the problems that cause them. We need ‘dreamers’ to come up with ways to ‘reverse the damage we do’, Sayers argues. But he never suggests that we stop causing damage in the first place. Consequently, in its focus on abstracted plastic detritus floating in the ocean, Super Nature lets capitalism, extractivism, and overdevelopment off the hook.
In a world of conservative natural history documentaries with huge ecological footprints that erase the knowledges of Indigenous people, it’s imperative that we support careful, ethically oriented filmmaking like Super Nature, and the gentler production practices it advocates. It is a beautiful film, a wondrous one even, and it affords its audiences possibilities for sadness and hope. At the same time, I can’t help feeling that we risk limiting our futures when we acquiesce to the comfort of rose-tinted lenses that invite us to gaze through, rather than engage with, the past.