There seems to be a proliferation of odd-looking figures in our visual culture.Monsters, mutants, hybrid creatures, robots, transgenic beings….turn on the TV and you’re likely to find a series about vampires or superheroes trying to make it in the modern world or cute humanoid creatures advertising anything from fruit juice to insurance. Legions of animated avatars and icons guide our computer use. Home decor shops sell cushion covers or trays that depict people who have bird or deer heads.

All kinds of inanimate objects have magically gained facial features and jerked into action, dancing about for our entertainment in a kind of mass-animism that less than a couple of decades ago, would only be found in the realm of the under 5s’.

These fantastical transformations have also extended into artificial landscapes.  Happy animals gambol in colourful textile hills – especially in dairy product and energy company adverts.             Plants aren’t excluded from this anthropomorphism either. In fact, nothing is. The most unlikely objects, (fridges, cars, detergent), have leapt and gurned their way onto our retinas.

Why is metamorphosis so prevalent in today’s imagery?      Well, there must be several causes to spawn such hybrid vigor.

It’s true to say that pictures, both moving and still, have become more dominant in society and that this rise is directly linked with the increasing influence of advertising. Given that advertising techniques have developed into methods of very sophisticated psychological manipulation, it is worth examining the content of the pictures produced, especially if there are discernable patterns…(It was noticing how animated characters had moved from children’s television to mainstream adverts and then how fantasy just kept popping out of it’s genre, that first prompted me to look further.  At first I put this observation down to increasing immaturity in the general populace, but then realised that such a glib and scornful explanation was somewhat inadequate).

In advertising the individual is relentlessly targeted; have you noticed the frequency in which the word ‘you’ is used? ‘Its all about you’, ‘It’s your choice’, et cetera, ad-nauseam.

Furry figures, or little toys wearing human clothes, or our clothes come to life, or cartoon objects, ease and comfort us in this difficult and stress-filled world.

It could be argued that this fantastical aesthetic is the result of a few marketing people deciding what sells more and others following suit, but that doesn’t really explain the preponderance of anthropomorphism and metamorphosis on our screens and also, (most notably in the genre of magical realism), in print.

Ad agencies are responding to the same forces as the rest of us, albeit in a more cynical and calculated way.

We do live in a more difficult and stress-filled world, or at least we perceive that we do.

The rapidity of technological change must, surely, be a contributory factor. Intended to reduce working hours, computers have instead helped to extend them.  The silicon chip is endemic and we are all obliged to use it or be outcasts. Whilst we are delighted by some of its innovations, its difficult not to be unnerved by speed and complexity; unnerved by the speed in which these innovations are established and we in turn adapt to their daily use and unnerved by complexity – the range of things that can be done on the average home computer is, to a lay person, (which is most of us), nothing short of magic.

Conversely, this digital ‘revolution’ is precisely the thing that’s made this manifestation of fantasy figures possible.  The pictures we create in our minds reading fiction, indeed, the imagining involved in the creation of fiction have been visualized for us. Some might even say been hijacked by the dominance of image culture.

A second reason, linked in some ways to the rise and rise of electronic technology, is awareness of the ecology of our planet. Species become extinct every day; habitats are threatened. It is ironic, but it makes an appalling kind of sense that energy companies use utopian, imagined landscapes and cartoon fauna in their branding.

Our relationship with the natural world, (now even the word ‘natural’ demands inverted commas), is dislocated, fraught and fractured by misinformation and dichotomies………

……to be continued