Writing Believability in Animals & Monsters

What does Aladdin, Godzilla: King of Monsters, and my house have in common? While all three are wildly different, they all contain animals that have distinct personalities (I have cats and fish). Writing and roleplaying animals can be really tough. I can show you how to portray animals and monsters far better using information that you already know. It just takes looking a little closer.

Biology and Ecology

One of the subjects that I think is the most fundamental to writing believable animals and monsters is to understand biology and ecology. While your fantasy monster may not exist in the real world, all creatures require three basic things: food, shelter, and reproduction. Let’s dig into each.

Food

If you don’t eat, you don’t live. If you don’t live, you don’t pass on our genes to the next generation. For most animals, this is the truth. You need to understand what it is the creature needs to sustain life. This doesn’t mean it has to be a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore. One of my favorite fantasy examples is what I like to call an animovore, a creature that feeds on psychic energy. It doesn’t have to be what we traditionally think of as food, just an energy source that they rely on.

Knowing what they consume gives you an idea of how they approach getting that food. For my cats, that is meowing at the humans to fill their bowls or to hunt down the mice in my yard when they are outside. For a tiger that could be crouched in some tall brush waiting for the perfect opportunity to pounce on the unsuspecting deer. These are behaviors that you can use in your stories and things you can tweak with elements we talk about later.

Shelter

While your first thought might be a home, this is more generally thought of as “how to endure the elements”. As with food, if you freeze to death then you don’t live to pass on your genetics. Most mammals have fur to help deal with colder climates, but they are also used for camouflage which for some applies to how they get food, while for others is how they avoid being eaten. Knowing the techniques that an animal uses to avoid getting killed brings more insight into its behavior.

I am a pretty regular hunter. In Michigan, white-tailed deer season comes every November and you can bet I’ll be in a hunting blind at that time. During my time hunting, I’ve learned a lot about the behavior of white-tailed deer. First and foremost is their fur, they blend in very well into areas of dense tree cover. They are also able to move incredibly slowly while still covering the ground. This combination means that while hunting a deer can sneak up right in front of you without you realizing. 

Another amazing thing they do is signal to other deer that are with them. Using their tails they can signal to other deer to keep alert if they spot danger. Their tail is white because they have adapted to making it more visible to other deer, even if that means exposing them to the predators around them. If it means that their kids can escape though, then they have successfully protected their genetics having been passed on. All of these behaviors are things that without knowing, would make writing a deer into your stories very unbelievable. There are numerous other things I could tell you about these creatures, but I recommend doing some research of your own. 

Reproduction

I’ve mentioned several times in the last parts that they need to eat and keep out of the way of danger in order to pass on their genetics, but that only applies to our normal understanding of creatures. Reproduction is the process of creating new offspring of the species. While we are used to creatures that reproduce sexually (humans, cats, dogs, etc) that is not the only way to reproduce. Some creatures, mostly single-celled organisms, can reproduce asexually or without the need to have sex. In D&D, most oozes reproduce this way, sometimes by getting cut by idiot adventurers that don’t know that using a bladed weapon is the worst.

You also need to understand how the creature reproduces because it impacts their behavior. My favorite example of this is to use birds. There are some amazing birds that go through elaborate rituals and “dances” in order to attract a mate. However, reproduction can also be shown through two members of the same sex competing. Elephant seals fight each other over who is going to win a mate.

One element we sometimes don’t think about in terms of reproduction is a creature’s territory. While this territory covers numerous areas, it is usually in terms of their family. This ranges from marking of territory, finding the scent of another’s territory, or acting aggressively toward intruders. This territory also doesn’t have to have one location. A mother bear will protect her cubs when something or someone gets too close.

Physical Limitations

While not part of the first list, this aspect of a creature is more of a limiting factor that plays into all three elements. Each creature is limited by the body they have. Think of a snake as the most extreme example. It has no arms or legs but is capable of amazing feats of acrobatics. One of my favorite videos of a snake is this one of a snake climbing a tree. Understanding how an animal accomplishes all of the above tasks with the limitations of its body will give you a far deeper insight into how it will behave.

These limitations also have to do with its environment, whether it is in its natural environment or outside of it. A modern example is hardwood flooring. When some animals (especially dogs) run and try to stop, their feet don’t always have the grip they need so they slide. Their bodies are adapted to the outdoors and those environments, not the unnatural hardwood flooring. The term “fish out of water” is a key example of this. Understand what makes an animal adapted to their specific environment, and how they would act outside of it.

In general, to best represent animals you should study as much biology and ecology as you can. Nature documentaries are by far the biggest source of information I’ve received in my own studies of the animal kingdom. Learn, learn, and learn. 

Personification

No doubt you have heard this in a high school, or even middle school level English class. Personification is giving human-like attributes and behaviors to non-human things. Think Abu and Iago from Aladdin or even appliances from The Brave Little Toaster. However, it's not just an on or off tool. 

Human beings have a habit of personifying everything. Look at the entire internet culture for cats or the number of things we put googly eyes on. We talk to our machines like they are people or blame them for things like we might a person. In our everyday lives, we personify things even if we know they don’t actually have those qualities. If you’ve ever looked at your pets and thought you knew what they are thinking, you have done this.

This means that in our media, we expect things to be personified even if it’s incredibly subtle. In Godzilla: King of Monsters, my favorite example is when Ghidorah first awakens the heads show signs of independence and personality (which the director wanted them to have) like in this shot. With the center head ramming its head into the other, we attribute that to them communicating or arguing in some way (really that head is the goofball of the three, Ghidorah is actually just a murderous 3 Stooges). This is a level of personification that is instilled in the monster but in a way that seems natural.

You can also take it to the levels of Abu or Iago from Aladdin which makes them feel entirely like people. By cranking it up to this amount of personification you get a deeper emotional connection with the creature than you would like with Godzilla and the other fellow titans. I often will give animals that are meant to help my heroes more qualities of a person since I want them to like those animals and interact with them more as a fellow adventurer. Plus, giving sass to a squirrel that you are trying to get to cooperate is just way too much fun.

A Basic Understanding of Animation

I never thought that my fundamental understanding of the 12 principles of animation would help me with creatures, but it is something that we fundamentally know with some creatures. Understanding some amount of animation can help you show how the creature acts. My favorite one that is use is #2 or Anticipation.

Anticipation gives a signal to the actions it is about to take. For this, the best example I can think of is when a creature breathes in anticipation of a breath attack. Take this scene from the 2014 Godzilla film of Godzilla charging up his breath attack. This signals to the audience that something is about to happen and if you have illustrated what the creature is like, this anticipation can give the audience an intellectual payoff when they correctly predict what is about to happen. It doesn’t matter that we know Godzilla is about to launch that fiery death laser. If he didn’t then it wouldn’t be satisfying.

Staging covers a lot, but it’s also key for creating a believable creature. How you present the creature means everything. Does it have scars all over its body? Is it covered in blood? How is the timing of its movements? Are they super jittery like the twitching legs of a spider or is it slow and lumbering because of its size? These questions are just some examples of portraying its movement which can tell you so much about the creature.

Overlap and Follow-through can help give the motions of the creature you are describing a real physical sense. When a dragon turns its body, the tail will lag behind the rest of the body and might go past the rotation the dragon actually made. You can give weight to different parts of the creature’s body in order to convey its movements better.

All in all, understanding what goes into animation is understanding how things move. This scene from Onward with the introduction of the Gelatonaous Cube shows a pretty non-standard creature in motion.  Even with this creature never really existing, it feels right. We know that’s how it would actually move. These are things that we inherently pick up on in our everyday interactions with animals. When your cat goes to leap up on a chair, you see their movements anticipating that jump. Without it, it wouldn’t seem real.

Conclusion

We see animals all the time in the real world. Technically we humans are one of those creatures. If you want to really make your animals believable, you need to look at the world with a more analytical mind. Question the behavior of the animals you see and really dig into the research. Watch slow-motion footage and consume movies with monsters in them. If you want any recommendations, feel free to reach out to me on twitter and I’m always happy to share what I’ve been watching recently. To get better at portraying animals, study them. Plus you’ll get to learn a lot of cool things about nature.

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