Blackfish Argumentative Essay

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A documentaries intention is to educate and inform their audience on a certain topic or social change. Blackfish (2014) directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite scrutinizes the treatment of killer whales in captivity and highlights SeaWorld cruel treatment of them. It has a focus on portraying how killer whales are highly intelligent, social and emotional animals that should be kept in the wild. The Cove (2009), directed by Louie Psihoyos, explores the town of Taiji which from the outside looks like a Japanese town with a love of dolphins but showcases the horrible truth of the slaughter of thousands of dolphins yearly which they are trying to hide. The Cove main agenda is to demonstrate that dolphins are highly intelligent, social and emotional …show more content…

One of The Cove main arguments is highlighting how difficult it is to see what really is happening with the dolphins, and how it is blocked from the public. We the viewers are instinctively drawn into this idea with the first line of the documentary being “I want to tell you, we tried to do the story legally”. We feel as if we are going undercover and exposing the truth. Juxtaposition is used with a woman eating dolphin at a Taiji theme park as she watches a dolphin show while Ric O’Barry narrates: “Here in Taiji, you can go to the Whale Museum and watch the dolphin show and eat a dolphin at the same time. They sell dolphin and whale meat right in the dolphinarium. It's the captivity industry that keeps this slaughter going by rewarding the fishermen for their bad behaviour.” Psihoyos intent is to shock the audience and persuade them to question Taiji methods. Blackfish pushes it agenda using archival footage with John Crowe a former orca capturer. Along with archival footage shown of the babies being captured while the rest of the family “communicate back and forth”. “You understand then what you’re doing. I lost it. I started crying…it’s like kidnapping a little kid away from its mother…it’s the worst thing I can think of.” These examples show how documentary filmmakers are very deliberate in how they of live and archival footage showcases how these video are deliberately chosen to further their

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