Animating Animality Through Dumas, D'Artagnan, and Dogtanian

This article discusses how cartoon adaptations that re-imagine characters as animals might be framed within recent critical discourse in animation studies and animal studies. It explores one of the more unique versions of Alexandre Dumas père’s 'Les Trois mousquetaires', a popular 1980s animated cartoon series entitled 'Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds', in which the majority of the characters are anthropomorphizations of dogs. The Dogtanian series indicates the creative possibilities afforded to adapters by anthropomorphized cartoon animals, not least as a means of suggesting naturalized human behaviours. Because animal instinct and heroic manhood align in Dumas’s novel, Dogtanian and his fellow characters provide an ideal ensemble in which to dramatise Dumas’s historical romance. Such an alignment in both the novel and this adaptation highlights natural impulse as an ongoing but certainly not unproblematic source of Dumas’s appeal.