To think critically about animals and entertainment media, one of the issues that arises repeatedly is anthropomorphism. Such is its prevalence that arguably anthropomorphism shapes ideas about nonhuman animals more than any other aspect of their popular representation. Despite or perhaps due to their undeniable and enduring popularity, anthropomorphised nonhuman animals are considered a problem. The overexpression of similitude between humans and other animals has become synonymous with Disney and a set of representational practices that reduce other species to simple feathered, furred and scaled human analogues. Anthropomorphised animals are subsumed into a human social logic where their commodification, especially for the family audience, is predicated on the erasure of their individual complexity and species difference. In its pejorative sense, anthropomorphism is also weighed down with associations to childishness, a lack of objectivity, and sentimentality. The stakes are high and in humanising nonhuman others we risk losing sight of them as beings in their own right with individual experiences and capacities that are quite different from ours. But, there are also good reasons to be critical of the rejection of anthropomorphism where it is also motivated by anthropocentric concerns that sustain oppression, exploitation and suffering. In this sense, anthropomorphism is a disruptive force, a capacity for imaginative appreciation of another’s perspective, it opens up the opportunity for cross-species intersubjectivity, and it can play a role in the development of empathetic relationships with nonhuman animals. In this talk I argue that the processes of mediating animal lives and experiences inevitably anthropomorphizes them. Drawing on a series of case studies, I consider the consequences of anthropomorphism, how it is entangled with the politics of human-animal relations and how it helps or hinders the public understanding of other species.