Donkeys have featured in many films, from the Eddie Murphy-voiced animation in Shrek through to Eeyore in the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh, as well as taking lead roles in cinema classics such as Robert Bresson’s celebrated Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s recent EO.

But after news that the University of Exeter is to offer a film studies module looking at how the portrayal of donkeys in films has affected public attitudes towards them by representing them in a negative light as stubborn or comedic, are there other animal species that deserve rehabilitation from their depiction in the movies? Here are four suggestions …

Apes

Unlikely to actually club you to death with bones

Great apes have had a bad representation in the movies. The true villains of the Planet of the Apes franchise may have been revealed in that first famous ending, but mostly, the whole series revolves around intelligent apes besting homo sapiens left, right and centre. No great ape has ever ridden a horse or fired a gun. It is also perhaps unfair of Stanley Kubrick to have pinned the whole unfolding nature of human civilisation and conflict on one ape clubbing another to death with some old bones because a space monolith told them to. In the 1933 original King Kong, the misunderstood beast may have trampled various inhabitants of Skull Island underfoot and enjoyed munching on residents of the Empire State Building while climbing up to his doom, but essentially at the start of the movie he was just minding his own business. Which really is what most great apes actually do in the wild – in their ever-diminishing habitats as humans encroach on them, not the other way round.

As seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, King Kong, and also that one where an orangutan goes on a road-trip with Clint Eastwood for some reason

Sharks

Bad when they happen, but shark attacks are extremely rare

Shark attacks are bad and frightening when they happen, but extremely rare, despite, since 1975’s Jaws, sharks being portrayed again and again as public enemy No 1 in numerous movies, sometimes even wind-assisted. Sharks kill fewer than 10 humans a year, and you have more chance of being killed by food poisoning, lawnmowers or lightning. Consider how sharks are treated compared with the hippopotamus. Hippos kill more people than sharks every year, but what music do you associate with sharks? You can probably hear John Williams’ menacing score in your head right now. And hippos? Their most famous movie moment is dancing cartoon ballet to Amilcare Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours in Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

As seen in Jaws, Sharknado and that terrible Under Paris Netflix thing

Rabbits

Not a warmongering species

Its dramatic cameo in 1987’s Fatal Attraction may not have been the rabbit’s fault, but has helped ensure that “bunny boiler” has remained a toxic misogynistic trope, thanks to a role for which Glenn Close has subsequently apologised. But where pop culture has really done rabbits a disservice is in traumatising an entire generation of children in the 1970s via the medium of General Woundwort and the Efrafa warren in Watership Down. And that’s before we’ve even started on the slightly creepy neediness of Margery Williams Velveteen Rabbit, and the bloodthirsty uncanny valley horror that was the rabbit-adjacent hare in Starve Acre. In real life rabbits are cuddly, love a bit of lettuce, and their enthusiasm for reproduction very much shows that, unlike Woundwort, they support the slogan “make love not war”.

As seen in Fatal Attraction and Watership Down

Penguins

Neither that villainous nor that cunning

Recent years have seen animation and claymation introduce us to manipulative and vindictive penguins. The master criminal Feathers McGraw is arguably the greatest silent movie villain of all time, while the quartet of Skipper, Kowalski, Private and Rico in the Madagascar franchise imply that the flightless birds have evolved a military-grade level of organisational sophistication. Penguins are nothing like this. Even the most cursory glance at nature documentaries will reveal their lives can be incredibly chaotic – this viral clip of two groups of penguins stopping for a chat and then several of them getting confused about which group they belong to in the process is typical of the genre. Penguins are also known to try to impress one another by lovingly offering gifts of pebbles. Movie penguins deserve to be represented more like those in Happy Feet, and be seen to spend less time disguising themselves as chickens indulging in a crime spree.

As seen in Wallace and Grommit and Madagascar