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Hallucinatory hippo drama Pepe, now on Mubi, joins the rabbits of Watership Down, a tragic donkey and elusive snow leopards in a classy menagerieIf you liked Moo Deng, Thailand’s baby pygmy hippo who went viral last year, there’s still no guarantee that you’ll like Pepe – but how much hippopotamus-oriented media does one typically get in a year? A deeply strange, dreamy voyage into the consciousness of an adult hippo held captive in Pablo Escobar’s infamous private menagerie in Colombia, this fragmented fable from Dominican director Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias won the Silver Bear for best director at Berlin last year is now streaming exclusively on Mubi. Though it might give the eponymous beast a philosophical, impressively multilingual narrative voice, this isn’t a cuddly, anthropomorphised creature feature: the handsome pachyderm begins and ends the film an elusive mystery.Pepe is an eccentric addition to a niche subgenre: grownup films centred on animals rather than humans. Outside nature documentaries, animal protagonists tend to be the preserve of animation and children’s fantasies: see the recently Golden Globe-honoured animal-apocalypse adventure Flow, hitting UK cinemas in March, while almost everyone has some Disney cartoon critter or other that caught their young imagination, be it Dumbo or The Lion King or the intrepid rodents of The Rescuers. (Or even the confusingly humanoid woodland creatures of Disney’s Robin Hood.) Somehow, adults are supposed to grow out of identifying with animals, and yet Pepe channels a more visceral form of that empathy. Continue reading...