{"id":762,"date":"2026-01-09T11:47:49","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T11:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/?p=762"},"modified":"2026-01-09T11:51:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T11:51:33","slug":"welcome-to-the-land-of-oz-an-anti-speciesist-review-of-wicked-for-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/2026\/01\/09\/welcome-to-the-land-of-oz-an-anti-speciesist-review-of-wicked-for-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Land of Oz: an anti-speciesist review of Wicked: For Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the opening scene of Wicked: For Good, <\/em>the second instalment of Jon M. Chu's film adaptation, Elphaba, the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West played by Cynthia Erivo swoops down on her flying broomstick to release four toiling creatures from forced labour on the Yellow Brick Road. The animals bound freely into the wild as the humans try to arrest their escape and take down Elphaba, the animal activist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recent two-part film adaptation of Wicked<\/em> has captured the hearts of millions across the world. Aside from the music and visual magnificence of this big-screen blockbuster, Wicked <\/em>also captures something of the zeitgeist<\/em>. As a tale in which good and evil get mixed up and confused, the film reflects back at us our own society where the very interpretations of good and evil, truth and falsehood, seem increasingly manipulated and controlled by powerful men in the shadows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the Wizard\u2019s Emerald City, with its own fake news industry bent on the falsification of the truth, is a fitting mirror to our own fracturing world, where the most basic tenets of climate science, national sovereignty and multilateralism are now being called into question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the first clue that we too - the cinemagoers - might be living in our own fantasy Land of Oz, where the fairytales we tell about and to ourselves may be nothing more than smoke and mirrors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In both films, running parallel to the human drama is an attack on animal rights and freedoms. As the Land of Oz is slowly tainted with despotism and authoritarianism at the hands of the Wizard and Madame Muriel Morrible, animals are forced to leave the realm, they lose the ability to speak, and find themselves caged and forced into servitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To say that Wicked<\/em> is to any great degree a film about animal justice would be to give credit where it probably isn\u2019t due. Yet the film does stake out a basic belief in the connection between moral goodness and animal rights. Elphaba represents this most clearly in the compassion and respect she shows for the animal kingdom and in freeing the animals held in captivity. And through her actions, Elphaba might just help us to reexamine our own relationship with animals too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the world order in the Land of Oz mirrors our own, then its treatment of animals undoubtedly does too. Just as Oz is built on the exploitation of nonhuman animals, the cinemagoer must also recognise that they are like the citizens in the Wizard\u2019s Oz, where their continuing consumption of animals contributes to the slaughter of 83 billion suffering creatures each year, an average of 104 animals per person.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyone who exits the cinema to dine on animal products must face a frightening ethical dilemma. Where moments before they found themselves delighting in the victory of good over evil on screen, they now face the far uglier reality that their meat-based meal constitutes complicity in animal exploitation and slaughter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alas, most cinemagoers would be excused if they missed this moral reckoning. This careful film adaptation of Wicked<\/em> flinches from drawing the explicit link between evil on screen and evil in the slaughterhouses. In omitting this, Wicked<\/em> might celebrate its own happy ending, but it doesn\u2019t help us much with ours.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the opening scene of Wicked: For Good, the second instalment of Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation, Elphaba, the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West played by Cynthia Erivo swoops down on her flying broomstick to release four toiling creatures from forced labour on the Yellow Brick Road. The animals bound freely into the wild […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":763,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":766,"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions\/766"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobwarn.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}