HI I’M BACK AND I MADE GRAPHS
For me personally, I think there’s two primary axes here--the first is like I said above, a scale from “a real-life human observer, looking at these animals in a brief snapshot of their lives, would experience them as normal animals” to “these animals live their lives as tiny humans complete with clothing and period-typical technology”.
The OTHER axis is the degree to which the animals have a distinct culture independent from (though generally not untouched by!) humans. As in--do the animal characters, as in Watership Down, have their own mythologies, their own worldview, their own ways of living that would go on just fine without human influence? or, as in Black Beauty, do the animals primarily define themselves according to the roles humans give them?
(Note that the latter isn’t a mark of, like, bad writing--I literally used Black Beauty as the ur-example! If you’re writing from the perspective of a DOMESTICATED ANIMAL, having them mentally define themselves by their place in human society is the only thing that IS realistic! This is actually where the Warriors books lost me as a kid--it got to the point where even as a member of the target audience I was going, “but they’re domesticated cats? the fact that they have to live in and around humans is like, the Point, that’s what made this interesting--”)
You will notice this gets super weird if you go ANY further right than Redwall--Robin Hood: Men With Fursonas flipped to the other axis for no clear reason because if you go any further along the scale than Redwall, there ceases to be any relevance to the characters being animals at all*. It’s no longer an animal story. If they behave 100% like humans and there’s 0% human influence (ie, no humans in the setting at all), then they’re just...............people. The Y axis ceases to have any meaning.
*(Anthro characters having animalistic traits isn’t the same thing and I’m not dismissing the use of that trope! Their TRAITS are still relevant and can be part of a super compelling story--but it’s no longer an animal story, no longer anthropomorphic fiction, ie telling a story about animals with human traits. Frankly, NARNIA falls into this--Talking Beasts are full citizens 100% and Narnian culture belongs to all Narnians, so they don’t really fit into the concept being discussed.)
So Robin Hood flips the axis because on a technicality, you literally cannot have a Robin Hood adaptation that’s not dependent on human civilization, but normally, after you pass Redwall you break the quadrants and enter non-euclidean furryspace.
Then there’s that z-axis I added, which I’ve made a reference for--the Z axis is there to account for “talking animal” stories, where an animal might have totally natural-looking behavior but also be able to speak to one or all humans and confuse the placement somewhat.
I used 101 Dalmations as the anchorpoint, dead center--they can clearly understand every word their humans say and can even read, but aren’t capable of communicating back in any way other than dog behavior (tm).
On one end of the scale is The Rescuers (all the animals are clearly ABLE to speak to humans at will but choose not to for their own protection). The other is again Watership Down, where human speech is comprehensible to the reader but the rabbit characters don’t understand it, and in which only a few of them are--just barely--capable of almost grasping the vague concept of writing or even of pictures/images being capable of conveying meaning.
For media like Redwall where humans just don’t exist or don’t functionally exist, they’d join 101 Dalmations dead-center because the question is irrelevant.
