Week 7 ~ Maus

I had never heard about Maus before this class and it was definitely a good read, aside from the horrifying and tragic subject. It was interesting that the way Art chose to tell this story was through a graphic novel and using animal characters. It's interesting and really engaging but definitely doesn't take away from the terrible truth of the matter, and definitely wouldn't call it cute just because people are represented as animals.
Having the Germans be cats was pretty clever for obvious reasons, they look more menacing and we know that they are the enemy. To use different animals for certain groups of people helped as a reader to understand the story and read through it more quickly. Even though they are animals they still have human bodies and as odd as it may seem I feel like that helps to see these characters more as people and feel for them, aside from knowing that these events were true and very sad.

Its definitely more realistic in a way that we see the father's character and that he isn't the kind of character we expect in most Holocaust movies where we see the goodness in the persons character and we feel more for them and hope that they will survive because they are a good person. Art's father is a jerk basically but it's his jerky qualities that helped him survive. That is what makes it more realistic I think, not that there couldn't possibly be survivor stories on people who are good. Perhaps saying it's more realistic isn't appropriate. It's just different than what we expect. Or what I have usually seen.