Both Okja and Carnage use humour and engaging narratives to draw people into redefining their relationships with animals. While they are both provocative, they don’t preach. In both cases, everyone is made fun of a bit. In Okja, that includes both Swinton’s insatiably greedy CEO and The Animal Liberation Front (ALF), who are portrayed like eco-terrorists (albeit well-intentioned ones). In Carnage there is the ‘Bland’ family, who conform to the stereotypical image of bean-eating, life-hating vegans – but then there’s also TV chef Fanny Cradock, whose extravagant meat dishes and explosive personality are weirder than fiction. First these films laugh with us, and then they shake up our preconceived ideas, and address our biases.

Both released in 2017, Carnage and Okja anticipated the vegan boom of the past three years. A report from 2018 showed that a third of Britons had reduced their meat consumption or stopped eating meat altogether, whether for the environment, their health and/or to save animals. More recently, this year an unprecedented 400,000 people signed up for Veganuary, a campaign where pledgers give veganism a try for the month of January.

Facts v fiction

Of course, the extent to which fiction is playing, or will play, a part in this shift is not obviously measurable. Documentaries and non-fiction can have a more immediately tangible impact perhaps. A few years ago, I remember seeing signs outside a number of London coffee shops in which the proprietors said they could no longer justify offering cow’s milk (and would now be offering a plant-based alternative) after having watched Cowspiracy, a 2014 film from Oscar-winning star Joaquin Phoenix, which explored the environmental impact of animal agriculture. Phoenix’s 2017 follow-up What the Health also caused a stir, critiquing the health impacts of the meat and dairy industries. Another more recent film which has made a big impression via Netflix is The Game Changers, a polemic advocating for plant-based diets which in part makes its case by challenging the notion that eating meat is necessary for strength and athleticism.

But fiction can have its own influence, changing hearts and minds in a way that may be less direct but can be just as powerful. Interestingly the documentary Earthlings also drew from poetry, art and literature that controversially compares the treatment of animals with the suffering of victims of racism and sexism.